> "If it takes me 30 seconds to fire off a prompt that has potential to benefit me it's worth it regardless of the 2 minutes of work it creates for a dozen people" scaled to all of society.

People love this stuff if it benefits them. It even gets cheered on when the receiving end can be reduced to something disliked, like a big corporation or a bureaucracy.

There was a startup that would fight traffic and parking tickets for you and everyone loved the idea. Until, that is, you realize that the company is doing automated requests to jam up your local government systems with extra work. The ticketing agents and government workers who have to put in extra time on these cases don't really care because it's no different than any other work. In some cases they might be able to get some overtime.

The real losers are people who have legitimate complaints who get backlogged behind a thousand automated requests from people who asked ChatGPT to try to fight something for them.

Then later, we all lose when the only way to contest things is to go to a physical location in person and prove that it's you trying to do it, not the bot.

Already seeing this with job applications, too: Apply for a job and you'll be mixed in with 1000 automated submissions. Do the interview remotely and they'll be wondering if you're cheating. Now you have to fly on site for middle interview stages to prove that it's you, not a bot, who can answer the questions.

AI agents create works are great from a consumer side.

Big companies has been using this to create frictions to disincentivize people for things they should deserve or the law requires them to do.

For example, cancel Gym membership, dealing with Xfinity/ATT jack up your pricing, applying for all different low income programs in the USA.

If companies can make you talk with AI, I should be able to use AI to talk with them.

Since the robocall tsunami of the 2020s, people stopped answering phone calls entirely.

The same thing might happen to the entire internet.

And AI becomes the only way to handle the deluge - the system insists upon itself.

I see a future where AI is banned to avoid that situation. If AI creates too much work and ends reducing advanced countries output then something will need to be done.

Individually, AI helps me to be more productive. But, as you point out, at society level makes everybody less productive. So, I have no incentive to stop. Nobody has. Only if we all agree to stop using it then it works. A tragedy of the commons problem.

On the upside, maybe some people will realize just how much trash we already were swimming in before it became economical to produce.

Like, if you pay attention to American politician bribery scandals, I think most people come to the conclusion: how fucking cheap are American politicians? They'll take a fucking hamburger to screw over their constituents.

Except most people aren't mass spammers, and most people aren't actually heard most of the time, and most of our systems are actually set up to make sure this continues to be the case.

How about AI will show us where we are intentionally underfunding things we have promised people?

quote requests are about to skyrocket

Sounds like the AI job apocalypse won’t happen, we’ll have plenty of Bullshit Jobs available to fix AI mistakes.

I'm applying for jobs right now all of them requires some sort of AI-familiarity.

Now I am being spammed with "AI-assessments" which are actually attempts to steal time/effort and train ai agents. This industry is infuriatingly stupid.