What REALLY made those behind the AI revolution panic?

 I published this article on this blog in 2021 and almost nobody read it:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2021/06/ai-and-economics-of-tyranny.html

Until, that is, about two months before the sudden about-face by leading AI researchers, politicians and business leaders, culminating in today's meetings between President Biden and not only the British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, but King Charles as well. 

And between world leaders meeting in Singapore, supposedly about pandemic regulations, and last week, that article was being seen by hundreds of people located in Singapore every single day.

Now, the most obvious theme of the article is that it suggests that an AI-based economy is the only known way that tyranny can become sustainable (and thus persist for generations or the proverbial thousand years) in the modern world, because it's the only known alternative to letting people have enough freedom and the certainty of ownership of their own ideas to innovate and pursue more efficient solutions, because it's in everybody's interests to do things better.

Somewhat paradoxically, an AI-based economy allows for innovation to be suppressed and efficiencies found which do not actually benefit those who have to implement those efficiencies. So an AI-based world economy would have the benefits of economic sustainability without any of this freedom, democracy and accountability stuff: and the past few years have seen the global elite very much at war with all three of these graces. But that's precisely why the about-face is so strange: it's been very clear for many years that this is what all the decision-makers in the Capitalist and Communist worlds have wanted ever since the "fall of communism" or at least, the failure of the Soviet Bloc. They didn't change their minds because this blog (or any other source of the same basic concept) showed them that continuing on their chosen path would probably have the very results they most wanted!

Thing is, there's the theme of the article, which is obvious, and its implication, which took a bit more thinking time on the part of our lords and masters:

If the Chinese economy benefits proportionately more from the introduction of AI than the American economy precisely because the bulk of its workforce is less-skilled than its American counterpart and expects much less reward, so it can be replaced by AI with little or no economic disruption and very little in the way of compensation and with no imperative to maintain anyone's standard of living, then not only is it possible that those economies where the skill levels are much HIGHER than in the United States (Finland, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea, possibly even Croatia these days) could see a negative economic and social impact from the introduction of AI, those economies with a significantly LOWER technological skills base than that of Communist China (such as Sudan, Uganda or Tanzania?) might derive an even greater proportional economic boost from AI than Communist China.

The panic is really all about the rather belated realisation that the AI revolution will have all the effects the global elite have hoped and planned for, but the resultant power and all other benefits will flow to all the wrong people!