Just to be pedantic 'cuz you’re an academic sort, I would say it raises the question rather than begs it.
As for the answer, I think advancement of one’s life in a “hugely impactful” way will be more likely when the AI gets sophisticated enough that it understands things in a more “natural” manner rather than a purely rule-based one, and particularly it realizes when to help and when to get out of the way.
For the “understanding” aspect…
Our language parsing via smart devices seems to still very much at the “programmatic parsing” stage. It analyzes your input, whatever that is, and applies rules that basically amount to a Google search for the info. If we get beyond that to the point of true “intelligence”, it would actually take stuff off our plate. Imagine, for example, being able to say “Hey (dingus), I need to buy a new (gadget). Find me the top 10 highest recommended products in the $50 to $200 price range, and show them to me.” Or “Hey (dingus), Sally wants to learn to draw. Put together a video playlist of the top introductory videos on the topic, ordered by difficulty from easiest to hardest.”
Right now, that’s work that has to be done by a human. Even if there’s a video playlist that would help Sally already out there, somebody else had to put it together - and I need to Google to find it. Taking some of the analysis off our plates would be hugely helpful.
For “getting out of the way”, just to use Apple examples…
Siri Suggestions is a neat feature, but until I figured out where to shut it off (I hope!) it kept hassling me about my Due reminders. So I’d get repeated notifications from Due, then repeated notifications from Siri after I’d addressed the Due recurring reminder, and that led to me a couple of times clicking through the Siri thing and dismissing tomorrow’s reminder. It’s a “step forward” that’s almost a step backward.
The fact that I can auto-pair my Apple headphone devices to my Apple TV is cool, but the fact that it pops up a not-obvious-how-to-dismiss notification when I walk into the room while my girlfriend is watching TV? Not so great. There are settings to disable it entirely, but they’re just that - settings, buried in a sub-menu somewhere.
How great would it be if you could just yell something a bit more abstract like “don’t ever make a Siri suggestion about taking my pills”, or “don’t offer to pair my PowerBeats automatically if you see that my girlfriend’s iPhone is in the room”, and it would say “okay” - then just automatically figure out how to make that happen?
I think that’s the chasm that needs to be crossed.