comment tl;dr AI is sending us to hell, but maybe there's air-conditioning down there.

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Sony news must be seen as incidental to a bigger movement in business.

26 years ago the corps would have fought this age thing tooth & nail, as a heinous government intrusion into their business practices and customer privacy without any clear social justification.

Then Facebook and Google showed that the public opinion can be directly monitored and controlled given sufficient surveillance and service capture, making these companies obscenely rich and politically powerful.

Now AI is set to expand this control and power by an order of magnitude.

All today's corps are pushing ahead of the age mandates because with AI they have the means to marry personal identification with the leverage of AI for exfiltration and integration of data over an ever-expanding range of population details, per service, per user, per page, per datum, across all services.

By placing networked AI agent within apps, they get behind the users' firewalls, where the agents can surveil from the position of the user's privilege across the entire spread of service consumption.

The AI-outfitted service provider can create a vise that continuously squeezes users via dark patterns from the outside while monitoring their reactions from the inside, all with a cybernetic dynamism.

Users can now be grafted onto services and guided in their behaviors with adaptive power and precision from cradle to grave.

We know all companies are pursuing this as the AI corps are going all out to build Sorcerer's Apprentice bucket brigade data-centers (paid for by service providers) at the enormous scale required to "serve" everybody in every business sector.

It's also obvious that if you have the power to haul in liquid data drawn up by AI from the deep well of the most personal, individual, intersectional information about users across all services, you will use that data to steer users towards dependent relationships with preferred providers.

To say that corps are striving to deploy the great eye of Sauron is not a hyperbolic analogy. It's a race to build the biggest most complete panopticon and lock everyone within it.

In a sense-- as difficult as this is to admit-- all the QAnon imbecilic raving about Bill Gates enslaving the world by putting microscopic RFID chips in vaccines is oddly true, but it's not being done with vaccines and RFID chips. It's oddly true in the same way that it's now known that there's a long-running elite cabal that been exploiting and consuming children for its own greed and pleasure, even though it wasn't literally running from pizza parlor basements, nor killing babies and harvesting their skin for beauty products.

Moreover, under Trump, the U.S. has made it crystal clear that it's a matter of national policy that the individual's freedom and independence are meaningless if you don't get along with Big Brother: you will be cast out, made homeless, deported and murdered.

You might think you'll get lucky add come out ahead, but just because your fate is seemingly randomly determinate to inscrutable factors aggregated to something like a social credit score, doesn't imply any inherent liberty to prevail under tyranny.

Through war, the U.S. has also made it clear that human life is worthless before the dictates of property.

So in a perverse inversion of the 20th century American ideal of freedom, every U.S. inhabitant is now implicitly also a something like an Iranian, existing as a superposition between free and coerced in the sense of something like Schrödinger's cat: It's a question of will the box you exist within be opened, thus fixing your status.

As dangerous as this era is becoming for all proles, it might be even more so for the very entitled class running this new AI paradigm. As they enjoy heretofore unheard of special rules, favors, and benefits from being executives and managers, they also exist within the panopticon, which can revoke their privileges at a moments notice.

To see this already in force, just look at overall business trends today as companies extract life essence from highly skilled workers-- who 25 years ago were themselves elites-- then firing them in order to give bonuses to "owners" and their executives.

Finance and the silicon valley set seem to sit well above the greater workforce, but they are as just as subject to being priced out of the neighborhood, imprisoned on an industrial scale, deported without recourse, drafted, and bombed to smithereens by the market or a kooky edict issued under this Federal administration's cheesily gilt facade of "power" and "prestige". The executive top side of this diabolical new AI era might even be most vulnerable to its control and machinations; a panopticon is inherently hazardous for its guards, who incarcerate themselves believing they have gained the ultimate control over the facility.

But maybe it's not all dread. For such reasons, and as is commonly the case for nature's ineluctable points of punctuation to any dynamic equilibrium, there's at least a dim prospect of surprising upsides for society in this new AI era. I just can't quite imagine what these might be...