AI powered toys are little more than techbros rushing to build Tom Riddle's diary.

>even if as little as 1% of the population

1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."

You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it just means associating something to your account, which is ultimately subject to the whims of the service provider.

It's engineered dependency.

Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely.

That's just not the world we live in currently.

Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.

It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.