Well ya, it doesn't cost a billion dollars to teach a child to read. In many ways, AI has been rolled out just exactly the opposite way that I might have done

Well ya, it doesn't cost a billion dollars to teach a child to read. In many ways, AI has been rolled out just exactly the opposite way that I might have done it. Just like I would have done almost everything the opposite way of what's been happening since the Dot Bomb around 2001. A few examples: we should have had CPUs with 100+ cores and local memories standard by now instead of SIMD video cards and various abstraction layers more abstruse than OpenGL. We should have had free distributed general computation runtimes like SETI@home but for any language. We should have had rich media documents with progressive enhancement like htmx instead of single-page applications and walled gardens that can't even be scraped or crawled by search engines. We should have had an open data interchange format like SOAP/JSONAPI/GraphQL/Open Graph/etc but not terrible, for supporting the semantic web. We should have had an approachable functional language like Erlang with the readability of Go and the vector handling of MATLAB, but we never got it, because the geeks who could make that stuff spent the last 20+ years as workaholics or struggling to survive on shoestring budgets in the open source community. We should have pushed for decommodification and right to repair instead of draconian IP laws like the DMCA. We should have had open funding like prosper.com and kickerstarter.com that actually worked (for all projects, not just creative ones) instead of VC firms and billionaires. We should have had Pragmatism instead of Move Fast and Break Things. We should be automating work to liberate us from forced labor, not automating art to strip away our dreams. We should be working towards UBI for every single person on the planet, not starting proxy wars between empire and the people who do the actual working and living and dying to support the 1%. I could go on forever, and the eventualities of these life choices have grown to capture our entire collective psyche. If we had all that stuff, I truly believe that AGI (or at least the liberation it represents) would have already arrived. But in the direction it's headed now, AI will almost certainly adopt the form of corporations (which arguably already are AIs with inhuman/amoral agendas) and deliver us into a dystopian future where the choice is lock-in under the yoke or survival in the wasteland. I still hold onto some small hope that AI can liberate us from the short-term scarcity mindset and bring about the New Age under some form of democratic socialism like on Star Trek. But it's so easy for the powers that be to sabotage all forward progress, even going as far as shutting down governments to get their way, that I worry it may already be too late. The safe bet is that we'll get the libertarian paradise of Star Wars instead. Present-day technologists will be tomorrow's rebels.