CarbonIceDragon

"Ive watched you guys enough to literally learn how to speak an alien language. Do you really think I don't know about all the problems you have on your planet?"

I have a litter robot 3 (the version without the wifi connectivity), and it does work, but honestly, I'm not sure I'll get another (I have multiple litter boxes and just the one automatic one, as I initially planned to replace one at a time as I had the spare money). It saves some amount of effort, but not a whole ton, it seems to let more smells out into the room than a regular covered litterbox, one of my cats doesn't like it as much as the other boxes, and once or twice it's randomly gotten stuck upside down until I reset it.

Ive not tried any others, but from what I hear, they're probably about as good as you get with these. (Ive also heard that one should definitely not get one of the cheaper devices that can be found on Amazon under a lot of different throwaway brands, that has a vertically spinning drum instead of an angled one like the litter robot, because they apparently have a design flaw that can kill cats).

So the kid can learn how to operate the power box maybe?

It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using that as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it's position by doing. I didn't want to just say "be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want", because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .

I don't think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don't really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.

I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they're important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.

Honestly, maybe slightly justified by the nature of the setting? The number of ships that seem to exist in universe, compared to the number of entire planets full of people to draw crew from, is so low that one must imagine that the entry requirements can be exceptionally high. One could also imagine better technology might imply better education technology as well as more refined techniques for using it.

Assuming the picture isn't edited or generated

Ad Jesus, sacrificed his time for your media.

rhetorical question, I do realize im not unique in that but its more to make the point that this idea seems flawed even beyond the tech not being up to it yet.

I know I can't be the only one that, even if AI was up to doing all this reliably, wouldn't want AI spending my money on it's own like this, surely? Like, I can be pretty picky and tend to spend a lot of time shopping around for things. A significant fraction of the time I end up deciding not to buy anything because I can't find exactly what I want at a price I'm willing to spend for it. I think I'd get hella stressed out that my AI would just buy the first thing that fit a category, or the cheapest, or whatever some company paid the AI developer to have it prefer, or such like that, and not to mention the worry that I might suggest buying something as a joke to someone else and have the AI hear and take it seriously or something and then my money's gone before I realize.