Comment by xp84

“who does the ai work for”

I think even ignoring the more scary government/cops questions, this gets to a key problem. Because for 25 years we’ve taught 2 generations of digital natives as well as everybody else that everything Internet should be “free as in beer” paid for by trashy advertising, and that consumers’ only cash cost should be hardware and ISP/data plan. Therefore the answer to “who’s going to foot the bill for that AI” “must” be Big Adtech meaning the AI 100% will work for them and often directly against users’ interests (just as the YouTube algorithm mindlessly but intentionally prefers to radicalize a user or drive them to obsession on any number of topics vs. having them arrive at a healthy level of satisfaction and then sign off and go outside).

In my opinion a lot of these problems we see in the scary law enforcement scenarios would be easier to solve if we didn’t expect everything to be ad-supported “free” and rather, we could be convinced to buy a $5000 piece of hardware for your home, that you control, that was privy to your encryption keys and performed all the power-insensitive AI processing for your family. That sounds a lot but compared to things like cars that people happily finance for $70,000 and smartphones which cost $1300 it is only weird because we aren’t used to it.