&gt; highly profitable industries<p>Those profits are not necessarily from AI.<p>&gt; advertising, facial recognition<p>Yes, surveillance capitalism is highly profitable. AI may be enabling and magnifying that problem, but a lot of the profits at the moment are due to technology making it a lot easier to obscure business models and the difficulty in challenging &quot;too big to fail&quot;-sized accumulation of wealth.<p>The point being that while AI has some really interesting uses (with more being discovered regularly), it&#x27;s profitability is probably somewhat closer to the fad tech of the 80s. It&#x27;s the <i>internet</i> combined with very cheap, portable computers - and the shady business models they have created - that are highly profitable.