Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.

If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.

When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.

For me, the individual placing of items gets pretty tedious. Solving nuclear power is interesting once but placing the same thing a second, third or tenth time is pretty dull.

The challenge of Factorio shifts throughout the game - initially you're worrying about individual metal plates and then you're dealing with belts full and then it's entire sections of your factory. This is why the Space Age DLC is so fun, it adds an entire new dimension of worrying about getting things between planets in a timely fashion.

Eventually the final boss is UPS (basically the performance of the game on your computer). Suddenly "the factory must grow" stops being the solution to your problems and usually makes things worse.

I don't think it ever reaches "vibe coding" levels - true, you can end up not knowing how part of your factory works but it's still a lot more active than just typing in a bunch of prompts.

Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).

You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.

As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.

There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.

This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.

By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).

Ultimately this reminds me of those really early social media profiles (before people understood privacy settings if they even existed) which would say "If you're not my friend you're not allowed to read this page".

If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.

Obviously that's not the whole problem - the other issue is the financial resources these companies have access to. Presumably if they wanted to, instead of pushing up the worlds prices for DRAM or electricity they could have distorted pretty much any market they wanted to given the money they have. If instead of datacentres they decided to buy the world's supply of coffee then presumably people would be paying $100 for a tin of coffee beans. You could introduce all sorts of restrictions and market controls but for me a better reform would be ensuring that they didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend in the first place.

>Except that perhaps this time AI is the tool which is actually going to do to the office what the assembly line did to the factory.

I think this is probably right, but for the people who worked on assembly lines they (or more realistically their kids) could go find an office job to do instead. It's not clear what the kids of todays office workers are going to do for employment (if anything).