[sublinear]

And yet we live in a world where even a basic surveillance camera, dashcam, or bodycam are often broken, missing, or turned off.

It's not always nefarious. The friction is just too high and people don't actually care about any of those things you listed as much as you might believe. If they did, we'd just as easily employ people performing audits on every interaction of every waking moment since the beginning of humanity. A nanny, if you will.

In the real world, simplicity wins. You can say it's irrational all you want. Nobody cares. Cost, reliability, and impedance are more important. No amount of engineering or economy of scale will overcome those things. Doing nothing is always an option and so this is all ultimately political.

What humanity has learned again and again is that trust is too important and intrinsic to leave it up to politics. All that will result in is brittle rules that are easily abused worse than the original problem they intended to solve. It's much easier to convince people to socialize accordingly and ignore or punish the people who refuse to comply.

Making sure that every decision in a flowchart leads somewhere is not necessarily valuable or even desirable to anyone.

[socalgal2]

I did’t say anyone wanted those things. I said they were positives the show ignored and don’t require AI

with Ai added the use cases are so compelling they fly off th shelves once they get the form and ux right.

Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s and yet here we are in 2025 an 85% of the planet has a PDA, renamed smartphone

[sublinear]

> Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s

No it wasn't. PDAs were seen as crappy little computers, but the applications were obvious because the bigger much more impressive computers were everywhere by then. There was no question about the value of personal computing anymore.

Everything regarding probabilistic AI is either about optimization or trading off costs. All such applications are intrinsically and perpetually lost in the weeds. The use cases aren't new because "generative" is a marketing buzzword desperately trying to cover up what is actually just "imitation".

AI makes what was already possible more accessible. It is useful, but not a revolution for the layperson or even most businesses apart from bridging knowledge gaps. It's a new way to search, but iterative at best. People are in awe of the money being exchanged, but are also in denial that it's almost entirely defense spending.

If it was just a matter of cost, scale, capability, etc. then why am I not allowed to own a flying car with my existing driver's license? Why doesn't everyone own full auto guns? Why do we serve horrible food in hospitals? Why do corporate offices thrive on work that technically never needed more than one person to accomplish even before computers were commonplace? The answers are all political.