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by 0xbadcafebee 1048 days ago
Your first paragraph is just Amazon today. They don't need AI for people to make up products and send you garbage. They probably will use AI for reviews, but they already have fake reviews that reliably fool people, so this isn't much different. If it gets so bad that Amazon's bottom line is threatened, they'll actually crack down; they're assholes, not business-suicidal.

"The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth" - you just described Google Search, like, 5 years ago.

"the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable.." - not really. What we're capable of is not what happens. We only reach the minimum viable capability that meets a societal expectation. Once the expectation is reached, progress stagnates, until something exceptional changes the expectation. As a more specific example, regardless of how advanced hardware gets, software remains a gas that fills any container, so what we can actually do with the hardware is always limited by our horrible software.

People keep talking about AI like it's going to transform everything. It's actually more like colorized talking movies vs the black-and-white silent ones. Reshapes industries and changes expectations and experiences? For sure. But the films, plots, characters, actors, industry, viewers, their effect on society, etc remain the same. 3D didn't take hold, neither did smell-o-vision, drive-ins, and countless other "innovations", even though they were feasible. This is just one example, there are tens of thousands of other examples I could give. It's like a law of nature. We don't accomplish what we aren't motivated to.

Also, mcdonalds drive thrus work all the time, not just most of the time. The drive thru is the engine that generates most of the revenue; it's a conveyor belt for cash. A franchise would go out of business if the drive thru broke.

1 comments

I'm talking about the quality of the food here.

as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.

AI isn't going to change a pandemic or an election by itself. Those are completely controlled by societal norms and actions of humans, regardless of any technological powers or their uses.

In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, we had the technology and knowledge to end it quickly. But nations around the world chose to spread disinformation and cover-up the story, which made it much worse. A third of the world died because of how society chose to act.

And when we make a product that can do harm, we also make a product that can revert it, clean it up, or institute laws to restrict it. Now that we've seen things like Russian bot farms, we look for them and shut them down. Despite that we have good AI, we can also detect AI. Our ingenuity can almost always be surpassed by more ingenuity. As much as it can cause harm, it can also fix said harm.

AI is just a hammer in a toolbox, and it isn't any worse than any other hammer we've had. Don't worry about the hammer; worry about the person holding it.