Actually, I had a long conversation with a world famous neuroscientist on this topic last year (or maybe it was the year before) working on my favorite cybersecurity project.

We both agreed that the core problem is the move and continued trend by commercial companies, driven-by-profit motives, to debase humans in favor of machines.

The entire push for "AI" is a debasement of humans in a favor or machines, in fact, because machines are cheaper to employ and easier to manage that humans. Humans require more care than machines. Humans are expensive compared to machines. I'm not talking about robotics assembling products like cars and electronics. That is a job well suited for a machine. I'm talking about tasks which require the human mind and the human experience, like editing news, writing reports, creating content, and all the other arts and sciences humans are so good at doing.

This is why Google, Facebook and most of the high-flying tech giants have such high stock prices and are so wealthy and at the same time push fake news, copyright violations, and offensive content to all of us; because they are using machines to do things that machines cannot do well. They do this to increase profit. They hire engineers to write AI which does not work well because they do not want to hire the legions of humans it would take to do the job correctly.

If these high tech, high flying companies would reduce their dependency on "Bad AI" and train and hire legions humans to view, review, edit and filter the content on their networks (like YouTube and Facebook for example) society would benefit because many more humans would have good jobs in tech who are not engineers and scientists; and users would benefit because the amount of "garbage and misinformation" we see flowing on the social and media networks would go down . However the downside is that the profits of these rich, high-flying high-tech giants would go down because they would have a large expense to pay humans to do the good work that humans do as content editors, content creators, reporters, content reviewers, content approvers, etc.

The core problem is this faux promise that "AI" is going to help. and the debasement of humans relative to machines. This is the false promise that all the high tech companies are trying to sell society.... "more AI will help"... but in fact, this is wrong. More AI will not help. More AI is the core problem and it is debasing to humans for high tech companies to tell us "well, we are not going to hire humans to fix the problems because that costs too much, but don't worry, we will get machines to fix the problem"... meanwhile, the world becomes more destabilized, white-color crime is on the rise, cyber disinformation and cybercrime is on the rise, political turmoil is on the rise, disinformation is on the rise.

The core problem is the debasement of humans in favor of machines, driven by profit.

These tech companies are not "bad" or "evil" per se, but there is no doubt that they are driven by profit (greed) and because they are driven by profit, and therefore greed, we are seeing the unintended consequences of that greed on human civilization, as a whole. It's as simple as "cause and effect" but because companies and people permit themselves to be controlled by greed (money, fame, power, material things, etc), this greed creates strong negative consequences on the planet.

In the past, heavy industry polluted the rivers, ocean, sky and the entire planet because of greed. Now, the new tech industries are polluting the information space, human consciousness, memetic spaces, social spaces and indeed, the very fabric of human society, because of greed.

It's really a sad state of human affairs when you think about it!