my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:
do you want to talk to verizon's help desk because there's an error on your bill? to access a real agent, you have to pay for Verizon Access+, only 5.99 a month.
want to filter out all the fake job postings from the real ones? subscribe to Indeed: Advanced Tactics and only verified postings will appear on your dash.
sick of the infinite ai slop? buy Google Premium; it'll automatically detect ai within a site and gives it a credibility score. with premium plus, you can shuffle high-credibility results to the top.
do you want a "luxury" experience? well, you'd have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn't want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.
when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.
My dude they already have this idea, this is 100% where they're going if we let them.
The amount of money being forced into AI right now isn't because they think it's a great tech, it's because they need us to be reliant on it or on related services so that they can put it behind a paywall. Maybe some of them think it'll be "you need paid AI services to function" but there's also "you need paid AI-blockers to function better."
Switch to DuckDuckGo, turn AI off on everything you can, and start finding alternatives for things that won't let you turn AI off. Burst their bubble before they lock in the con to bleed us dry.
