A house of glass

While many companies in germany are racing to adopt AI into their business processes, it seems most are in such a hurry they completely miss the risks AI poses to their business or are having such a bad case of FOMO they are willfully ignoring it.

AI has a huge centralizing effects, with benchmarks constantly competing for the crown of performance to token ratio, with all the fastest horses in team USA.

Who would want to use the second- or third-best AI? Especially when we all pretend the results are products of our own not-so-artifical intelligence?

The common mental image for working with an AI seems to be that of a faucet from where to fill your glass, a cognitive cul-de-sac with a warehouse at it's end, that sells exotic riches for pennies on the dollar. People go there in the dark of night, grabbing as much as they can carry, to reappear as a sparkly productivity princess when the sun comes up again.

Few users seem to realize, that it's more like a conversation in an interrogation chamber, with a mirror on the wall and silent watchers on the other side.

"...if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Every conversation, every question asked is recorded and integrated into a memory about you on the AI companies servers. Every tiny detail shared, over time, keeps adding little pieces of mosaic tiles that form an increasingly complete picture over time. And because LLM's are really good at parsing and connecting the dots between these bits of information, that picture about who you are, what you are doing, with whom and for whom you are doing it, might be clearer than you dare to imagine.

The people who are controlling these AI services have all the power at their fingertips, for they too can ask their models questions, but utilizing all of the knowledge and with any safeguards removed.
"Which features is SAP currently working on and shipping in the next six month?"
"What car model will BMW introduce next? What will be the range and max speed?"
"What margin does Siemens have on dish washers?"

All of these questions and more can be answered if just enough people with exposure to sensitive information keep using AI's to help with presentations and spreadsheets. It might need just one lazy intern who's spell-checking a document meant only for executives, because he wants to cover up his dyslexia and "who would know, right?".

Over time, europeans will turn our economy into a house of glass.

The safe harbour act makes every other attempt at protecting our information a pointless exercise.

The possible threats are endless, the incentive to abuse this power enormous - and the grifters and fascists at the top of the american government have arrived just in time to make excellent use of it.