People call me paranoid, but after my dad’s MS Surface spontaneously encrypted itself and lost the recovery keys, my belief is that what you described is the goal they are working towards.
Apple already does all of this along with client side scanning and MS is falling over itself to implement the same ecosystem.
The TPU is not for you, it’s for tech companies to surveil, train, and exfiltrate your data at every level of the stack from hardware to application in a “secure” fashion. The “features” they proscribe feel forced because they are - they exist to make it seem like you’re getting the next new thing, when really the features that you actually want (like an ad-free experience and a local Windows account) have been so enshitified to hell that they functionally no longer exist.
The hardware manufacturer gets to sell you extra hardware you don’t want.
The OS vendor gets to run classification on all of your pictures, documents, and software.
The browser vendor gets to see every site you visit and when, every product you buy, and every porn site you watch.
Then, it all gets trained into a personal model that is cryptographically tied to your hardware and identity that can be queried at any time by tech companies, data brokers, advertisers, and law enforcement.
What YOU get is to ask a finders-fee-biased chatbot which product to buy, maybe some shitty mental health care, and a sycophantic buddy to patronize your ego. AI is the ultimate surveillance and advertising device.
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. Then, they turn all that tensor compute against us to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when they control bare metal access to your rented corporate cloud hardware because consumer PC equipment is too astronomically expensive to afford for the average person?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to the level of religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.