I have a creeping suspicion that many of my real life acquaintances do not actually read my emails and messages anymore. They just feed it to the AI and reply with whatever AI comes up with.
Also, messengers and email providers have started to integrate that shit in their apps, so very soon it actually might be harder to write or read something by yourself, than simply click the AI icon... or maybe there won't even be any icon at all. Just already generated reply with Send button... or even just automated AI slop reply without any button whatsoever.
This realization, of course, gives heavy incentive to do the same. Why would I read or write anything if another party doesn't? Why bother when no one is reading it anyway? This way it is only a matter of time until everyone becomes a mindless button clicking zombie unable to read anything longer than few words and watching anything longer than a minute or so.
So, the plan, apparently, is to turn us all into some kind of collective borg. Where no one thinks for themselves anymore and everything (everything!) is being mediated by the system, humans becoming only a kind of a meatsack appendages to the system.
Well, guys, if this is not the end of human race, I don't know what is. No wars or political shitstorms can come even close to AI in terms of threat to human existence. Especially when this is heavily promoted by the powers that be.
Ellul's The Technological Society, the book Ted Kaczynski called "his bible" - describes who this trajectoy needs no plan. The pursuit of "efficiency" is built into the techno prison we have made for ourselves.
It needs no cabal.
Could be. At the end of the day is it really that important whether it is all being driven by some kind of cabal or just an idea? It could be real people (or entities), making real plans... but it also could be something like an idea or a mind virus that has infected our civilisation. We can call it The System. The System does not work by itself. It has to have at least someone to make plans and supervise execution. So, I'd say it is not fully automated. The power pyramid exists. However, we might never know what is at the top of this pyramid. Is it some kind of supernatural being, Baal, Moloch, some powerful people, secret societies, or just an idea that is corrupting us from top to bottom?...
That said, Kaczynski was right. He might have chosen wrong methods to express his opinion, but in general he was right.