[thrance]

I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

[echelon]

Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet.

A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms:

- Marketing emails

- YouTube sponsorship clips

- Banner ads

- Google search ads

- Actual human salespeople

- ...

It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives.

Furthermore, we could probably use it to remove most of the worst parts of the internet too:

- Clickbait

- Trolling

- Rage content

I'm actually really looking forward to this. As long as we can get this agent into all of the panes of glass (Google will fight to prevent this), we will win. We just need it to sit between us and everything else.

[madamelic]

> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet.

Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results.

It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".

[mostlysimilar]

> Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results.

Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.

[pixl97]

Unfortunately it turns out that at the end of the day one of the most common values is the love of massive piles of money. Vampires don't catch on fire in sunlight like storybook villains, they will invite themselves in, sidle up beside you, and be your best friend. Then in the moment you are weak they will plunge their fangs in.

Competing with bad actors is very, very hard. They will be fat with investor money, they will give their services away, and commonly they are not afraid to do things like DDOS to raise your costs of operations.

[webninja]

Someone has to pay off the $1 Trillion per year in Interest on the U.S. Federal Debt. Who’s that going to be? Either it’s them or it’s you. At least your grandparents got to live a nice life.

[echelon]

There will be a uBlock Origin for that.

[sebastiennight]

I think GP's comment describes the business model of AdBlock / AdBlock Plus / Ghostery to a tee, and they collectively seem to be bigger in usage and notoriety than uBlock.

[the__alchemist]

This was present in the book Fall;, or, Dodge in Hell. (Published in 2019; takes place in the near future) Everyone had a personal AI assistant as you describe to curate the internet. A big part of the motivation was to filter the spam. A secondary affect was that the internet was even further divided into echo chambers.

[iamthefury]

Williams Gibson also describes this in Idoru - a virtual world with digital bugs that eat spam.

[Bluecobra]

I get what you are saying but what is the end result when someone is so shielded from the outside when they decide to block everything that irks them and stuck in an echo chamber?

What if the user is a conservative voter and considers anything counterpoint to their world view the worst part of the internet and removes all instances of it from their daily lives? Not to say that isn’t already happening but they are consciously making the choice, not some AI bot. I can see something like this making the country even more polarized.

[echelon]

Same as it ever was.

Growing up as a southern evangelical before the internet, I can promise you that there has never been a modern world without filter bubbles.

The concept of "fake news" is not new, either. There has been general distrust of opposing ideas and institutions for as long as I've been alive.

And there's an entire publishing and media ecosystem for every single ideology you can imagine: 700 Club, Abeka, etc. Again, this all predates the internet. It's not going anywhere.

The danger isn't strictly censorship or filter bubbles. It's not having a choice or control over your own destiny. These decisions need to be first class and conscious.

Also, a sure fire way to rile up the "other team" is to say you're going to soften, limit, or block their world view. The brain has so many defenses against this. It's not the way to change minds.

If you want to win people over, you have to do the hard, almost individual work, of respecting them and sharing how you feel. That's a hard, uphill battle because you're attempting to create a new slope in a steep gradient to get them to see your perspective. Angering, making fun, or disrespecting is just flying headfirst into that mountain. It might make you feel good, but it undoes any progress anyone else has made.

[sandworm101]

Someone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails.

I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.

[loa_in_]

It's the tech that put you on a queue to be called

[sandworm101]

There was no tech here. My new landlord contacted the local ISP, the one they liked to work with, to say they had a new tenant arriving soon. I'd bet that my connection will have been setup long before I arrive, at a time convenient to the landlord and local provider. A landlord recommending a favored local vendor to a tenant, or a tenant to a vendor, is the sort of human relationship that predates electricity.

[pseudalopex]

Sales people were never artists. Cold calling is not art.

[johnnyanmac]

cold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).

[Jensson]

Programming and just about every other job is an art as well with that argument. If we aren't allowed to automate away that then we aren't allowed to automate anything.

[taneq]

If it's not an art then if we make the best example of something, what would that example be the state of?

[johnnyanmac]

It'll all vary based on what and who is automated. I'm sure there'd be less(but non-zero) fuss if we were trying to automate plumbing. I'm sure there'd be entire riots over trying to automate professional sports leagues.

I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of

1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire 2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money 3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from 4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen.

But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.

[fennecbutt]

OP is wrong anyway. Everything is art. Art is about interpretation not determinism.

[pseudalopex]

Art and an art have different meanings.

[johnnyanmac]

Based on the response upstream, I assume they were talking about the latter. There's no art to door to door sales reading a boilerplate. There is an art to researching a customer and curating a proper response to make them feel good.

[pseudalopex]

They said artists. Artists means people who make art commonly. Not everyone with a non scientific skill. The word was incorrect no matter what they meant.

[tim333]

>they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.

[wongarsu]

Google has 5 times as many employees as NASA, SpaceX, ULA, Rocket Lab and Aerojet Rocketdyne have combined. Which is actually a lot closer than I would have expected. But still, just Alphabet is a lot bigger than the entire US space industry. Adding Fusion probably doesn't change the numbers much.

[oceanplexian]

It’s not the fact they have 5 times the employees that surprises me, it’s how little they accomplish.

SpaceX is launching multiple rocket ships into orbit every week. Google is.. releasing webpage CSS tweaks like “New Google Sign In Page” and a couple second rate AI products no one asked for when they get caught with their pants down.

[johnnyanmac]

well the biggest tech companies with 100x's the computing power are. I'm sure if the collective FAANG all focused their funds and hardware on getting to Mars we'd see the seeds of terraforming in our lifetime.

[webninja]

No wonder. Have you seen the Federal government’s debt? It’s existential. At least your grandparents got to live a nice life.

usdebtclock.org

[taneq]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "government debt" the sum total of currency issued, rather than being like the balance on a credit card? It's better thought of as a measure of the size of the economy being governed. What you want to keep an eye on is the total inflation-adjusted 'value' of the economy, if this starts reducing then that's not good.

[webninja]

It depends on which country. Your country might be that way but in the U.S. it isn’t. In the U.S., 90% of the money is created by banks via loans and 10% of the money is created by the federal reserve via a small variety of open market operations such as the adjustment of federal interest rate. All USD created is tied to debt somewhere of some kind. This system gives the currency both scarcity as well as demand.

All of the debt has to be paid back but it can’t all be paid back or else there would be no currency in circulation.

One of the biggest reasons the USD is so strong is because the federal reserve is distinct, separate, and independent from the government. Most governments in history have eventually moved to influence or take over their central bank so they can spend even more wastefully & recklessly than before. America was designed with a unique separation of powers. Other’s weren’t. All of the rest of the world’s paper currencies have been worse to hold over the last 30 years and possibly more.

[paxys]

And yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels.

The "smart people are all working in advertising" trope is idiotic. Just an excuse for people to justify their own laziness. There is an infinite number of opportunities out there to make the world better. If you are ignoring them, that's on you.

[runlaszlorun]

> And yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels.

Which is true. But clearly far fewer people work doing that than in advertising or some other seemingly meaningless grunt work. And I’m including the technological plumbling work with many on this site, myself included, have depended upon to support themselves and/or a family.

Which at best is effectively doing minor lubrication of a large and hard to comprehend system that doesn’t seem to have put society as a whole in a particularly great place.

[aswegs8]

Financial incentives, huh?

[bamboozled]

It’s as if real issues like climate change aren’t a thing that needs solving…

[segmondy]

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography, banking online, and so on and so forth. We love to trivialize what is common, but that clicking on an ad is not an easy problem. Clicking on ads has generated enormous wealth in the world which is now bootstrapping AGI.

Clicking on ads helped with our goal to AI today. Showing you the right ad and beating those trying to game it is machine learning heavy. When was the first time we started seeing spelling correction and next word suggestions? It was in google search bar. To serve the correct ads and deal with spam? heavy NLP algorithms. If you stop and think of it, we can drop a think line from the current state of LLMs to these ads click you are talking about.

[digdugdirk]

It took way too long to convince myself this wasn't satire. I still wish it wasn't.

It made me realize that I think many computing people need more of a fundamental education in "hard" physics (statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science) in order to better understand the staggering paradigm shift that occurred in our understanding of the world in the early 20th century. Maybe then they would appreciate how much of the world's resources have now been directed by the major capital players towards sucking the collective attention span of humanity into a small rectangular screen, and the potential impact of doing so.

[lukan]

"Putting man on the moon or ecommerce"

The comparison here is between moonlanding and advertisement. So I choose the moon obviously.

Ecommerce can work just the same without LLM augmented personalized ads, or no advertisement at all. If a law would ban all commercial advertisement - people still need to buy things. But who would miss the ads?

[sebastiennight]

To complement your argument, I once was invited to speak at an event in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and was astonished to learn that outdoors advertising is _banned_ in that city.

Yet somehow people have still been buying mattresses, cars, and laundry detergent.

I can't say I missed the ads one minute during my trip.

[ksynwa]

They are clearly talking about one aspect of the industry which is the marketing part related to maximising engagement. It is not meant to be conflated with the e-commerce industry as a whole.

[Jgrubb]

That last line kind of makes the point. Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?

[runlaszlorun]

> Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?

I think the answer is pretty clear in the fact that so many of them, bluntly speaking, just don’t give a shit any more. I absolutely don’t blame them.

[thedevilslawyer]

It sure as heck is inspiring to a critical thinking adult. There's been enormous value added to all world's citizens.

[commodoreboxer]

Interesting. In my experience, advertisement and the incentives around it have led to the most devastatingly widespread removal of value in human culture and social connections that we've seen in this generation. Huge amounts of effort wasted on harvesting attention, manipulating money away from people, isolating and fostering extremism, building a massive political divide. And centralizing wealth more and more. The amount of human effort wasted on advertisement is staggering and shocking.

I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.

How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?

[ryandrake]

"Adding value" and "Generating wealth" are always the vague euphemisms that these guys fall back to when they try to justify much of today's economic activity. Adding value for who? Generating whose wealth? The answer is usually "people who are already wealthy." Of course, they'll downplay the massive funneling of wealth to these people, and instead point to the X number of people "lifted out of poverty in the 20th century" as if capitalism and commerce was the sole lifting force.

I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."

[mrtranscendence]

> If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them.

I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.

[mostlysimilar]

> I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in.

Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.

[commodoreboxer]

Ads are not charity. There is clearly a cost, otherwise they would lose money. They do not generate money out of thin air. "Generate" and "extract" aren't synonyms.

They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.

[johnnyanmac]

> you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in.

Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.

UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.

>Is that also a net bad for the world?

World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.

[raxxorraxor]

I think this is a rationalization of an enormous waste of work. The effects generating wealth are indirect. In that regard you could argue that betting is generating wealth too. Advertising is like a hamster wheel people have to jump onto if they want their place in the market.

A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.

There is advertising and advertising of course but most of advertising is incredibly toxic and I would argue that by capturing attention, it is a huge economic drain as well.

Of course an AI would also be quite apt at removing unwanted ads, which I believe will become a reality quite soon.

[mlyle]

> A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.

I fear statements like this go too far. I can't agree with the first part of this sentence.

I feel this about both marketing and finance:

They are valuable fields. There are huge amounts of activity in these fields that offer value to everyone. Removing friction on commerce and the activities that parties take in self-interest to produce a market or financial system are essential to the verdant world we live in.

And yet, they're arms races that can go seemingly-infinitely far. Beyond any generation of societal value. Beyond needless consumption of intellect and resources. All the way to actual negative impacts that clutter the financial world or the ability to communicate effectively in the market.

[swat535]

> enormous value added to all worlds citizens

This is quite a statement to make.

Please elaborate on what enormous value has spam ads and marketing emails added to _world_ citizens?

Unless of course by “world” you mean Silicon Valley venture capitalists..

[batch12]

Marketing manipulation and spam is less important.

[mxkopy]

In the grand scheme, what you’re talking about is very zero-sum, while stuff like making rockets is not. Uber vs Waymo is a good example of how adtech can only go so far in actually creating wealth.

[commodoreboxer]

I keep hearing the phrase "generate wealth" in regards to advertisement and from the mouths of startup founders, but in almost no other context. I'm not familiar with the economic concept of "wealth generation" or its cousin "creating value".

Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? That all economic activity is good, and therefore anything that leads to more economic activity is also good? Or is it what it sounds like, and it just means "making some specific people very wealthy"? Wouldn't the more accurate wording be that it "concentrates wealth"? I don't see a huge difference in the economic output of advertisement from most other scams. A ponzi scheme also uses psychological tricks to move money from a large amount of people to a small amount of people. Something getting people to spend money isn't inherently a good thing.

[runlaszlorun]

> Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous?

Maybe this was your point, but this is built in to one of the definitions of GDP, isn’t it? Money supply times velocity of money?

I’m no economist though I’m sure there are folks on here who are. But this seems like an unfortunate fact that’s built into our system- that as laypeople we tend to assume that ‘economic growth’ means an increase in the material aspects of our life. Which in itself is a debatable goal, but our GDP perspective means even this is questionable.

For example, take a family of five living out in a relatively rural area. In scenario one, both parents work good paying remote tech jobs and meals, childcare, maintenance of land and housing, etc. are all outsourced. This scenario contrubutes a lot according to our economic definitions of GDP. And provides many opportunities for government to tax and companies to earn a share of these money flows.

Then take scenario 2, you take the same family but they’re living off of the grid as much as possible, raising or growing nearly all their own food, parents are providing whatever education there is, etc. In this scenario, the measurable economic activity is close to zero- even if the material situation could be quite similar. Not to mention quality of life might be rated far higher by many.

What rating an economy by the flow of its money does do is, and I’m not sure if this is at all intentional, is it does paint a picture of what money flows are potentially capturable either by government taxation or by companies trying to grab some percentage as revenue. It’s a lot harder to get a share of money that isn’t there and/or not moving around.

Perhaps my take on economics is off base but, for me, seeing this made me realize just how far off our system is from what it could and should be.

[commodoreboxer]

GDP is a measure. I'm very much not an economist, but I am extremely skeptical that the health of an economy can be reduced to any single number. Goodheart's law and all.

I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending to ensure economic activity. A low GDP inherently shows poor economic health, but a high GDP does not guarantee good health.

In my mind (noting, again, that I'm no economist), economic health is defined by the effectiveness of allocating resources to things that are beneficial to the members of that economy. Any amount of GDP can be "waste", resources flowing to places where they do not benefit the public. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP includes money spent on addictive and harmful drugs, polluting industries, and many other ventures that are actively harmful.[0]

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FAmr1la6w0

[pixl97]

Going back to the previous posters monetary velocity statement, if you have a trillion dollar GDP, but it's just two AI's bouncing money back and forth high speed while all the humans starve in the street your economy is "great" and totally awful at the same time. The one number has to be referenced against others like wealth inequality.

[cooolbear]

"Generate wealth" means "make somebody's number go up" i.e. allocating real resources/capital somewhere, with the assumption that 1. allocating that capital creates a net boon for society and 2. those who have "generated wealth" are wise and competent investors/leaders and their investments will create a net boon elsewhere. The first point is probably not especially true very often in contemporary tech (other than 'job creation') and is arguably not true for advertisement. The second point is not really a given at all and seems to be pretty consistently shown otherwise.