Arguably though that social atrophy was going on for long before "AI" and is now simply entering a new (and terminal?) stage...

No worries, stablecoins will stabilize everything. Its in the name, no? 🤣

The financialization and monetization of every aspect of society has been long time in the making, but indeed "tech" managed to probe new depths.

Never before (at least since the abolition of slavery) was human agency attacked in such a frontal manner by turning us all into algorithm fodder.

Two decades later it is now generally safe to conclude that "tech companies" don't exactly have society's best interest at heart...

Me thinks its simpler than that. They are not cannibalizing their own business, they try to keep it alive by making the search endpoints they worked so hard to embed everywhere maintain relevance. They can always integrate (even expand) adtech in the "AI" summaries.

All that matters for google is to maintain the lock-in of users searching via their universally embedded endpoints (browser, mobile etc.)

Interleaving "AI" summaries with paid links, using user chat data for ever more invasive targeting etc., are minor technical challenges in comparison.

We can't have good things because good things, as a rule, happen to good societies.

xkcd is one of those rare exceptions that keep the hope alive.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks. The European political class is overwhelmingly not in the digital-native class. Interprets things along the categories they know. The elephant in the room is #opensource. Must morph into something sustainable, a new recipe rather than reheated food.

For now "AI" works mostly as an anti-enshittification filter: the unusable, pay-to-play / SEO infested results page is replaced by something seemingly more to the point.

But make no mistake, when the "AI" result gets enshittified (as it will) the same pathologies will be completely LLM-washed.

in the end it boils down to a deeply flawed financial system. Through the systematic amplification of collective hallucinations it grants enormous power and impact to a small number of people.

Its the forced stupidification of society for the benefit of a tiny minority.

Indeed. For every pithy observation there is an equally pithy one that asserts the opposite. E.g. Heraclitus' "you can never enter the same river twice".

The complexity of human society's phenomena does not admit simplistic explanatory / predictive recipes.

In normal times the balance would have been an unequivocal plus: A core part of reaching a sustainable state is internalizing the human footprint so that it can be contained - in which ever way.

This task is, in its essence, an information technology exercise.

But we don't live in normal times.

good news in particular for KDE and the linux desktop more generally.

Three decades late but it *is* coming 🤣