Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!
> Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power.
Then we're doomed. The kinds of people who seek and amass that power are not the kinds of people who will treat the teeming unemployed masses with respect and largess.
> protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism
Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.