This will be a growth activity, especially with AI-integrated browsers and other user-empowerment tooling, so long as civil society and their pet regulators do not kill such technologies before they are born, because of dual-use arguments / permitting “excessively powerful” analysis of text:
I can speak from personal experience: having invented the modern password cracker and — in the early days at least — released a few high-speed cryptographic libraries, I have repeatedly heard people tell me that they wished they could have prevented me from doing that… although now more than 30 years later, we take these tools for granted, as part of the security landscape.
I had a discussion similar to this on Bluesky earlier today: Imagine that somebody embeds a locally-running LLM/AI into a web browser, so that it can read web pages for you and summarise them for you, perhaps translates them for you, or provides some sort of assistive mechanism for visual impairment. Using that web browser you visit the Facebook group which includes “dating reviews” of various named individuals and how they performed as a “date”. Then you tell your web browser to:
“Click through the pages of this Facebook group for me; aggregate all of the names and the sentiment and opinions which relate to them, and correlate and reduce the names to remove duplicates. Produce a CSV of all names and map the associated sentiment for each name, normalised in the range 1 to 3.”
Presto, you have star ratings of single men (or: women, nb, whatever) in New York; tell me that’s not going to terrify somebody?
Yep, they are going to be scared but it needs to happen.
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