But the really radical notion would be to harness AI to provide honest advertisements. It would seem trivial to parse the web to let us know which thingamajig is the best thingamajig. We all know we've been suffering gaming by the ad industry since forever. Well, at least since radio and television. The creatives in the industry look for ways to make mediocre seem really really good. As I kid I wondered why they often touted what was worst about the product in some sort of reverse psychology bid.
The real question underlying all this stuff is why we cede the public good and goods to the wealthy for their exploitation? Do we really buy their own self-assessment that they deserve their wealth because of "merit."
Merit is a word that can be parsed so very many ways; none of them providing any satisfaction about usage. In our particular economy, merit is approximately equivalent to getting away with something, meaning one small step away from theft. Cory Doctorow provides sound enlightenment on this topic in his Enshittification thesis.
But really the key term here is "gaming." As in, the bigger the company the more it games us. And guess what, now we offer ways to game the future by way of prediction markets. Seems to me that this might incentivize destruction, given how much easier that is than to make something. Entropy and all.
It also does seem a given that AI will pretty much level the field for prediction, making this a fraught topic for regulators. It was quickly obvious that one shouldn't be able to bet on a human's future demise. But what about disease trends or costs or climate change?
If you're motivated to make money on the basis of doing no demonstrable good for anyone, you're certainly likely to devote your personal quota of cleverness toward making as much money possible. Our uniquely American form of religious capitalism provides the perfect cover. Greed is almost your duty here.
I'm by no means a mortal enemy to capitalism, properly regulated. Global corporate capitalism should not be something we want to encourage, since for capitalism to operate properly there must be competition. Once upon a time we understood this. More recently we seem to have decided that consumer cost is the proper measure for anti-trust actions, or lack thereof.
But a good AI prediction engine would have to understand how different the temporary price relief is from destructive competition when you use investors' money to sell below cost and drive all the small fry out of business. It's perfectly predictable that the result is uniformly higher prices and the ultimate nightmare of Amazon which can dictate the price for nearly anything. We're always being sold a pig-in-a-poke. It's just that the scale has become immense.
My own pet measure is the growth in income disparity between workers and the ownership class. And the biggest trouble there is that the economy has now been groomed such that we are all forced to put retirement funds into ownership-class holdings in order to keep from losing money faster and faster. And we still can't touch the growth available to those who control our stocks and bonds.
In my personal memory it was once quite trivial to find a place to live affordable on minimum wage. When I started college it was at the most expensive university on the planet, but the $5K, which included room and board and when books were cheap, was held by me in a savings bank from paper-routes, lawn mowing, pool cleaning and work in a bicycle shop.
What happened!! Corey Doctorow provides a pretty good start. But in my simper terms, we've simply shunk the cost of amoral behavior. Everybody's doing it. Moralilty is impossible without physical interaction with other people. We Americans have wiped that off the map. Once a week in a big box church doesn't count.
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