20260614 Abhängigkeit vom digitalen Assistenten

Petty tyranny at its finest

“Back in the day, you had to do everything yourself,” people will say in a few years, placing their full trust in their chatbot. Whereas today, for example, when planning a trip, you open multiple browser tabs to research flight times, airfares, hotels, rental cars, restaurants, and forums discussing experiences with the rooms, location, and food, simply asking your personal chatbot, “Plan a long weekend in Lisbon for me,” will be all it takes. This is what the world is supposed to look like after the transition from chatbot to digital assistant that has now begun.

This chatbot you trust — from Google, OpenAI, AWS, ... — already knows everything about you today: your preferences, your deal-breakers, your financial means, and it will try to exploit the latter as much as possible for its own company’s benefit ...
Of course, this chatbot will also serve you the news and make sure you don’t have to choke on unsavory events. It will ensure that your political views don’t veer too far in one direction and that you remain a (for it) valuable member of society.

Telepolis.de warns: The more tasks you delegate to a platform, the more insight you give it into your daily life. This could have significant consequences for media outlets, online stores, and comparison sites. When users direct their questions directly to an AI agent, attention shifts away from individual websites.

We shouldn’t let the internet slip (even further) out of our hands. We would then no longer be able to visit individual websites at all. Others will determine (even more) what we find online — just as search engines already curate what we’re allowed to see...