-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth
-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI
-- …rendering such a future impossible
Also "rendering such a future impossible". This is a retrocausal way of thinking. As though an a bad event in the future makes that future impossible.
And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.
Some kinds of growth are beneficial in a phase but not sustainable over time. Like the baby hamster.
The GP was claiming that it is "20th century myopic" to not notice that in the past the products of most human toil went mostly to a small elite. My very point was that that old way of doing things didn't generate much wealth, not that the way things have changed is all good. I'm not advocating for any of the old ways, I'm saying that having an economic system that brings benefits to all is an important component of growing the overall wealth of a society (and of humanity overall).
The entire point of capitalism (at least until the very recent past) was to harness the production capacity of labor to create profit. Since elites generally do not engage in labor, there is no sense in which capitalism has ever involved "elites producing for elites".
Of course, expanded automation may tweak this a bit, since elites may no longer rely on human labor to facilitate production. That would change things ... substantially, which was really the original point.
If we arrived at a scenario in which elites used highly automated production to simply produce for themselves, what does that economy look like compared to today? Is it wealthier or poorer overall? Is it self-sustaining?