Why hackers with AGI are a big threat to ad rev
Screens are addictive. Apps are addictive. The internet is addictive. But oh is it useful. It's fun, participating online. It's not simply the apps that have become addictive. The entire organism of networked technology has evolved alongside us. The lack of friction keeps you coming back. First, a desktop, then, a laptop, then, your phone in your pocket. Large teams of software engineers, researchers, all thinking very carefully about how to make it better. It's no wonder we can't put it down.
It's my belief that decentralization, for networks, does not work. Keeping software services up is difficult. Keeping on the people talented enough to improve the system costs a lot of money. Unfortunately, the centralization means that to participate, you have to interact with software you haven't wrote yourself. And to interact with software you haven't written is to risk getting brainjacked.
Youtube, for example. Incredible technology, complex and powerful, scale unimaginable. You can pull up a video of someone developing an ion thruster in a shack, learn how to set up a chainsaw mill, and watch minecraft youtubers build beautiful virtual buildings.
This same incredible technology becomes antagonistic. As far as I can tell, the objective function is watch time. And there are very smart people working on this - so that objective gets optimized for very well. The machine is set. The signals it uses are my own behaviours, and the behaviours of my neighbours in latent space. The product manager, trying to justify his 800k/Y salary, decides to put more shorts up on the screen. Sigh
I'm sick of this shit man. I need a wrapper. A condom, if you will. It's not like you're given a way to opt out of this. Or rather, there is no first-class way of opting out of this. APIs don't make money, ads do. So, enter - the computer condom. Do you think I'm going to continue exposing myself and my family to rapidly evolving maligned psychofauna? LLMs can see now. They can click around an interface. They can generate new UIs arbitrarily, code is throw away. We are going to live in a world where our AIs use our computers for us.
Your ad revenue is going to not matter - when an AI prewatches all of the content for me, automatically strips out inline sponsorships, and uses diffusion to blur out coca cola cans. It will download everything, and engage with my desired preferences, not my revealed preferences. Your software then becomes only a distribution channel. And I remain free – I've had to cut this one short because I'm out of time. it's almost 12! One blog post every day. Still going strong!
