The meta bit is that specifically here, it’s sort of a derail of the main topic. Some downvotes I’m sure are for that. As for why this essay might generally attract downvotes? I’ll follow your locomotive off the track.

I mean, 1. It’s a frickin’ essay. 2. Comes off as a little cold and sorta “I know better than you do”, and 3. seems to completely miss the point of what I interpret as most folks dislike of AI in the current incarnations we are seeing (which isn’t a real sci-fi type general AI that gets society to the end point of your essay). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone worrying about “what will I do to find purpose in a fully-automated-gay-space-luxury-communism?” (overemphasis mine of course). It’s now and the next so many years, not some far off future that (I interpret) folks seem to be worrying about. It’s income stability now, careers to go into now, disinformation now, degradation of the internet and media now. I think the zeitgeist here is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I don’t think anyone on Lemmy really has high hopes for major players in current economic systems to use AI-as-it-exists-now to make anything better of the world in aggregate. It ain’t the tools, it’s those who wield them.

Your cynicism is warranted but a big part of the advertised value is that their rcs implementation is end to end encrypted. Or they say it is, which presumably someone (not me!) would be able to verify.

It’s weird because it is a standard but Google’s implementation is not really the standard. For insurance, the standard does not use end to end encryption, Google does. Their implementation also runs over their own Jibe servers rather than carrier stuff. You gotta be a Google bestie with muscle like Samsung to get your rcs client on Android seems like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Do you have information on it supporting rcs? I don’t see anything on the play store mentioning it. The first Google results I see say it doesn’t. Seems like it would be a big deal because if they did and would be prominently displayed as I thought only Google messages and Samsung messages supported rcs.

https://chomp.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/1895488-rcs-implementation

Watch out on those terms and conditions. Before long you’ll have to pay more to unlock an ad free vision experience that was previously ad free. Or maybe their licensing deal with Pantone or dolby vision will lapse and your “only licensed” capabilities will go away. Or maybe your one eye just veers off and focuses on any nearby advertisement that’s part of the manufacturer’s partner program and you literally could not take your eye off it? Non-partner brands are blurry and hard to see? I once dreamed of futuristic technological advances outside the gravity well of all consuming capitalism. Those were the days I tell ya!

High quality picture and video? Have you never exchanged pictures or video with a non iPhone user from your iphone? Pictures aren’t always horrible but video is basically unwatchable. Also end to end encryption, which is less obvious. Group chats are also borked by having a single non iPhone user in them. Android to android in most cases lately has high quality multimedia but that’s not true of mixed interactions.