For a false dichotomy to be a false dichotomy, one has to believe that there's are more than two alternate, opposing (at least partially) possibilities.

As previously stated , I disagree that there are more than two options regarding the state of ai as it currently exists. Ergo, I don't agree they it is a false dichotomy. It's just a dichotomy.

You're free to disagree, that's okay. However, based on apparent tone, and what seems to be a misunderstanding of intent, I very much doubt that you feel the same way. It would seem I am not free to disagree with your premise. Restating that premise won't change my mind about my original statement, or the ways I've rephrased it so far. Nor will repetition of "orphan crushing machine". Which, again, you do you, but I ain't typing that out again and will just refer to it as capitalism, assuming we keep chatting casually. Once shit gets heated, I'm out though, I got too much shit going on in meatspace for that to be even remotely the way I'll spend my lemmy time.

Proton, being a product run by a capitalist, absolutely would not have taken a different path. It could have, but the non profit that owns a majority of proton chose their CEO, and neither stopped him, nor removed him since. So, back to the would not. They might still reverse course, engage with less problematic standpoints regarding ai (and, again repeating myself, my issue isn't with ai per se, it's how it's being used and mandated by proton leadership). I very seriously doubt that will happen. It isn't impossible, just very unlikely in light of the CEO still being in place after two different events where he put a giant piece of his foot in his mouth.

Now, regarding ai itself, it doesn't have to produce slop. Really, it doesn't. A sufficiently built model will be able to generate a lot of things that are fully functional. Ai isn't magic. It's a fancy bit of software. As long as the parameters are built well, and the people building it aren't chasing profits instead of safe, quality results, it will eventually get to the point that it's so much faster than and as capable as a human code expert. It isn't there yet, but at some point it will be.

Since resources are being hogged up by capitalist driven ai, I don't see it happening in a weedy that's acceptable without a radical reconstruction of human society. Hence my original comment.

I also disagree with your statement that the goal of proton users is security only. O would even disagree that it's security as a primary want. I would argue that privacy, when compared to companies like Google/alphabet is the predominant goal of users. Protonmail by itself isn't that secure. It can't be because it's not able to magically make recipients able to read their encrypted email. You can't mail from proton to gmail encrypted currently. That's inherently insecure. It is, however, more private so long as you only email people that don't use privacy hating providers.

Their other products, yeah, I can see those being chosen because they're more secure. Calendars, data storage, VPN, and password management can all be done in a way that's more secure than capitalist driven options. I would argue that whether or not proton can be considered secure should determined by their least secure, and most used services. VPN and email are those two, or were last I checked ( back when bitwarden began its flirtation with enshittification, so not long ago overall).

The VPN is up to standard overall. The email is no more or less secure than any other provider that can't ensure recipients can decrypt messages. That's the standard I believe is most useful in determining if "secure" is a valid adjective for proton as a company.

Since more people use them for email than anything else, if users really believe they're more secure, and that's why they signed up, well, I can't do anything about that, but I would still disagree that it means the average user "want security".

Ai was always inevitable. So long as computer science existed, it was going to happen because the entire point of computers is doing things for humans. We built them to crunch numbers faster and more reliably. ENIAC was rudimentary artificial intelligence in the broadest sense of the term. Everything since has been developing to where we are now in terms of the fundamental technology. Pong was rudimentary ai when you played against the computer. So were all the enemies in Mario brothers. So are the mobs in your preferred crpg.

Generative ai was always coming. It's only going to go away if it is utterly wiped out, in all forms, in a way that prevents humans from being able to start over. Best we can hope for is enough of a revolution to oust the capitalists using it to fuck over everyone else.