> We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver.

We did. Pre-WW II ..., and afterwards, the old, everlasting Cold War (vs the new one). And there are self-emerging/self-organizing buckets of people who all pledged their allegiance to ideas and plans, works forever in progress and aggregating jobs and expanding industries. People with value and virtue systems, radicalized or called to some need-to-know duty. And the personal level was always covered by applied and philosophical psychology, cultural discourses, however progressively or decadently lead by public figures while peoples' desires were and still are shaped by interactions, social AND parasocial.

Shouldn't we stop wondering whether they have enough time, now that several hundreds of thousands of hours of work already done and work yet to get done are neatly compressed into a few instants?

AI will always be "two" things:

- a search engine that misses less and less and is just waiting for you to increase your processing power - a tool to cope with your laziness or disability by deferring or skipping intervals of learning curves and/or biomechanics - an evergrowing compendium of abstractions and intents, formalized or not, by humans, for humans, off humans (even when it's AI)

but that's irrelevant ... because humans will always be only "two" things, as well.

So, ... the threat vector remains unchanged, however AI, accessibility and skill will amplify or change the landscape: casually, no, leisurely ignorant bystanders.