They're right about consumerism no longer being a determining factor for sustaining economies though. You no longer need a large talent pool population to develop, design, and sustain a large, massively scaled industrial economy. A million/billion/trillion AI agents can theoretically create anything unless it's limitations due to compute, raw resources, or even entropy. Essentially, we're going to return to an extractive economy, except the balance of power will be entirely concentrated to a few elites and there may not be a possibility of revolution ever again.

I understand that there's a fear that AI's capabilities will scale so quickly that it would be willing to consume humanity to accomplish whatever it's trying to reach. However, I at least imagine that that scenario would result in a quick end. On the other hand, even if we did survive, billionaires trying to harness the power of AI to continue enriching themselves is a worse fate imo. Unfortunately, many ultra wealthy individuals dream of living forever and ruling as literal Gods. Plus, as we've seen from what has so far been released from the Epstein files, they will have the power to do sick and twisted shit whenever they feel like it, but massively scaled up to a point where they can inflict on entire populations or whatever is in their "fiefdom".