That seems like an unlikely future reality. Productivity will be off the charts, goods and services will be nearly free. Why would the average person be poor in such a future?

Because if productivity can be achieved with less people, and even intellectual work is not protected from machines, people will become redundant for the creation of economic value.

Productivity is achieving more with the same number of people. The end result is more stuff (goods/services) at a lower price. It seems unlikely that this will be bad: wealth = f(technology)

Optimists sound dumb in the present but are usually right in the long run. Pessimists sounds smart in the present but are usually wrong and miss out on opportunities.

If not, which year in the past was significantly better than today? What was humanity's high water mark? I suspect we are nowhere near it.

It's also unlikely unless AI owners manage to completely topple democracy. If 90% of people can't get work due to AI and we're all homeless and hungry, we're going to vote in ways that forces distribution of resources.

productivity by who and for who ? AI will belong to a small number of people, and I will not be part of them

When do you expect that this will change? It certainly isn’t the case now. Rich folks don’t broadly have access to significantly better AI today.

This seems to be a common misconception - the rich and powerful have access to far more advanced technology than the average person. The economics just don’t support it.

Let’s say Bezos wanted a better computer chip, just for himself. Ok, fine, try to start a company, hire all the best people and buy all the fabs. It would be very expensive, not much fun and likely wouldn’t lead to good results.

Money actually doesn’t do as much as people think. It is great for buying things that already exist but the relationship between money and things that don’t yet exist is tenuous. Stop buying into the weakness thesis.

I think he meant who own the AI? Beside Stable Diffusion, all those fancy AI we saw recently are running on someone else computer. And it could be rate limited, more expensive, of offer specific feature for specific membership.

To continue on your example, Besos could probably buy OpenAI.

I don't see that as threatening by itself, but more a continuation of a particular class of people owning the means of productions.

Props to Stable Diffusion and I hope to see more of those type of AI, as opposed to fancy black box at the other side of an API.

I’ve been a plumber all my life, all I see here is more pipes.

I think, as long as your AGI overlords allowed it, you'd be off growing food, hunting etc.

Probably have a really fulfilling life.