Weird question:
So, one possible nearterm use for AI is as a concierge for purchases, e.g. "find me the best place(s) to buy the following 14 spices online; my budget is 60 dollars" How does this affect advertising? Meaning, part of why advertising works is individual people don't have the time or expertise to do a careful analysis about quality and cost, so brands try to capture attention and then to display quality/desirability.
You can imagine a world where advertising is designed to trick the concierge of course, but at a certain point there's just objective data, e.g. "don't pay more for [x] because it actually comes from the same factor." If something like that could be achieved, what does it do for the ad business generally, and how do companies react?
The fantasy version (though it'd harm me personally) is that companies have to spend more effort competing on price/quality and less on branding. However, because humans signal to each other using clothing, food, cars, etc. you'd still have ads designed to promote status.
@ZachWeinersmith I think the difficulty is that qualities I care about aren't captured well in text. make me a robot that can travel around tasting things with my taste preferences wired in, or a robot that can test drive cars and tell me if they handle similarly enough to my current car to not annoy me.
maybe if you can design an AI that will tell me what combination of computer parts will let me play game X at the lowest price point, that would be good
