Viable AR/VR?
Fully autonomous vehicles?
Fusion power?
Edit: I'm confused why this question is garnering all these downvotes. Could anyone please help me understand why this is controversial or disliked?
But most leaps would not result in ‘x will make things unequal’ if the people making would give everyone access to them in an affordable manner. That’s why an unlimited source of energy has to be easy to make and copy and not be hampered by patents on hurdles that prevent that. Otherwise these articles are absolutely right.
I think the "accessible to everyone" rubric is more complicated than the GP described. It's more like provides similar economic benefits to everyone. ChatGPT may be "readily accessible to everyone," but if it and similar technologies allow significant automation of knowledge work it will not provide similar benefits to everyone, since it will allow the elimination of entire categories of jobs.
At least in the short-term "elimination of entire categories of jobs" benefits the ownership class and no one else. If these "AI" technologies also inhibit the ability of those masses of laid off workers to retrain an switch jobs to something with equivalently high wages, then they will make our society even more unequal in the long term.
You can basically always find an angle for the story you want to tell.
What's the name of that story?
There's a different story by another author where a similar machine brings on an economic depression, but I forget the title.
Bankrupt many companies, causing the loss of jobs generally around the world and a potential expanding economic shock matched to the rate of production of the new devices
Cause the complete devastation of smaller sized communities (villages and towns, very small cities) where the majority of employment is directly in an energy related resource extraction capacity or in supporting jobs maintaining equipment for or supplying services to these primary resource industries
The lack of externally needed power supply like diesel fuel or surface supplies for solar farms would enable more people to take up mobile or alternative living situations (van life, mobile homes, camping with appliances) as the need for a house to plug in appliances is one of the anchoring factors in real estate economics which could be the best thing for people in general but also another potentially large scale economic shock.
Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates.
This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.
Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.
This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. While the rest of us are oblivious to the approaching calamity. The tech crowd with a boner for the supposed techno-utopia imagined in sci-fi needs to ask what costs we should be willing to pay for a chance at that future.