Am I Chicken Little? Either AI or the Tech Bros Are Coming For You

 YouTube tossed out The Best Breakdown of America You’ve Never Heard - Richard Miniter, and I found time for listening to it (with varying degrees of intensity), it is over an hour long. I found much that I agreed with, some things about culture I had not thought of, and only when he started talking about the billionaire tech bros did I find anything I disagreed with. There is no more unaccountable class in American than the billionaire class. DOGE remains an open question whether it is a success. And when you have a Secretary of Defense leak plans of our attack on the Houthis via a Signal chat, there is a good reason not to digitize the federal government.

As for my own writing, it may have given back up for the idea that Indiana is a border state.

Some of Mr. Miniter's ideas about the Democrats I found an affinity to another video, a college lecture, that I had read earlier in the day, consumerism as the perfection of slavery.

But the origin of this post comes from another Ted Gioia essay, The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public.

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet. 

They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.

AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it—and more so with each passing month. So the purveyors must bundle it into current offerings, and force usage that way.

I disagree with Mr. Gioia on one point: you can get rid of Microsoft Office. I suggest LibreOffice instead of Microsoft, It is compatible with MS Office without the AI - and it is free. Google searches might be more of a problem - Bing also uses AI. But why not leave Facebook?

A better solution because it can be preventive rather than reactive:

There should be laws against this.

There should be transparency laws. There should be opt-in laws. There should be liability laws. There should be IP laws.

We’re lucky that AI bots don’t write the laws—at least not yet. We should take action before that happens. And if politicians won’t act, let’s turn to voter initiatives (which are binding in many places) or class-action suits or take other steps.

But with the tech bros buying up our government, I am not sanguine about anything, anyone, will be coming to save us.

sch 7/5