Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)
He&#x27;s addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don&#x27;t have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it.<p>For me at least, that&#x27;s not the primary fear. I don&#x27;t fear people becoming dependent on AI. Rather, I fear people misusing the information that AI reveals about others. I don&#x27;t feel uncomfortable from (for example) AI observing my media habits and using that information to make recommendations for other media.<p>However, I would feel uncomfortable if someone with access to that AI then fed those insights into some other AI that I wasn&#x27;t aware of for much more nefarious purposes, such as profiling me to try to quantify my loyalty to the government.<p>That&#x27;s just one example. Even if I had absolute faith in my government, bad actors could misuse that information to do other things, like determine which people would be most likely to take on debt on unfavorable terms (so they could be sent a 20% APR preapproved credit card, naturally!), or which people would be most likely to want to help a troubled Nigerian prince who just needs a place to temporarily park a bunch of money.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to fearmonger and I&#x27;m actually very excited for the future of AI. I just don&#x27;t think this piece is addressing the deeper fears people have about the technology.