The shift from a web made for humans to one consumed by machines is wild. Back in the day honchos would say: “Have your people call my people” … now it’s “have my bots connect with your bots.”
We’ve largely allowed tech to stripmine our knowledge and creativity, then discard the human source. This rise of ultra-processed information feels like the informational equivalent of junk food: addictive, empty, and harmful in scale.
Last night as I was listening to the audiobook version of Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People, I was horrified to learn that Zuckerberg explored a Presidential run. To have all that power and resources but zero moral ambition - it blows the mind. As Deepak Chopra put it: “The world is run by male gangsters.” Only a transformation in collective consciousness rooted in human creativity and connection, not algorithmic convenience, offers a way forward.
What I keep wondering is how fast we are going to see the bots-talking-to-bots, thus bots creating all the new content on the web, resulting in massive hallucinations that feed each other. Will it explode in our faces quickly? Or be a slow-boiling march to an information meltdown?
Great topic, Baratunde! When I first starting building internet publication platforms for traditional media, mostly broadcasters, we discussed the agentic future. No one was clever enough to imagine the impact to revenue, but the first thing I heard from the traditionalists was "this is anathema to our sacred journalistic duty" to uphold the pubic interest by curating content. Now these hypotheticals are practicals! Regarding the cost of bots, last week JPMorgan went off on the cost of API calls from Plaid, MX, etc. Agentic, indeed. I do like idea of a new agent to authority protocol: a new "robots.txt" for governance. Finally, returning to provenance and the economics of content production versus consumption: you'll never hear me saying "needs blockchain" or "use micro-transactions," but clearly some sort of "maker's mark" needs to flow through the system for attribution alone, if not remuneration as well.
The shift from a web made for humans to one consumed by machines is wild. Back in the day honchos would say: “Have your people call my people” … now it’s “have my bots connect with your bots.”
We’ve largely allowed tech to stripmine our knowledge and creativity, then discard the human source. This rise of ultra-processed information feels like the informational equivalent of junk food: addictive, empty, and harmful in scale.
Last night as I was listening to the audiobook version of Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People, I was horrified to learn that Zuckerberg explored a Presidential run. To have all that power and resources but zero moral ambition - it blows the mind. As Deepak Chopra put it: “The world is run by male gangsters.” Only a transformation in collective consciousness rooted in human creativity and connection, not algorithmic convenience, offers a way forward.
What I keep wondering is how fast we are going to see the bots-talking-to-bots, thus bots creating all the new content on the web, resulting in massive hallucinations that feed each other. Will it explode in our faces quickly? Or be a slow-boiling march to an information meltdown?
Great topic, Baratunde! When I first starting building internet publication platforms for traditional media, mostly broadcasters, we discussed the agentic future. No one was clever enough to imagine the impact to revenue, but the first thing I heard from the traditionalists was "this is anathema to our sacred journalistic duty" to uphold the pubic interest by curating content. Now these hypotheticals are practicals! Regarding the cost of bots, last week JPMorgan went off on the cost of API calls from Plaid, MX, etc. Agentic, indeed. I do like idea of a new agent to authority protocol: a new "robots.txt" for governance. Finally, returning to provenance and the economics of content production versus consumption: you'll never hear me saying "needs blockchain" or "use micro-transactions," but clearly some sort of "maker's mark" needs to flow through the system for attribution alone, if not remuneration as well.