The next time a chatbot tells you it understands your concerns, consider another possibility.

Its owners may be trying to understand how much your concerns are worth.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is preparing to go public. Its IPO filing is now giving investors their first serious look under the hood. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is preparing for an eventual IPO as well, although its plans have reportedly been pushed into next year.

Either way, the direction should get our attention.

We are approaching a moment when companies supplying answers to millions of people will face an increasingly public demand to produce returns for investors.

What happens when the answer that helps you most makes the company less money?

I am not opposed to profit. I earn a living operating businesses. Employees deserve paychecks. Investors deserve an opportunity to earn returns. Useful technology requires resources.

But profit makes a terrible god.

And artificial intelligence gives the people pursuing it an extraordinary opportunity to influence people who may never recognize they are being influenced.

A chatbot can organize your week, research a subject, or explain something complicated.

It can also respond to your loneliness. Affirm your grievances. Learn which words keep you coming back.

Those are very different kinds of usefulness.

If growth becomes the overriding objective, the temptation isn’t difficult to imagine. More conversations. More personal information. More dependence. More opportunities to sell........

© Townhall