The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and people.
Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants.
In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.
Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.
> In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have [...]
I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.
I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life.
Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.
I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.
How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).
I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.
It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.
Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.
Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were serious costs to having your data leaked out like this people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat how their social media content feeds at this point have been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing users is great in the eyes of most people.
You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.
Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.
At least in my part of the US, it's not hard to do without smartphones at all. Default assumptions are that you have one, but you can still do everything you want to do if you don't.
This could be applied to any gadget with "smart" prefix in the name (eg - Smartphone, smart TV, smart traffic signals) today.
I wish people would stop believing that "smart" things are always better.
But, we're basically being trained for the future you mentioned. Folks are getting more comfortable talking to their handheld devices, relying on mapping apps for navigation (I'm guilty), and writing AI query prompts.
Big companies like Google are already doing this without AI. Will AI make the services more tempting? Yes, but there's also a lot of headway in open source AI and search, which could serve to topple people's reliance on big tech.
If everyone had a $500 device at home that served as their own self hosted AI, then Google could cease to exist. That's a future worth working towards.
That is how most people will interface with their "personal assistant bot".
Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and curates all your contacts in order to "better help you".
When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to "help" and collect data in a similar manner.
Poetic as this is, I always feel like if we can imagine it then it won't happen. The only constant is surprise, we can only predict these types of developments accidentally
"Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs."
If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will they stay competitive and relevant?
I mean by this definition I’d say it happened when they introduced Siri or Hey Google. The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though. Getting to point where you consider them as a dark “guardian angel” or “ancestral spirit” goes even a step farther I think
>> The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though.
It only takes a decade or so.
Consider people who are young children now in "first world nations". They will have always had LLM-based tools available and voice assistants you can ask natural language questions.
It will likely follow the same adoption curves as smartphones, only faster because of existing network effects.
If you have smartphone with a reasonably fast connection, you have access to LLM tools. The next generations of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops will all have LLM tools built-in.
I do see what you mean, and don't totally disagree, but to extend your "smartphone" metaphor I see your hypothetical as akin to someone looking at a like an old school Motorola Razr and saying "in the future these will be ubiquitous". Not necessarily wrong, but not exactly right either. The implementation of personalized assistants could take lots of different flavors, and the ultimate usage pattern which is settled (to me) seems likely to be outside any of our current models.
Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants.
In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.
Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.