I am also an optimist about AI, although I worry about the labor aspect as well (as a leftist I see the class aspect of this, on the other hand, as a computer programmer, computers were also originally meant to replace human labor, and we all see what happened).

My view is, current top AIs do multiple different things:

1. Interpret and output natural language

2. Do formal logical reasoning

3. Do informal logical reasoning

4. Provide encyclopedic knowledge

5. Discern vague instructions/statements and fill the most likely gaps (kind of error correction)

6. Serve as a model of the human mind, a proxy for a person

7. Translate between different languages, formal and informal

All these things are combined in these huge, hard-to-understand blobs of weights. I think humanity would be better off by understanding each aspect separately, but disentangling them will take decades of philosophical research. So there is a lot of interesting work ahead of us.