But simply using it doesn’t progress society in any way. Once again, you rely on transportation that was invented less than 150 years ago for any sort of transportation, both for yourself and nearly every single physical object you use.Using it and relying on it are two different things.
People are literally gatekept from participating in society if they don't have a smartphone; increasingly so every year. Want to order food from a restaurant? Better have a damn qr scanner or you can't access the menu. That one can probably be blamed on money though: they want you to depend on tech for everythiing because then you have to spend a 2000 dollar fee in order to function... but at the bonus that it proves how easy we are to control. Companies love malleable people, yes?
And before that you were gatekept by knowing how to use a pen to sign the bill. That doesn’t mean that they were in cahoots with Bic. It’s not the restaurants fault that they realized it’s easier to utilize a tool that everyone has inside their pocket than it is to print out 100 physical menus. Most restaurants carry physical menus in addition to that anyway so I think this complaint specifically doesn’t quite apply. The cell phone didn’t become popular just because corporations wanted a way to squeeze every penny out of people, if it were that easy then something like that would have happened long before that. They became popular because they’re legitimately useful tools for a variety of circumstances.
You say that as if this is somehow AI’s fault, when in reality this has been going on for ages. It’s always been difficult to differentiate between true and false. Yeah it gets more obvious when a new technology that involves communication is involved, but that doesn’t mean that it happens any more than usual because of that technology.The last thing we will unlearn is how to think for ourselves and that's already happening. People don't question information they're given anymore. Even in my short time on inaturalist, I see people tagging insects as species that don't even REMOTELY resemble the picture because that's what the ai told them and they don't take the time to say "wait a minute, let me see if I could manually categorize this." They just, on principle, trust what they're being fed. And no, that is too far. And it's not even wholly a problem with the ai, it's how our psychology is changing because the way we're being told to use it suggests it knows more than us.