

I think that you have useful food for thought. I think that you underestimate the degree to which capitalism recuperates technological advances, though. For example, it’s common for singers supported by the music industry to have pitch correction which covers up slight mistakes or persistent tone-deafness, even when performing live in concert. This technology could also be used to allow amateurs to sing well, but it isn’t priced for them; what is priced for amateurs is the gimmicky (and beloved) whammy pedal that allows guitarists to create squeaky dubstep squeals. The same underlying technology is configured for different parts of capitalism.
From that angle, it’s worth understanding that today’s generative tooling will also be configured for capitalism. Indeed, that’s basically what RLHF does to a language model; in the jargon, it creates an “agent”, a synthetic laborer, based on desired sales/marketing/support interactions. We also have uses for raw generation; in particular, we predict the weather by generating many possible futures and performing statistical analysis. Style transfer will always be useful because it allows capitalists to capture more of a person and exploit them more fully, but it won’t ever be adopted purely so that the customer has a more pleasant experience. Composites with object detection (“filters”) in selfie-sharing apps aren’t added to allow people to express themselves and be cute, but to increase the total and average time that users spend in the apps. Capitalists can always use the Shmoo, or at least they’ll invest in Shmoo production in order to capture more of a potential future market.
So, imagine that we build miniature cloned-voice text-to-speech models. We don’t need to imagine what they’re used for, because we already know; Disney is making movies and extending their copyright on old characters, and amateurs are making porn. For every blind person using such a model with a screen reader, there are dozens of streamers on Twitch using them to read out donations from chat in the voice of a breathy young woman or a wheezing old man. There are other uses, yes, but capitalism will go with what is safest and most profitable.
Finally, yes, you’re completely right that e.g. smartphones completely revolutionized filmmaking. It’s important to know that the film industry didn’t intend for this to happen! This is just as much of an exaptation as captialist recuperation and we can’t easily plan for it because of the same difficulty in understanding how subsystems of large systems interact (y’know, plan interference.)
It’s important to understand that the book’s premise is fairly hollow. Yudkowsky’s rhetoric really only gets going once we agree that (1) intelligence is comparable, (2) humans have a lot of intelligence, (3) AGIs can exist, (4) AGIs can be more intelligent than humans, and finally (5) an AGI can exist which has more intelligence than any human. They conclude from those premises that AGIs can command and control humans with their intelligence.
However, what if we analogize AGIs and humans to humans and housecats? Cats have a lot of intelligence, humans can exist, humans can be more intelligent than housecats, and many folks might believe that there is a human who is more intelligent than any housecat. Assuming intelligence is comparable, does it follow that that human can command and control any housecat? Nope, not in the least. Cats often ignore humans; moreover, they appear to be able to choose to ignore humans. This is in spite of the fact that cats appear to have some sort of empathy for humans and perceive us as large slow unintuitive cats. A traditional example in philosophy is to imagine that Stephen Hawking owns a housecat; since Hawking is incredibly smart and capable of spoken words, does it follow that Hawking is capable of e.g. talking the cat into climbing into a cat carrier? (Aside: I recall seeing this example in one of Sean Carroll’s papers, but it’s also popularized by Cegłowski’s 2016 talk on superintelligence. I’m not sure who originated it, but I’d be unsurprised if it were Hawking himself; he had had that sort of humor.)