You know it’s important and hard-hitting when both BroBible and Unilad are carrying it (possibly originating with the Daily Star?). Terminator director James Cameron is quoted as saying:

“AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it, but we just don’t know because it would have total control over all the media and everything. What better explanation is there for how absurd everything is right now? Nothing makes better sense to me.”

I’ve written about this before vis-a-vis the AI hegemony, that we’ve already been effectively living under AI rule via social media platforms for more than a decade culturally, globally. So, it seems like the inevitable throughline of that is one day we dispense with the charade of the old systems and tilt headlong into overt AI rule.

In fact, this is pretty much the plot of my second (manually-written) book, Conspiratopia (a novella), in which a young unwitting conspiracy dude is drawn into a web of lies after being exposed to the AI Virus by seeing an ad on social media (see also).

In a way, I think this also connects to what Jaron Lanier was talking about w/r/t social media platforms driving users (probably unintentionally, but who knows) towards a sort of composite personality that expresses all the foibles and fragility built into the technology itself.

Also, if you follow the logic of sci-fi author Charles Stross, who claims that corporations are “slow motion” AIs already, then we’ve been under the thumb of these entities for hundreds of years already…