I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about a problem we’re only beginning to glimpse that could spell the death of the internet as we know it.
From social media to e-commerce to journalism, the internet is built on the basis of the attention economy. More users equates to more views, more ad clicks, more sales, and more profit. Entire industries are founded on this model.
But AI chatbots have become scarily good at imitating people, and unscrupulous actors are already using them for everything from phony reviews to coordinated propaganda campaigns. Genuine humans are at risk of being drowned out by endless zombie hordes of bots. How will this affect the assumptions that the internet is built on? What happens when there are no humans left to advertise to?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter. I’m told that now everyone can post comments:
By some estimates, bots already comprise as much as 50% of total internet traffic. And these are still the early days of AI. This problem is only going to get worse. It may not be long before encountering another human being on the net is a rare exception.
The future of the internet is a lifeless wasteland. It’s a zombie funhouse of bots chattering inanely at each other, heedless of whether anyone is listening. It’s an infinite conveyor belt of meaningless words spilling into the void, with no humans in the loop at all.
But it won’t last. It can’t. The same incentives that created this digital Babel will be its downfall.
Um.
Internet is a communications infrastructure and protocols.
Email will still go on; that’s internet.
Shopping will still go on; news will still go on, etc.
All internet.
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But then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
the internet is built on the basis of the attention economy
It was not built to be that. Since the late 90s a layer of commercial marketing has figured out how to monetize attention, but that’s probably only a temporary situation. Even at the height of the attention market (which is where I think we are) “content is king” still applies – people continue to seek out and read/watch/listen to interesting, compelling, or educational material. The attention market tries to substitute its products in place of the things people are trying to watch, to their detriment. Eventually it will collapse because it is the antithesis of value.
@John Morales #1:
If the online market places are flooded with scammers, and it becomes hard to distinguish from real sellers, or worse, real sellers keep getting hijacked, what then?
If much of the “news” is invented by AI, and passed around as real even on (formerly) legitimate news sources, what then?
If one’s inbox is flooded with pages of filter-defeating spam, and half of the legit messages end up in the spam folder due to aggressive filters, what then?
If, at some point, a botpocalypse does happen (I’ve also seen it referred to as “Internet Kessler Syndrome”) – not saying it will, but I’ve seen enough elsewhere to suggest that this is at least a plausible outcome of current trends – it probably won’t wreck the entire internet, but it’s hard to say which aspects of it will be hit the hardest. It would force some major changes… but without knowing what would get broken the worst, it’s impossible to predict what the “new” internet would look like. Maybe it’d look mostly the same on the surface, just with a lot of reconfiguration under the hood, so to speak. Maybe it’d become something more like the “Wild West” days of the early internet, like Adam suggests, though obviously not exactly the same. Maybe it’d be an impetus to rush towards an internet 3.0 – though if it ends up as some sort of “Metaverse”, I would hope that it’s not Zuckerberg’s version of it. Or it could be something else entirely which would seem rather unlikely from our current perspective. It’s just speculation at this point.
The internet is simply too useful a tool to disappear entirely, I don’t think most people disagree with that. It might become less convenient or less useful for certain purposes, though.
It might.
I think both you and Adam refer to social interactions between people and their legitimacy.
You obviously concur that the medium is the internet. That certainly shan’t die.
So.
Say you have friends, you have family, you have colleagues.
Will these bots bother your mutual interactions? Not really, right?
Your banking, your news, your streaming, your mapping, your weather, that sort of stuff will remain.
So the worry is purely about that little tiny bit of the internet that mediates personal interactions with strangers.
A passing phase, I think.
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BTW, I was around when TCP/IP was a proposal, and other protocols/systems were proposed.
I was around when putting in a query into Google would be a genuine query.
I was around before it was properly monetised with advertising and influencing.
I was around when the (first) internet bubble burst.
Seems to me the problem is with accepting that it will change; but it will most certainly not die.
(Adapting is the best policy, I reckon)
BTW, re “wild west” days, I recall when I impressed a friend by typing in a simple search query (“pink bits bounce”) and getting harcore porn within the first screen of results.
:!