Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.

What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?

If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.

AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.

I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.

I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.

Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.

To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.