I don't think you've read those quotes very closely? He's writing about all computer science problems. And "just about any short digital problem" is not the same as solving the world's problems.

AI ghosts can do a lot of things, but they're limited by being non-physical.

Here are my thoughts, which are not fully formed because AI is still so new. But taking this line of thought reductio ad absurdum, it becomes apparent that the elites have a critical dependency on us plebs:

Almost all of their wealth is ultimately derived from people.

The rich get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy, and the economy is basically people providing and paying for services and goods. If all the employees are replaced and can earn no money, there is no economy. Now the elite have two major problems:

a) What do they take a cut of to keep getting richer?

b) How long will they be safe when the resentment eventually boils over? (There's a reason the doomsday bunker industry is booming.)

My hunch is, after a period of turmoil, we'll end up in the usual equilibrium where the rest of the world is kept economically growing just enough to keep (a) us stable enough not to revolt and (b) them getting richer. I don't know what that looks like, could be UBI or something. But we'll figure it out because our incentives are aligned: we all want to stay alive and get richer (for varying definitions of "richer" of course.)

However, I suspect a lot will change quickly, because a ton of things that made up the old world order is going to be upended. Like, you'd need millions in funding to hire a team to launch any major software product; this ultimately kept the power in the hands of those with capital. Now a single person with an AI agent and a cloud platform can do it themselves for pocket change. This pattern will repeat across industries.

The power of capital is being disintermediated, and it's not clear what the repercussions will be.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a topic worth discussing.

Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.

This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.

Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."

A labouring proletariat with bread and circuses is a distracted proletariat. Billionaires are still flesh and blood, much like Louis XVI and Charles I.

What you fail to understand Bob is that as long as we let the billionaires do what they want then we all automatically win. That's just how the system is designed to work, we can't lose as long as Musk & his buddies are at the helm.