We have to quickly drop the expectation that the platonic ideal usage of AI is what we should expect to see. The typical use of it will be as a cheap/lazy labor machine like you say.
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
You're right. It's in their power to kneecap the businesses they sit on Twitter and whine about. Twitter, incidentally, being another one of those businesses.
The typical person has not had to meaningfully learn math since the invention of calculators. Think about the consequences of that. Now imagine the effect of them ceding general thinking and creating.
My car is much older and I used to hope it would last forever. But now I hope it dies soon enough that when I go to replace it, the options for non smart cars haven't gone away.
Steam trained a whole generation of gamers not to expect real ownership with resale rights. It's sad. The population old enough to even know this is how it used to be is shrinking.
PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.
This is very different on PC since Valve does not have the same iron grip on the platform that Sony has. If Steam becomes evil and tries to take my games away I'll just download a pirated copy instead. I purchase my games for convenience and to give some money to the creators. I don't need to purchase games to play them. I also can back up my Steam game files and use a crack on them if necessary.
Pirating has literally never been easier than it is today. Even Denuvo's been defeated for the most part, both via VM bypasses and through actual cracks in some cases. If it weren't so sad, it's hilarious that the games even run better without the Denuvo crapware running on top of the game process.
If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.
Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.
That doesn't relieve people of the responsibility of having enough scientific literacy to understand that 30 years is only an instant on geological time scales. And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.
It's like trying to argue with someone saying they actually are going to build the whole plane out of the black box. At some point we should just cut our losses.
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