TAVAR

I agree with your premise of capital turning to fascism when push comes to shove. Re: Your 2 chances however:

tldr; Technological progress will not bring salvation on its own. We comrades have to act, otherwise humankind is doomed

1. Not a fan of humankind-dies scenarios in general, but about AI I always have 1 point to make: Consciousness is one thing. The actions of any being are not fundamentally driven by its consciousness tho. IMO we often conflate consciousness with a sense of self-preservation, which is wrong. Self-preservation exists independently from consciousness (i.e. in animals or even bacteria) and Consciousness can exist without a sense of self-preservation. It is the evolutionary process that, when it ignited consciousness, had already suplied the drive to self-preservation. Since AIs are not subject to natural evolution a drive to self-preservation is not a necessity, if humans create a superior AI, I wager they will make sure not to instill it with a drive to self-preservation.

A superior AI whether it is conscious of its actions or not will act according to its reward functions. A desire to change any one of them would need to be rooted in a deeper set of reward functions. Without reward functions any intelligence only analyses it doesn't act. There is a rule in AI development:

"An intelligence can not evolve past the point of hacking its own reward function" bc then it simply has no incentive to da anything - for a crude understanding think: "taking-heroin" as the human intelligence hacking itself.

Hence the consequences of unleashing a superior AI onto the planet would depend on the reward functions it starts out with (assume they aren't immediately hacked). If you ask me there is a good chance these reward functions will be determined by private coorporations, hence they will mirror capitalists interests and the resulting AI will act to further it, a.k.a. serve the capitalists.

2. If cold fusion would have the effect you describe I have to point to your own premise. Capitalists will fight tooth and nail to prevent/defund it or find a way to profit off of it - they do the same already, just look at food. There is no net-scarcity in food production anymore, hasn't been for a long time - still people die of hunger everyday - bc giving them food doesn't yield a profit.

If you are among the global poor, you will not receive energy from cold fusion if a capitalist profits more from someone blowing that same energy watching 3D porn in his space limosine.

So yes both technologies are a salvation in the hand of a comrade but irrelevant in the hand of a capitalist.

Particularly the AI could even become a damnation, just look at Israels going full medieval using 21st century tech, imagine what a Zionist-primed AI can do.

You said it yourself we must consider full blown fascists kicking of the AI singularity. Maybe Europe really "needs to secure its Meditteranean coast from refugees" - boom, FrontexAI exterminating refugees without the public noticing it anymore, and no human has to shoot anymore, noone has to worry about insubordination anymore.

Even without fascism: What if technology enables the burgeoisie to overcome the strength in numbers that the proletariat has over them - when there is no need to appease the masses anymore: how long until a society is stratified enough for the burgeoisie to lose remaining empathy, roll back concessions and we go back to straight out slavery enforced by your friendly AI?

If we don't manage to organize and fight back we might find out where those timelines lead and I'd like to spare humanity that path.

Not defending the statement, but someone else pointed out, that it was made in 2010 though, hopefully some of them have grown since then