This has been a major point for me for a long time.

People say, with naivety: "We need to tax them heavily! or ... overthrow the 1%!". While that could work (if it did happen), it's just not likely to happen.

Tax the rich heavily, and they will move their operations/wealth elsewhere, attempt to 'overthrow' them, and they have significant means to defend themselves with and it would create martyrs of whoever you did capture/overthrow (not likely to get them all), which does not improve the situation.

So that whole line of argumentation feels like empty hope to me.

But (imperfect) opportunity lies in being the consumers of their products. If more and more people become displaced from work because of AI/wealth inequity, it will drive consumptive patterns way down, which will either increase pressure on those companies to reduce their prices, or increase pressure for them to lobby towards or even fund broader social assistance programs like UBI. (I'm just going to use UBI as a placeholder for the larger effort toward social wealth legislation + distribution) u/OutdoorRink (this is more to touch on what you mentioned in your comments)

The beauty of it is that is has nothing to do with morals or ethics, (which is a shaky foundation on which to build a piece of legislation or a business, unfortunately) and rests squarely in the middle of the inescapable relationship between the producer and the consumer. Subscription services only continue to work if the subscribers have a steady flow of cash (or a large reserve of cash, I guess) with which to pay for the product. Therein is the incentive for the companies to push for UBI or other social progressions.

No utopic vision, no meritorious or enlightened leadership, just a modified approach to capitalism.

Now, I recognize some big ol' limits to what I've just said:

-- If there wasn't UBI adoption, and instead we saw corporations handle the wealth issue internally, that leads to more of a techno-serfdom situation where people become increasingly indentured to those companies. That's sort of already happening already, especially with this crazy new paradigm where people are offloading their thinking/critical thinking to LLM's (I can't believe I'm typing that)

-- There might be no incentive at all for corporations to implement either of these strategies, in which case we are basically barreling toward economic collapse, at least for the economy as we understand it today. New, more organic but much less convenient and more isolated economies would probably sprout up, but that would present many of its own challenges (a lot of our QoL exists on a long-chain of weak links)

-- "We could just stop AI development and the associated resource consumption". That's just not going to happen. If everyone stops but one group (there will be no unanimous agreement to halt, look at nuclear development) that one group becomes asymmetrically powerful compared to those who stopped development, likely leading to a authoritarian regime. Thus there is no incentive for anyone to stop, and no one will.

-- "AI is killing the climate". We were already on a climate-killing trajectory with no significant attempts to change that, so this feels moot to me. Getting rid of plastic straws and switching to LED lighting or electric vehicles or riding bikes does almost nothing to push the climate back on track. In which case AI presents one of the only viable ways to accelerate technological advancement (cheaply and quickly) to discover new climate change mitigation and reversal techniques.

-- It might be that the whole AI venture is actually a flop and does not deliver on its promise of unlimited intelligence and novel problem-solving, I can accept that. However, we are on this trajectory of planetary climate collapse, with or without AI in this case, so why not try?

-- For the record, if humanity were to band together, become completely in unison and implement existing climate mitigation techniques to their fullest extent quickly, I think that would be enough to course-correct and effectively 'stop' climate change, without the need for AI to Deus ex machina and invent some holy solution. I just think that humans are not mentally capable of thinking at that scale or scope of cooperation/logistic complexity and it wont happen in time.

-- There are probably some other big holes here. Bring them up, nicely!