It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct.

That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs.

So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.

Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences)

I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard