"Homo economicus" is the hypothetical "perfectly economically rational" person that economic models often assume us all to be, despite the fact that we are demonstrably not perfectly rational.
we do live in the shadow of such modern demons: we call them "limited liability corporations." These are (potentially) immortal colony organisms that treat us fleshy humans as mere inconvenient gut flora. These artificial persons are not merely recognized as people under the law – they are given more rights than mere flesh-and-blood people. They seek to expand without limit, absorbing one another, covering the globe, acting in ways that are "economically rational" and utterly wicked. As Charlie Stross says, a corporation is a "slow AI"
Ted Chiang has proposed that when a corporate executive like Elon Musk claims to be terrified of AIs taking over, they're really talking about the repressed constant terror they feel because they are nominally in charge of a powerful artificial life-form (a corporation) that acts as though it has a mind of its own, in ways that are devastating to human beings
Laws included in trade deals protect US companies’ rent extraction schemes and stop us from fixing or improving our own devices — from phones and tractors to insulin pumps. Repealing them will save billions and hit Trump’s donor class.
Repealing anticircumvention laws would allow the world’s small tech companies to make — and export — tools that “jailbreak” tractors, printers, insulin pumps, cars, consoles, and phones. We could end the perverse system in which a euro, dollar, or peso spent on a locally made app goes on a round trip through Cupertino, California, and comes back 30 percent lighter.
Domestic firms could export jailbreaking tools for printers to support third-party ink cartridge sellers — breaking the grip of the printer-ink cartel, which has driven prices higher than $10,000 a gallon, making ink the most expensive fluid a civilian can buy without a permit.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?
https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf
The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement.
This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place.
But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bosswareThese companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire.