AI as Exploitation Colonialism

Wherein I opine on the exhausting subject of AI. Yesterday at the Tinderbox meetup, which has pretty much become an AI meetup, Michael Becker was discussing a tool, a browser extension of some kind, that he had created with the help of AI. There was some mention of entities "licensing" this tool. This piqued my interest. At some point earlier in the discussion, someone mentioned that the web has become something it was never intended to be. "Cyberspace," and the "worldwide web" lend themselves, conceptually, to a "place" or "space" metaphor. Somewhere we may "be." The original web was populated by people, perhaps much as the world was populated, expanding outward from some origin. Africa in the case of humans, Southern California probably in the case of the web. These "digital natives" were the indigenous people of cyberspace. Later, corporations appeared and began to "exploit" this new territory. Extraction industries consuming the natives' resources of attention, converting them…