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Just some quick thoughts on the future of the internet. In short, I expect the way we use the web and social media to change quite dramatically over the next 3-5 years as a result of the growing sophistication of AI assistants combined with a new deluge of AI spam, agitprop, and clickbait content hitting the big socials. Specifically, I’d guess most people will have an AI assistant fielding user queries via API calls to Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and creating a personalised stream of content that filters out ads, spam, phishing, and (depending on users’ tastes) clickbait and AI generated lust-provoking images. The result will be a little bit like an old RSS feed but mostly selected on their behalf rather than by them directly, and obviously packed with multimedia and social content. As the big social networks start to make progressively more of their money from API charges from AI assistant apps and have fewer high-value native users, they’ll have less incentive to control for spambots locally, which will create a feedback loop that makes the sites basically uninhabitable without AI curation.
One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed, because these days people use it mainly for navigation rather than exploratory search (eg you use it to search Reddit, Twitter, or Wikipedia, or find your way to previously-visited articles or websites when you can’t remember the exact URL). But AI assistants will handle navigation and site-specific queries, and even exploratory search will be behind the scenes, meaning Google Ads will get progressively less and less exposure to human eyeballs. This is why they urgently need to make Gemini a success, because their current business model won’t exist in the medium-term.
All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.
I doubt there will be widespread adoption in the next 3-5 years. People galactically overhyped chatbots as the effective advent of AGI, but it was more of an iterative step like any other. A useful one, to be sure, but not immediately transformative to all aspects of human existence that some have claimed.
Search results were already sort of an issue from SEO slop-factories gaming the system so aggressively. Chatbots will lower the price of that stuff a bit so we'll probably see a bit more, but I doubt it's going to be that much more of an issue compared to what could be done a few years ago by paying some ESL third-worlder rock bottom prices to produce the stuff. I doubt that AI-powered RSS feeds are going to be the wave of the future as well. Search results aren't great, but you can usually find what you're looking for if you enter the right query (for most things, that means appending "reddit" to the end).
I think this is short sighted. We are at the infancy stages of what these things can do, and judging what will be true in 5-10 years based on brand new technology is a fool’s errand. In 1992, only the true dreamers imagined the internet as always on, available, and in everyone’s pockets. Outside of the optimistic futurists, you would not have predicted Űber, DoorDash, Grubhub, or the like. We had an early version of online shopping in the form of Service Merchandise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise) in which you could drive to the store and order things from a kiosk. People seeing things like that and the big clunky desktops connected to dialup modems would think someone talking about hailing a cab over the internet was a kook.
And I’ll mention that a lot of the anti-hype is often not only based on early versions on AI, but it seems quite often on wishful thinking and a high view of what it is they actually do. Journalism isn’t that difficult provided to have the facts at hand. The format and conventions of writing for the news are not difficult. In fact, I don’t think most business writing is super difficult to learn. AI could probably write something that would be indistinguishable from a human written article or business paper. I’d give fiction writing 10-15 years tops if we’re talking about median genre fiction. Art bot ai can already produce stuff that’s easy enough to edit into something you could use as graphic art. The new Sora could probably create a commercial in ten years. But a lot of people just don’t want to believe that their entire profession could be automated so they comfort themselves that AI chatbot can’t do their job and therefore it’s safe.
It's rather goofy that you lead with a sentence saying how it's essentially impossible to predict the future of tech, then you... do exactly that, but in the other direction. Obviously there's very wide error bars here on both sides, but I don't think accurately predicting an impending tech revolution is any easier than predicting a tech fizzle as you seem to implicitly think.
There have also been a bunch of failures like VR, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Crypto (as more than just a medium for fraud and bigger-fool speculation). Even self-driving cars seem decades away from mass adoption. The number of tech startup failures dwarfs the amount of success stories by at least an order of magnitude. As such, I believe our Bayesian priors should be calibrated towards pessimism in general, only veering towards cautious optimism for the most promising possibilities.
Promises of "it's only just begun, surely the next version will be even better which will lead to mass adoption" were used for all those listed failures, but improvements either didn't manifest, or were so marginal as to be irrelevant.
A lot of the pro-hype arguments here are based less on historical technological developments, and more on wishful thinking that it would somehow hurt their outgroup. "Your days are numbered, journalist!" is a pretty good example.
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