Comment by myrmidon

A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on.

Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.

Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.

I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.