This assumes that the way things are now is the way things always will be.

Right now AI is in its mainframe era (thin clients connecting to expensive compute somewhere else that you don't control), but I firmly believe that the AI version of the personal computing revolution is on the horizon. Democratized computing probably seemed pretty out of reach when all we had were mainframes, but in retrospect the progression from mainframe to personal computer to supercomputer in your pocket seems ordinary and almost expected.

I have no doubt that the technology needed to democratized personal AI will also advance in similar ways, and we will have no shortage of next generation's "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Maybe. Alternatively, things will veer further towards centralisation because that is where all the VCs bet on getting their investments back, and where they historically have seen the most revenue. I’m not convinced AI follows the same trajectory general computing did 50 years ago; the world has changed massively since then.

"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched." except in the world of the AI advocates, where they confidently assure us that it's perfectly fine to count our AI chickens before they've hatched because reasons.

We only got PCs because IBM screwed up. Every other ecosystem is walled off to various degrees. And absolutely every current corp knows about IBMs failure and definitely does not want to repeat it.

Nintendo? Walled garden. Playstation? Walled garden. Mac/iOS? Walled garden? Clouds? Obviously walled gardens, the higher the walls the more advanced the services. SaaS? Walled gardens. Social media? Walled gardens.

I think the problem is a stochastic one: More options seem to exist for this technolgy to abuse humanity via it's "owners" than do it to democratize anything. It's not like it's helping to wage war, molify the public and entraining pre-existing racist for the last decade.

These are all things happening today via AI, so really, this is an argument thats like, entropy. There's always way more ways in which things fall apart than they build to stability.

Being optimistic seems more like religiousity than any real accounting of the current system you're operating in (unless you're a billionaire).