The post claims that AIs will make helping people pointless because it will "end poverty and cure cancer without your help".
Yes, it does. But the point is not that helping people today is pointless, in fact it may be all the more helpful because you take an active part in helping people attain a more positive life in the future.
Conditional on an AI actually being able to accelerate progress in these areas ( the likelihood of which the author does not even try to guess), the part of "helping other people" not surely remaining a true source of meaning still holds.
1. AI so far has moved us exactly oppositely from solving poverty and disease. In my opinion their ownership structures and their design prevent them from ever being a positive force let alone "solving" it.
2. At a high enough level, isn't helping other people the most valid possible source of meaning? Finding beauty and sharing it? If AI can somehow impossibly replace humans ability to ever help another human then we are done. No meaning is possible. Nothing matters.
The article writes like this is an inevitability and I think that's weird and wrong.
You don't actually believe that, do you? Or that the author means it literally?
I mean, even if an AI could one day actually do that, they would sell the service only for a price that makes you poor for the rest of your life.