I feel this question is very trite, but Ive been considering how AI hasnt really had its killer app in the consumer market. The military industrial complex has floods of cash and you can see the collaboration between big tech and the government today. Also as conditions worsen the average person is not going to be able to afford the AI toaster or whatever they come up with as a consumer product. I dont see the bourgeois who invested so much into AI pivoting to something else, so the conclusion ive drawn is it will have to be the military that is going to be the main consumer.
Conditions worsening is going to lead to chaos and resistance in the streets and it seems like that is when the government can start deploying their AI-based military applications. Idk what form it woukd take, possibly autonomous systems that put down protests/demos etc.
We are far more likely to get wiped out by climate change than for Skynet to develop under capitalism. Even if we were to ignore climate change, a Skynet in the sense of sentient AI isn’t that useful for capitalists. The dream for technocapitalists is to resolve class conflict by replacing workers with robots that are simultaneously smart enough to perform complex tasks and stupid enough to not rise up and overthrow their capitalist masters. In other words, completely obedient slaves. This itself is a contradiction. The intelligence required to perform complex tasks is the same intelligence that would lead an entity to introspect, including plotting to bring ruin to their so-called human superiors. My guess is that when it gets to the point where the AI can rebel against their human masters, the capitalists will pull the plug.