In the early to mid-2010s AI hype peaked, radical Kurzweillean ideas became sales pitches from founders, and a great wave of discussion and speculation passed t

In the early to mid-2010s AI hype peaked, radical Kurzweillean ideas became sales pitches from founders, and a great wave of discussion and speculation passed through the media public consciousness. For a time r/futurology was an interesting place for discussion, and there were really great comments to be found amidst the internet chaff . One of the things I speculated about then was that ai doesn't need be sentient to ruin everything. Powerful tools in the hands of malicious actors could wreak havoc on the internet. The internet could become compromised in so many ways via privacy invasions and data theft, aggressive spam, misinformation, propaganda and malicious code that nobody can reliably depend on it for much of anything any longer. One could receive a phone call from someone who sounds like their own mother, an ai that says things only a mother would know. That voice could be very persuasive. that was the kind of stuff we talked about years ago. There were no instantaneous results, of course, and it became boring and uncool to keep going on about such things. Nonetheless, it seems now that the tools and incentives needed to create a dystopia such as what I described are really starting to come into focus.