Writing about what I feared

As I was writing it, my focus began to change from our relationship with technology to the ethics of the people developing and using it, and the moral dilemma we all face. As political theorist Langdon Winner put it in his 1977 paper on autonomous technologies: "Their (the tech prophets'] notion of active vital use is more accurately seen as a passive utilisation - a totally accepting, unquestioning relationship with technologies over which they have no real power".

This notion has haunted me: that when it comes to technology, and AI specifically, we operate with the illusion of power, when in fact we could easily become (if we're not already) passive consumers. That we will be cowed by convenience and give in to a consumption of AI, with an outsourcing of effort, coupled with a handing over of autonomy as the logical conclusion. As large AI models rehash words, images and voices based on human input, we become both consumer and consumed.