Don't be fooled into thinking that the tractor or the loom brought about positive social progress.

It wasn't the machines that caused the social progress. It was the organised labour movements (and the variously destructive or violent sabotage movements) pushing back against the machines that made the social progress.

The tractor and the loom made life noticeably worse for the people they replaced until they organised against them, and even then it took decades for them to get back the limited kind of quality of life (and health) an agricultural worker might have had.

I do find it interesting how many AI people make tractor and loom analogies without the slightest grasp of the true history of the industrial revolution.

Any social progress that comes from AI will not be something AI people can claim as their success, because it will have happened at their expense. There will be pushback; it may be violent.

> Social progress is literally the story of labor saving devices.

Historically it was not. They are two mostly unrelated things. Creating more with less labor can mean the richest getting richer while middle class becomes poor and poor become hopelessly poor.

> Creating more with less labor means a society of relative abundance, with more time for education, creativity, leisure and personal growth.

It never meant that, this is fairly tale. We got 40 hours workweek rather then 80 hours workweek because of political movements and fights, not because of technology. Labor saving device, on itself, leads to two outcomes: you work as much as before, but produce more (cue all the burned out overworked ai coders) or you get unemployed desperately looking for new work.