[1827162]

A totalitarian police state in the making there. Yes, with ChatGPT (and its successors) they will be targeting politically subversive conversations that threaten state power, in 20+ years time.

It's happened before and we are already showing all the signs of early stage fascism[1], and there is no reason that it won't happen again.

1. Yes I am using the word fascism, instead of authoritarianism, because that is what I think it is, it is that severe, when you consider what is happening already (mass Internet surveillance, protesters being criminalized).

[counttheforks]

I used to feel sad that I wouldn't be able to see what our society will be like in a few hundred years. The past few years that feeling has instead shifted to feeling glad that I won't have to endure most of it.

[1827162]

It might actually get better over hundreds of years, the current problems are decline over a couple of decades, which will likely result in a backlash eventually.

We abolished slavery, torture, blasphemy, heresy, witch hunting, etc. over the centuries. And made huge roads into tackling racism and the persecution of homosexuals, etc. So no reason to think it will get worse over the very long term, I think?

Unrelatedly one pressing issue we haven't yet fixed is the systematic cruelty and mistreatment of children by parents, which probably has religious origins in prior generations. And instead the government focuses on sexual abuse, which is a drop in the ocean by comparison.

We are also in the midst of a revolution - AI might shift power back to the individual - because it can be run locally, and the government has a much harder time monitoring that. And it can reduce our dependence on online services which are the primary means for state control over our lives?

[giraffe_lady]

There's no reason to think those things will get better either, in fact maybe the opposite. The gains we've made against racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc were hard-won, localized, limited, and recent. At least in my country right now we're seeing a serious and so far somewhat successful revanchist backlash against many of them.

Whether the positive changes will stay as they are or continue to improve is unclear, they certainly aren't well established or uncontested.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Yes, just because these things have improved doesn't mean they can't get worse, a lot worse.

[brokenmachine]

>AI might shift power back to the individual - because it can be run locally, and the government has a much harder time monitoring that

It will become AI as a service in the cloud with rent seeking, like everything else.

[nathanaldensr]

Online services are not the primary means of state control over our lives; taxation and the monopoly on violence are.

[1827162]

But I think it's the primary way the state finds out what we are doing, so it then can exercise it's violence, if it finds us doing something that it doesn't like.

The first thing police do nowadays is check social media accounts when there's a crime, whether it's a thought crime or not? So by reducing our reliance on online services, we can diminish the ability of the state to police our lives?

Or maybe I'm wrong here (tired, and need a rest, so I don't end up spamming HN)?

[rootusrootus]

In the US, at least, the state definitely doesn't have a complete monopoly on violence. For better or worse.