• AI and Trust - Schneier on Security

    talking about trust:

    We might think of them as friends, when they are actually services. Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as immoral as the law and their reputations let them get away with.

    So corporations regularly take advantage of their customers, mistreat their workers, pollute the environment, and lobby for changes in law so they can do even more of these things.

    Both language and the laws make this an easy category error to make. We use the same grammar for people and corporations. We imagine that we have personal relationships with brands. We give corporations some of the same rights as people.

    Corporations like that we make this category error—see, I just made it myself—because they profit when we think of them as friends. They use mascots and spokesmodels. They have social media accounts with personalities. They refer to themselves like they are people.

    But they are not our friends. Corporations are not capable of having that kind of relationship.

    We are about to make the same category error with AI. We’re going to think of them as our friends when they’re not. (emphasis mine)

    that these dream/hallucination machines have a chat interface really seems to be an interesting hack on our psyche.