In the prisoner's dilemma are the prisoners stupid? No, they're actually defined as rational. What makes them come to their collectively poor outcome is that they have no way to act collectively, they require coordination. Those prisoners could be smarter than you and me, they're still trapped by the rules of the system they exist in.
>If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?
Our own government has some problems with this but since we're being a bit high-minded here, let's ask ourselves what a democratic government ideally is. It's just a way for individuals to coordinate with each other.
Prisoner's Dilemma again. By market mechanisms, we're going to jail for two years. We may meet some strange definition of freedom but if we're both rational then we know we will never realize the option of serving lesser sentences. To me though that isn't real freedom so we can see then that a coordination mechanism isn't here to curtail freedom, it's here to grant it (it lets us both choose to remain silent.)
I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.
>I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook?
If the people collectively decide that then yes.
>It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.
Well here let me rework this:
It's scary because once the people get to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.
You're right that is powerful, we should have that power.
>To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
Let me rework this also:
To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.