The clear pattern for most of human history is conflict between a few people who have a lot of power and the many more people that are exploited by those few. I

The clear pattern for most of human history is conflict between a few people who have a lot of power and the many more people that are exploited by those few. It should be obvious by this point that the most probable near-term risk of AI development is that wealthy and influential groups get access to a resource that makes it cheap for them to dramatically expand their power and control over everyone else. What will society look like when some software can immediately aggregate an enormous amount of data about consumers and use that to adjust their behavior? What might happen when AI starts writing legislation for anybody that can afford to pay for it? What might AI-generated textbooks look like in 50 years? These are all tools that could be wielded in any of these ways to improve life for lots of people, or to ensure that their lives never improve. Which outcome you believe is more likely largely depends on which news you consume -- and AI is already being used to write that.