Well, it's like the 'invention' of the internet; it wasn't planned, it came about principally because the US Dept of Defense, needed the combined computing power of lots of universities, to work out nuclear equations. And even when the Internet finally took off in the early 90s, big business, the state, corporate media, still didn't get it. It was only when they realised that it was a powerful medium of communication (and control) that they got involved. The point is, the state and business etc, were clueless, they had no idea, they never thought about the implications of the technology, until it ran over them.

The same goes for so-called AI (in reality, it's machine learning by another name, made possible by gigantic computing power). The implications of just one aspect, imitating, read mimicing, human thought and actions, is mind-boggling, it really throws a spanner in the works of digital capitalism but it's also extremely dangerous technology. Reality?????????

Of course capturing human thought and actions isn't new, it formed the basis of capitalism with the Age of Reason, the 17th Century, called back then and for good reason, the Age of Iron, not reason. It's what the Industrial Revolution was all about; stealing our skills and our knowledge and embedding it in machines so it could dispense with the worker.