The entire point of AI is not to make people more productive, but to trade productivity in the short-term for even more automation that goes beyond the point of diminishing returns so that those at the top can accumulate even more wealth. Big-tech corporations act as attractants for those who love power and money above any other concern and they certainly are not creating any tools to help anyone.
When a small company makes a product, they are happy to make something useful in exchange for a living. When big tech makes something, you are the product and they just want to use their economies of scale to squeeze you dry, making you think they have something useful.
People talk about AI now as if it is a great tool for them. Maybe it is, but in some years it won't really be a great tool at all except at keeping power in the hands of the most wealthy.
Isn't this the case with any invention that greatly improves productivity? Ask early 1800s English textile workers. Their wages did not return back to late 1700s peak, inflation adjusted, till WWI. Does that mean that mechanisation of textile industry was a bad thing? It meant people no longer had to wear $5000 T-shirts (https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... - I inflation-adjusted $3500 from 2013 to today).
If it was made in the US with a $7.25/hour wage sure, now do it in cambodia for $200 a month, at 48 hours a week that's barely a dollar an hour, all of a sudden it's a $500 shirt already.
Anyways I don't think you can use inflation over 700 years to come up with a tshirt price based on modern min wages, even peasants had clothes and they sure did not spend 6 months of labor to get a single item of clothing
After spending some times looking about more info on this topic you very quickly find people who debunk the original claim, and the inflation adjusted price the list is about I came up on my side using cambodia: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt...
It is the case, but it varies in magnitude. The textile industry was a bad thing in one way in that it caused an uncontrollable surplus of clothing that is in a sense "too cheap" and now is a major environmental problem. They key is that each invention can be thought of having a magnitude M of how it becomes uncontrollable, and once M > T (some threshhold T), then it becomes a net negative, where AI is certainly greater than T.
When a small company makes a product, they are happy to make something useful in exchange for a living. When big tech makes something, you are the product and they just want to use their economies of scale to squeeze you dry, making you think they have something useful.
People talk about AI now as if it is a great tool for them. Maybe it is, but in some years it won't really be a great tool at all except at keeping power in the hands of the most wealthy.