This really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually. We're just not sure when.

The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-com collapse.

What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI.

I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder, riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me Skynet over that crap.