The ultimate dream of any CEO is for people to become dependent on their product to the point where they can't picture living without it.
Amazon and its competitors rose to prominence via creating products that were so cheap and convenient that people gave in, they gave us a store where everything could be gotten in one place and with free two day shipping that was surely worth the then low subscription cost.
Now we're seeing brick and mortar stores as well as smaller online distributors shutter. We're also seeing Amazon hike up the prices of items and subscriptions because they know they're the only option for a lot of people now-- they've cut out the competition. This is how a lot of the big tech CEOs post dot com boom ensured their power.
Sam Altman and his peers are the next generation of that, and in the tradition of American innovation, their goal has always been to take what came before them and build it to new extremes.
So if Amazon's goal is to create a service that is cheap and easy to the point you stop going to the store (and then monetizing off your dependence once said store is gone), and Chatgpt is selling you intelligence...
I'm not saying this to be mean, but one of the major things Amazon did was put all the items you could want in one place, which also had the side effects of making it so a lot more people were further disconnected from the realities of the supply chain and just flat out didn't know where in real life they could get many of the specialty items they were looking for at their fair market prices.
Chatgpt similar disconnects you from the sources information is gathered from and robs you of the chance to approach their answers with a critical eye-- the consequences of which will extend past these AI engines because when you don't go to the websites you get answers from, you lose crucial opportunities to take in the information surrounding what you're looking for and begin to consider what you think a reputable source looks like and what your definition of normal looks like.
It essentially sets you up to fail, and hinders your skills in whatever areas you use it for because Sam Altman and his associates want you to become reliant on these ais and choose them over the alternatives so that you will be willing to pay more for them and see them as essential.
It's in their best interest for you to think less and seek instant gratification more for their ultimate bottom line, and as this post exemplifies, it's working.
The questions we ask AI are growing larger and larger to the point where essential life skills have been ceded to this soulless grasp for our wallets.
When Amazon first began to receive criticism for their practices and was accused of undercutting the competition, Jeff Bezos tried to say that they weren't focused on the competition but the customers and focused on what Amazon was doing that the competition wasn't capable of doing-- this is because Amazon wasn't focused on outdoing competitors but rather whole industries and changing consumer behavior. As a result, a sizeable portion of Americans will now learn that shopping online for things like fabric and books should be the new normal and, you know, there's only one place to go for that now if you're a casual consumer who doesn't live and breathe those communities.
Similarly, ais aren't so much competing against each other right now. That's not their competition. eBay was never a true threat to Amazon, the ease of going to a store and leaving with an item in your hands in an hour or less was.
Ai's largest competitor is your mind and what it's capable of doing.
The fact that tech is inserting it everywhere and constantly expanding the capabilities to target even the tiny, inconsequential decisions you make should make you terrified.
