I think right now people are at the end of that cusp; daily they are worse at grasping how their results are collated, and thus are more unable to figure out what "facts" they are getting are reliable. Things are far more subtle than the Ping Pong Pizza days. The online interactions of millions and millions of people with search engines, AI, database backends, and etc. being used to "create" answers on the fly kinda worries me.
I don't disagree with you, but my concern is more people simply accepting the 'answer' because how could the AI be wrong and not for a moment thinking 'I should check if this is right', and if called out defaulting to 'not my problem, the AI said so'.
Not sure. But I figure we are pretty close to a world where people think AIs and tech are so advanced as to convince people they are autonomously making 'offers' of things (like, if people are so bad at all that 'free stuff!' crap that washes over everything in imaginary internetland, how can AIs do it?). Every day at least one of my devices comes up with some cockamamie fake thing it seems to build my personalized results around, even with content blockers enabled.
That is ignoring stuff AI might come up with that isn't steeped in emptions... I mean, if you think about it, I am not sure how an AI should respond if it were acting as a PA (personal assistant) to someone looking for work with no luck after a certain amount of time, for instance. Facebook experimented (I think appropriately) with stuff like trying to calm down mania online, and got sort of bashed for it, but it seems cruel for an AI to be pumping sunshine also. I am aware the DOD researched this extensively and assume the CIA and similar other countries' intelligence agencies will have also.
Add in stuff like what Musk experiments with and peoples' psychological issues with AI almost certainly would be terrible. These are things intelligence agencies have invested in research in for decades and decades.
If there is much more human-machine overlap, if nothing else human interaction as we think of it will be extinct. Do not want that.
Will people just turn into extensions of agentic AI instead of (godforbid either is bad) the other way around? Not a fan of cybernetics; that creeps me out (not, per se, me doing it , although at some point it seems if that happened one would feel like there was no choice but to also take part), but being forced to interact with any of it (and this part is here and now and moving forward continuously now; we are already forced to act with it, most of us, if obviously the tech is not at the point where we are competing for dominance with it quite yet).
I'd like to think that even though agencies like the CIA have been involved in some sketchy stuff over the past almost a century, they also have probably gotten involved to try to prevent more of it than most anyone knows either.
At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.