I’m not sure anyone is convinced this will empower individuals. On the contrary: if we get this tech “right” enough, the inequality gap will become an inequality chasm… There is no financial incentive to pay humans when a machine is a fraction of the cost.
If each human body needs 0.2 acre of land to grow the food necessary for subsistence, what happens when the price of intelligence keeps dropping and one person's intelligence (even when directed towards the highest-value use!) is not enough to afford the use of that land? In other words, what happens when humans are no longer economically viable?
Jevon's Paradox means that the demand for intelligence will keep rising as the cost drops, so I can't help but expect a steady increase in the economic value of land _when used for AI_. It'll take a long time before it exceeds the economic value of land when used for human subsistence, but the growth curves are not pointing in encouraging directions.
AGI / human overlords that cater to AGI won't need earth resources for more than a few decades. There will be a bootstrapping period, reliant on earth resources but soon it will be much cleaner to have solar/nuclear in space and have robotic mining of raw resources from asteroids.
