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I think we'll end up with a single truly unitary state. AI naturally centralizes power. In principle, you could have a robotic mine, robotic power plant, robotic industrial economy, robotic soldiers, all centrally coordinated by a superintelligence. That is surely more efficient than having hundreds of millions of people running around, doing all those things, scheming against eachother, failing to communicate or coordinate.
Whether the superintelligence is autonomous or under someone's control doesn't really matter, it'll effectively be a single-actor, unitary state with many appendages. Now maybe you have a small oligarchy of human controllers - I think this is unstable. Where there are people, there are disagreements and internal conflicts. None of them gain from having the cooperation of the others like old-timey oligarchs, they don't have their own independent power base or wealth sources. They're all using the same source of power. Eventually it would decay down to rule by one person, or one AI.
I think a large, democratic system is better in moral terms but harder to achieve and less competitive. Ideally, I'd like to see a world where we all have our own sovereign resource base as some kind of posthuman. I might have the bulk of my assets in an iron mine on an asteroid, Steve might have a manufacturing facility orbiting Mercury, we trade and retain our own sovereign military strength. Citizen-soldiers but in space and with more guns. Power is decentralized such that the majority can gang up on the wealthy elite if they behave egregiously. Decisions are made democratically, such that the status quo can't be overthrown. But how could we get to this state? We'd need a benign, altruistic, non-powerseeking libertarian to provide the technology to everyone and disperse it, such that each has power over their own destiny.
Some people have said 'Xi Jinping or Altman don't seem like they're going to exterminate humanity'. I believe that power corrupts. Those who come up with superintelligence first will try to hoard its fruits. They don't want enemies to threaten them and power is seductive. I think there will be a decisive strategic advantage coming up, that someone will get self-improving AGI at some point that can then spit out a bunch of really powerful inventions too quickly for states to handle. Or maybe there's some architecture change that puts the machine up to superhuman intellect immediately. The first to get to self-improvement wins the game, then nobody can resist them.
What does immortality and absolute power do to people? What sort of pettiness or humiliation rituals are we going to experience? Consider what our current elites do with their immense wealth and power. Then consider that there would be some kind of sifting mechanism where the most aggressive and conniving are more likely to get ultimate control (by betraying their brethren and seizing control). In the long run, I think we all die, if we are merely subjects of some AI-controller.
Only a slow take-off could keep us away from a unitary state and progress seems to be anything but slow.
All of this stuff is in its infancy though. I would expect that within 20 years, making food would be within the robotic skill set. Twenty years ago LLMs were the stuff of fantasy. Here they are, able to write well enough to be writing copy.
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The context of this conversation is:
That there is no currently extant physical machine shouldn't matter when talking about 'what comes next'. It's not impossible in principle to replicate the human hand mechanically.
Sufficient intelligence can get you physical automation.
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Looking at the pace of progress in both rigid and soft body robotics suggests that the overhang of software above hardware isn't going to last very long.
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