Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades.
> the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem.
We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to.
I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.
Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.
This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.
Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."
Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.
Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.
Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.
Of course that comes with its own set of problems, e.g. that you will lose training, connections, the ability to exert influence through the job or any hope of building a career.