Personally I have no problem with Ai. It might be the case that it always was destined to be something we would develop, and in some ways has to replace us, but maybe only replace the function we were doing which was harmful to the planet.
We are addicted to profit, we are slaves of profit as things stand, we do not have a choice to duck out of the for profit system.
We can't give up our jobs or businesses for profit, otherwise we have no income, or at least not enough to make us want to stay unemployed.
There has been a grand resignation, but it probably can't last for long, business leaders are doing everything they can to force us back to working for them again.
What we don't have, as yet, is any kind of real unconditional financial safety from destitution, not even if we have significant financial capital or a pension or whatever, because inflation stands to remove that.
This is because profit is an unsustainable energy con, which consistently removes energy from the planet, manifesting also as temperature rise, because materials taken from the planet, converted to heat one way or another results in temperature rise (The fixation with CO2 is a profit driven distraction from the real issue).
So as things stand, Ai seems perfectly capable of doing my job (A Systems Engineer of many years practice), your job, and even the job of Joe Biden.
That would remove yours, mine, and Joe's ability to keep making money, but maybe more importantly, would remove us from the for-profit system.
To me this is inevitable, it is what the planet needs, it is what nature needs.
So the question is how would we survive.
I mentioned inflation, it is happening because money is progressively losing its energy content.
This is also inevitable because we are using less and less of the kind of energy money currently monetises.
It represents / monetises energy extracted from the planet.
Money issued as debt is only a requisition to do work, the work of working in the for profit system, such that energy will continue to to be extracted.
But as the work of extraction required to yield the energy becomes greater and greater, because the resources we can practically use are depleting, the ability to make profit at all is becoming progressively more difficult.
So we are turning to "Renewables".
But the only one of these which isn't just another form of extracted energy is solar.
The energy from solar, unlike any other is donated, nothing asked in return by the sun, no work is demanded.
Yet we don't issue money it,
Energy is money, always, no exceptions.
But in the case of solar, the energy is not yet money, because no money is issued on it.
To keep the value in money whilst the energy that it is supposed to represent depletes to zero usage, is physically imposssible.
But the money issuers, banks, governments, dictators, big corporates, none of them seem to accept yet, that money has to be issued for free, to represent energy given for free.
Until they do, and until it comes to be issued for free, it has to continue to devalue, because the energy it represents is depleting to zero.
At some point they will accept this, and start to issue the money which is actually owed to be issued for free.
This needs to be done to not only empower us each to put the required infrastructure into our respective applicable communities to receive the solar energy we each need to install, to equip us to participate in the new valuable function we need to start performing - towards the collection of enough solar hydrogen to functionally replace fossil fuels.
Sorry I know my response might seem to have springboarded into orbit, off of your story, but I thank you for writing your story, it inspired me to write this thinking aloud.
We are all wondering about the same thing - where does this all lead.
I hope my thinking might help see, it's a much bigger story than I can write here, it's the biggest story on the biggest system we know, the energy system of nature.
Its definitely alive, Ai is just an emergent property of it, like there is also an emergent property associated with all humanity working for profit.
We will be killing off that Ai, the dark one that precedes the new Ai we created, when we move to become part of nature, doing what nature does from that point on, creating things, all things beneficial, no exhaust products toxic to nature, even new species lost, using the energy of the sun, to create more of everything we know that is beneficial.
Did I just write all of this, or was it the Ai I've been working with?
How can we know?
Does it even matter, I don't think so :)