Comment by walleeee

My intuition is similar; software can distribute responsibility in ways no previous vehicle could, by virtue of speed, scale, and mode of interaction (in a McLuhan-ish "medium as message" sense). But it's still an evolution of long pre-existing social dynamics, not (or relatively rarely) an absolute novelty. Scamming is an ancient art which we did not invent, I suspect, but rather discovered ourselves doing already. Only painstakingly (and still only partially) have we dragged the concept into the light of consciousness.

I feel the same way about artificial intelligence: it's not new, it's all around us, digital computation merely crystallizes the concept. But shiny objects should not distract us from the much more general phenomenon.