In the future, we will have air gapped facilities where people are paid to harvest their thoughts, similar to plasma "donation" ;)
Will be interesting to see if mining archives of "low background steel" data (anything created before chatGPT exploded) will become a industry.
Another interesting impact... older, more established tech suddenly has a non-trivial advantage over new, cutting edge competitors because LLM are well trained to work with the older tech.
If anything, I can see a future with a push to further erode privacy laws with the ultimate aim of getting more access to human data in the real world to train AI. I’m sure the smartphones in everyone’s pocket is a rich source of sensors and data…
If we can get to a point where AI can reliable seek out, filter/normalize and incorporate data from the real world into its model, that’s when it will probably start approaching the singularity.
The obvious flip side of which would be that authoritarian governments could use this to figure out how to crush dissent, carry out “efficient” genocides, pillage their forests etc.
Surveillance is what AI will excel at and so that is what it will be used for.
But remembering Battlestar Galactica, cutting the interconnectivity was the prominent defense against cylons.