AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts being "verified" as genuinely human. This can be done in two ways – just move to invite-only silos where you already know everybody, or big platforms where the owners do the vetting for you. Lots of platforms will simply take a knee-jerk reaction where they just up the amount of surveillance. "Now that there's so much bot activity, everybody need to upload their passport and driver's license, for your own safety of course!" Powerful nation states will be more than eager to assist them in this regard.

I think people would put a premium on the abundant BOTS, actually. If we look at wall street trading bots and so on, it’s actualy far more likely what will happen is that organizations will start to PREFER bots. Eventually, we’ll have self driving cars dominating all traffic, bots generating nearly all online content, and humans PREFERRING them. Because why not have a seeminglu flawless outcome every time, a bot teacher with limitless memory and eventually learning the habits and knowldge of 917 people in the classroom for a personalized approach etc.

Why have a human lawyer when a bot can go through 300 arguments and pick the one that fits that particular jury and circumstances?

Take VCs for example. They want to see a community with hockey stick growth and recurring revenues. Why have a community of humans? You can now replicate this growth entirely with bots. Twitter’s growth will look pedestrian by comparison.

You may say, where’s the money in this? The bots don’t bring any capital to the site. That’s true today, but on wall street they account for the vast majority of trading since they can out-trade everyone and they also can swarm to collude with each other.

It’s not hard to imagine that bots will start to actually receive payment for the content they produce, just as people pay each other on Patreon etc. or pay for copywriters, designers etc.

At this point the bots would be programmed to amass credits on a site, which they can turn into capital. They’ll have realistic 3D models conversing with you, modeled after really anyone. Why have onlyfans? Why have instagram models? Why pay for newscasters? Why have actors in movies? Why have salespeople make calls? Why have humans do anything online or remotely AT ALL?

My prediction is that bots will control nearly all the capital, produce nearly all the content, and humans will prefer to interact with bots for romantic conversations and everything else.

The problem will be that these bots can easily swarm at any time and dominate any group of humans, destroy reputations, move public sentiment etc.

People’s public opinion would be dominated by bot swarms.

Those who try to somehow prevail in their local communities or control the bots will be essentially disrupted and reputationally destroyed by the botswarms. It would become so cheap to destroy any number of human reputations that people would set swarms up to do it for the Lulz.

Governments that try to ban these bots can themselves be easily overcome by botswarms. They’d just send endless numbers of fooled and outraged people to their doorsteps and wherever they may be eating. They will know all their whereabouts and all their proclivities. And besides this, thousands of people will be convinced by deepfakes and fake articles online that this politician is doing something ridiculous or embarrassing. Every time the politician would try to do something, they’d get a call or visit from N constituents demanding their attention. The botswarms can just DDOS all humans who try to stop them basically. And at pretty trivial cost.

You here commenting on HN … imagine if in 12 months from now, half of all accounts around you are bots, and they all collude against you and people with your viewpoint. What would you do?

The problem is “logging off” is about as effective as Ted Kazinski trying to escape civilization by moving to the woods. Are wild animals able to escape encroachment by humans into their habitat?

Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is trained to remove low effort in an unbiased way

Seems more like extremely wealthy sociopaths & psychopaths that thrive in a capitalistic system are. Don’t think people would be so doomy & gloomy if it weren’t for those with the means to do so trying to shape society into their dystopian dreams.

Two examples if needed:

Thiel & Davos family

Most notably, kids were in school with people their age, adults were at work, etc. 1st grader intellect and emotional interactions partitioned from 5th grade, partitioned from 9th, partitioned from college, partitioned from post-college.

For another example, the "grownups' table" and the "kids' table" at a holiday dinner.

Though, as a kid, I definitely benefited from listening in on the grownups on the Internet.