> several dozen poorly-trained AI recommendation engines optimizing for variables and sample instance that the coders might care a lot more about than any specific user? Dang. I ended up in dystopia-land anyway. Sorry about that.

This is the scary part for me: 'AI' is just a means for organizations to dodge accountability for the systems they build because decision-makers don't understand what they're looking at and the people building the systems aren't incentivized to care, or are incentivized to optimize for things that are bad for society as a whole. This is the same hazard of capitalism in general, you don't actually need an AI for this to happen because it already has in many ways. The world-eating paperclip machine won't be a computer, it's going to be us.