nah, dawg. The hell we're headed for, it'll be a DLC marketplace

nobody blinking at how the NSA engages in the kinds of things we associate with dictatorial governments, when we're supposed to be "one of the good ones"

Consider synesthesia, the phenomenon wherein a sensory stimulus in one channel (let's say hearing) activates a sensory perception in another sensory channel (let's say vision).

Imagine you have synesthesia, and you're a pre-linguistic human surviving in the wild. You hear a tiger roar, and via synesthesia you also "see" bright red, then a member of your tribe gets eaten by a tiger while others flee.

For such a person, "seeing" red now has personal symbolic meaning associated with tiger danger.

Symbolism does not need to derive from culture or a larger system. All you need is the capacity to recognize patterns between various stimuli. What that looks like for a "mind" that isn't limited to human sensation is another question entirely

Hospitals literally can't tell you how much your insurance company will charge you for a procedure. Only the insurance company can tell you, and often they won't tell you the real cost until you've already committed. This is the "middle man" people complain about.

For many, "Go see an actual doctor" is not something which can be done simply, quickly, or without expense. Millions of people in the US avoid seeing healthcare due to cost.

The use of the internet as a stand-in for healthcare isn't the fault of people who are dumb or gullible as you seem to imply -- it's a reflection of millions of people with health concerns who feel like they can't seek care.

I think you're half right -- the rise of AI will lead people to suspect that any piece of media they encounter may be fake.

Where I think you're missing a piece -- pervasive doubt in media does not lead inevitably to people becoming better at independently judging veracity of media.

For an all-too-real example, "Fake news". In the last 10-20 years, we've seen conventional media that has attempted to sew doubt in any source of authority other than itself. Millions of people were trained to doubt everything they hear from any media outlet left of Reagan.

That doubt didn't result in those people developing critical thinking or media analysis skills. They picked their "trusted source" and ignored everything else.

To be clear, I don't think the people to whom this happened are uniquely naive or stupid. Ordinary people with lives and jobs don't have time to learn media analysis just so they can filter 10% real content out of a 90% fabricated newscast. We've seen what happens -- people find the "least bad" media source and uncritically believe everything that outlet says.

Media which requires careful study to verify defeats the point of consuming media.

The White House sitting down with an AI designed to generate politically feasible and coherent policy:

"Artificial Intelligence bill of rights, election year favorite, layman's terms, historic policy, popular, trending on Politico"