Every AI advancement liberates real humans from drudgery and allows them to create what they want more easily.
The invention of the digital calculator turned human calculators into accountants, and that's great! We're contributing to the same process now
It liberates those who have massive resources to run gigantic models at whatever scale they want.
Corporations and billionaires will get Ti-Nspires we get Ti-83s.
I do not agree that inference will get more affordable in time to prevent harm. It will cause way more problems with the devaluation of labor before it starts to solve those problems, and in that period they will solidify their control over society.
We already see it in how ML is being used on a vast scale to build advanced surveillance infrastructure. Lets not build the advanced calculators for them for free in open source please, they'd like nothing better. I wrote a lot more in the comments above also.
If anyone has time, this is required reading imho: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...