Right. This has been my take since ChatGPT hit the scene.
I'm not really afraid of Skynet or AM. What worries me is that AI will accelerate the enshittification of everything as it gets baked into everything.
Think of the experience of trying to get any kind of help from a giant company with call centers. You have some legitimate problem or grievance. Any thinking person would agree that a resolution is in order.
But you're not allowed to access a thinking person. What you get instead is some wage slave who has to follow a script. The script doesn't have your situation in it. They don't have some button they can press to solve your problem. There's a gigantic bureaucracy between you and the person who could fix your issue. Eventually you may just give up and mark your issue down as unsolvable.
This is already a realistic situation today, but now imagine that there's a new layer in front of all this where you have to convince an LLM your problem is worth considering. Or imagine the human on the other end has to try to send your request through some AI system.
It's not going to launch all the nukes, or construct nanofactories to make a plague. It's just going to get in your way, serve you garbage, frustrate you, and make the world a slightly worse place.
Maybe in the far future it could be more of a Skynet situation, I dunno. But between then and now there will be plenty of low level annoyance for anyone having to deal with these systems.
I'm not as cynical as this post reads - I think just like the whole internet there are still opportunities for good here, for people's lives to be improved by technology. But our incentives right now sure encourage the worse scenario.
I’m less about enshittification or literal Skynet and more about casually and indirectly causing a major destabilization with some seemingly mundane application of fancy tech that devs didn’t bother to think through about the implications of, or were so amazed they could do something they didn’t think about whether they should.
I'm not really afraid of Skynet or AM. What worries me is that AI will accelerate the enshittification of everything as it gets baked into everything.
Think of the experience of trying to get any kind of help from a giant company with call centers. You have some legitimate problem or grievance. Any thinking person would agree that a resolution is in order.
But you're not allowed to access a thinking person. What you get instead is some wage slave who has to follow a script. The script doesn't have your situation in it. They don't have some button they can press to solve your problem. There's a gigantic bureaucracy between you and the person who could fix your issue. Eventually you may just give up and mark your issue down as unsolvable.
This is already a realistic situation today, but now imagine that there's a new layer in front of all this where you have to convince an LLM your problem is worth considering. Or imagine the human on the other end has to try to send your request through some AI system.
It's not going to launch all the nukes, or construct nanofactories to make a plague. It's just going to get in your way, serve you garbage, frustrate you, and make the world a slightly worse place.
Maybe in the far future it could be more of a Skynet situation, I dunno. But between then and now there will be plenty of low level annoyance for anyone having to deal with these systems.
I'm not as cynical as this post reads - I think just like the whole internet there are still opportunities for good here, for people's lives to be improved by technology. But our incentives right now sure encourage the worse scenario.