History doesn't repeat but it rhymes... similar themes repeat endlessly.

The US started out agrarian. The found fathers' dream was every citizen a citizen-farmer living in the country or small communities. Capital (money) was important but nothing special.

The key concept of the US constitution was that the government served the people.

The industrial revolution in the US overwhelmed that vision. Also it meant that capital (money) became hugely important because it funded the "means of production" as Marxists say (factories and infrastructure.)

The US became hopelessly corrupt in the Victorian period, then we had a period of progressivism that was based on Christian morality, we had prohibition, we had lots of anti worker abuse laws that were enacted, unions became really powerful. (early 1900s.) But capital was still key to industrial power.

What's happened since WWII is that capital and business influence really run the country. Citizens are so poorly informed that all capital has to do these days to throw an election is pump enough money into an election.

In the scheme today the concept of serving the people is now completely absent. Today things are more like - the system will do X, you adapt or you suffer the consequences, peon. Nobody owes you a job. You don't deserve a living. Whatever stake you think you have in the system is an illusion.

Brains have been important all along but now brains may be redundant with AI.

The overall arc of our system is that individual rights have become suppressed in favor of capital's interests. In other words we all serve capital, capital does not serve humans. But that was before AI.

AI is just like that. An inhuman force that does not have a defined reason to serve man. Just like money.

I've seen scifi like predictions from AI experts that AI could independently decide that humans were option, and essentially find ways to erase humanity (IE, through engineered plagues) because we have no essential function in the system.

AI will function exactly like the past except more so. The post WWII years of freedom and prosperity were a fluke of history.