However, from an economic perspective, it does not need AI to turn evil, nor evil business owners replacing all human employees with robots.

I don’t see corporations as necessarily ‘evil’, in the sense of a blatantly evil movie villain playing it to the hilt— but so long as we stick to the Friedman concept of stock-holder-primacy, they are going to be driven by that single focus — and end up acting exactly that way — minus the histrionics — showing no responsibility towards their employees or the communities they’re in. We’ve seen the move to move labor out of the country (stock holder value!), but I’m with Yang on the real issue being automation (from simple pick-and-put to AI).

Speaking of AI, I got Marvin Minsky to laugh uncontrollably when I told him earnestly that “The term AI just means we can’t do that yet ”. But, in the 80s, that’s exactly how it looked to a techie. Text recognition was ‘AI’ — until we could do it, and then it was just “text reco”. Ditto voice, chess, vision. So I’m not convinced the things that take all the knowledge worker jobs will be called ‘AI’ when it happens, any more than a camera equipped pick-and-put is. but, yeah, that’s coming.