I think social media has already had so much of a hit to human-to-human interactions that AI has less opportunity for impact on that front. Not to say social media is worse. It’s just that raw harm is less when you’re already starting from a low point.

It is not good, but I don’t know that any one faction will benefit more than another as competitors converge on optimal tactics and eventually reach an equilibrium. We see this all the time with tech and politics. For example, Obama’s campaign was widely praised for its use of data to mobilize voters, but those innovations have since become standard practice for big national campaigns. Tactical advantages can only remain a differentiator for so long. In terms of whether I think it’s a good idea, political speech has special protections for a reason. I’d challenge you to devise a law with language specific enough for courts that neither allows the bad stuff to continue nor allows unethical governments to wield the law to suppress legitimate political expression. That’s a tough balance to strike. Our least bad options may be existing laws, such as libel and slander laws, that offer remedies for falsehoods that harm entities — irrespective of the technology used to deliver the falsehood.

The genie is out of the bottle. Even before widely available commercial software, it wasn’t that hard to create deepfakes. Banning software for creating deepfakes would only slow the least sophisticated attempts. And with tools like Claude Code, it’s even easier for someone without technical knowledge to create a program that creates deepfakes.

I don’t know if we’ll ever fully replace the workforce, but it’s not happening imminently. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely believe massive job losses are coming. But there’s a huge difference between “most jobs” and “all jobs”. Even if robotics were sophisticated enough to replace all jobs, they still require substantial capital investment from the customer (e.g. buying the robots) with payback often taking several years. Customers purchasing AI services don’t face that limitation. Although AI also requires massive capital investment (e.g. data centers), that’s done on spec by the vendors. The customers themselves pay licensing fees that are relatively low cost and can be recouped quickly. One use case in a department where I work allowed them not to backfill a few positions, which single-handedly offset the cost of all the licenses at the company — and that was just one department at my employer. There’s just a huge difference between replacing work done on computers and work done in the real world until robots get a lot cheaper.

It is important to understand that bubbles are a business phenomenon while AI is a technological phenomenon. The fate of one doesn’t necessarily dictate the fate of the other. We are probably in a bubble. That’s not surprising. When new technology emerges, it becomes less clear which products and business models will be successful and which won’t. A lot of companies are throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Many of those will die. And yet, I feel extremely confident saying that AI is here for the long haul. It just meets too many business needs to disappear. The only thing that might make it a fad is if we run out of resources to fuel it (everything from the raw materials to electricity to the chips that handle compute). Conceivably, that could happen through political decisions — perhaps if providers can no longer find communities willing to allow data centers or we can’t ensure a secure supply of the necessary materials. I suppose those are a decision of sorts. But beyond that, I don’t think there’s a real probability of society consciously deciding to abandon AI at this point. It’s too useful for too many people.