I mean if everybody has a super-smart personal assistant in their home, who thinks independently, why would they need or want a ruling class, when we can simply have democratic socialism?
You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection is gone. Nobody really wants to be in a constant "resource competition" or whatever, it's an effort. People generally want to have fun and enjoy life.
In theory, yes. In practice, the circle has been continually expanding with technological progress.
Stated differently: What's the point of being powerful if you cannot rule over other people? What's the point of having thousands of empty palaces, when no other humans see them or care?
Only if by continually you mean in sum. The holocaust and the genocide that have come since were pretty huge back slides and the tran Atlantic slave trade was a fairly new innovation in scale and kind even if slavery had existed before. Both of those seem if anything enabled by technology. And certainly the rich and powerful are unlikely to to kill absolutely everyone else, but I thought earlier you were arguing that AI would see the end of the rich and powerful. Now you're just saying they'll want to have pets
[0]: i.e. the system in the US and western Europe that prevailed over the USSR at the end of the cold war, technically not "real" capitalism.
That's my point! Your personal AI (in collaboration with other AIs) can take care of figuring that out as needed. You don't need capitalism anymore.
They have a business model problem. A century ago, recorded music obsoleted low-level musicians. Over the last two decades, the World Wide Web obsoleted most journalists and printers. Artists now face a similar problem.
An insight from ChatGPT is that "creative" is easy, but "accurate" is hard.