On his expedition to Britain, Julius Caesar (55-54 BCE) dispatched a letter to Cicero in Rome. That urgent military correspondence crawled across the empire for 29 days.
Nothing much changed for the next ~ 1,800 years, communication speeds remained as slow. A letter from Britain to Rome in 1800 AD would still take weeks, just as in Caesar's time.
Until the invention of railways in the 19th century, a journey that took a month could be reduced to mere days. It reconfigured the society.
Even after the advent of railways, another ~ 144 years passed before the next true revolution: the internet. Yes, there were advances like the telegraph, telephone, and fax machine, but none had the same civilizational impact as the internet.
The internet reconfigured global communication, collapsing weeks into milliseconds and transforming human connectivity in a radical way.
Electricity followed a similar pattern: thousands of years of candles and oil lamps, then sudden illumination that transformed every aspect of human life, from working hours to city planning to industrial capacity.
Civilizational advancements usually take time to show up but when they show up, they reconfigure the society.
I expect AI advance to follow the path of Railway, Electricity and Internet in reconfiguring our society.
I'm absolutely not sure of the direction but cheaper access to intelligence will fast track progress in medicine (especially drug discovery), education, city planning and innovation.