> it wouldn't be rather trivial in some sense for users to build the same capabilities but for personal protection from malign influences. Yes the implication

> it wouldn't be rather trivial in some sense for users to build the same capabilities but for personal protection from malign influences. Yes the implication of AI in economics and society is like that of scraping, spam, scalping or fraud, ie leading to an arms race. Insurance companies denying claims, citizens fighting back filing appeals with AI. Captchas and fingerprinting to protect against bots, that use OCR and now AI to bypass the defenses. Well, this idea of increased net productivity relies on the fact that we don’t waste the excess on fighting each other in the same games we were playing all along. It’s like a feud between tribes going from sticks to swords to guns. It’s only when you replace the zero-sum activity with a positive value that the world actually improves. The techno-optimists see only potential in an all-else-equal world, which isn’t the world we live in. Potential is irrelevant in the face of incentives.