[sunir]

True, in May 2026. But this is only one version of this.

In the future, it's likely the open Internet will be 99.99% robots. It's already > 50% robots. The government ID system a lot of countries are adopting to keep teenagers off of social media would also serve to both help control for non-human spam, and also control the network period. It's also possible a private system of human-verification certificates may come up to meet the demand like Apple ID with biometrics. Could also be the liveness tests KYC companies use may be more popular.

Discussed previously here: https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GovernmentBackedAuthentication

[janalsncm]

I don’t think we can extrapolate from current trends like that (at least I hope not). Society is dynamic. People will adapt. If bots become a problem websites will take more and more strict measures against them.

Which is a long way of saying, for any big enough problem created by a YC company, another YC company will emerge to fix it.

[sunir]

It’s more likely people will embrace artifice more. We already see that everywhere for the last 5 decades.

However in domains where human verification matters it’s just a matter of an arms race, true.

[dgellow]

But how does that block a human from running an agent that is using their identity?

[sunir]

Think about it from an information theory point of view. You need to attach a digital transaction to human body. Since a human body isn’t digital you need a gateway that you can trust to vouch for that human body being present.

Either you use biometrics, like liveness testing or face id or fingerprint testing, or social validation like decentralized web of trust or private moderation (account controls) or state methods like fines and criminal convictions.

Biometrics rely on social methods eventually like we trust Apple because we can sue them or the government will harangue them. Liveness testing is only as good as your sensor and image vs generation and replay in the arms race.

And iterated social games like punishment are only as good as people want to invest energy into it.

[dgellow]

What I mean is that once you have a token that represents your identity, you can pass it to your agent. As you said, humans aren’t digital, so we need to delegate the trust to a digital marker (auth token, cryptographic signature, etc). But once digitalized there is no way that I know of to block an agent from using that marker. And I don’t mean the agent stealing it. I mean the human running an agent that impersonates them deliberately

[sunir]

Exactly. There is only an arms race, which is escalating costs. Eventually it breaks and we use social means to manage it, surrender the digital space, or accept the artificial nature of the digital realm.