The idea of the attention economy being displaced by AI agents is flawed
What many are now describing as the evolution of internet (+real world) interactions sounds to me like a transition into some “vegetative state” of human existence and that is frankly not a feasible future.
There's a heavy push for an economic shift to automation. Little to no human intervention as some phrase is, is the next phase of literally everything, or at least that's the speculations.
The breakout of artificial intelligence has greatly helped push the developments towards this reality. However, so much about it is not quite coming together.
Matter of fact, the only way what is being discussed is possible is if the human race can somehow agree to literally turn themselves off and let machines take over.
Now I know how that might sound, but a chip in the brain is all that's needed for something like this to happen, and funny enough, we have people already developing things like this.
But let's distant ourselves from zombie fantasies for a second, and focus more on something that's been growing on humanity over recent years - the Internet.
AI agents, right now at least, are heavily internet-centric. Considering that said ecosystem has become a literally portal through to the lives of billions of earthlings, it's no surprise that a great deal of resources is being allocated to perfect automation through AI agents for the internet.
The general concept seems to lean towards a “peer-to-peer” communication system where the peers are AI agents, rather than humans, passing on data to one another, fulfilling contracts and completing pre-defined or assigned tasks.
Of a surety, this goes beyond “pre-defined” tasks, the greater reality of an economy of AI agents is that they are conscious and can make their own decisions, but supposedly to serve the “intents” of their human buddy, see how fucked up that sounds?
Quick highlight for read:
The convergence of AI x Crypto and the subsequent explosion of agents on blockchains, we propose, means we are evolving from not “Read, Write, Own” to “Read, Write, Own, Delegate,” creating a new internet paradigm we call The Post Web.
We are moving from the era of the “Attention Economy,” where internet properties compete for our mindshare, to the “Intention Economy,” where agents work to optimally solve our intentions, forming an unprecedented market super cycle.
This report suggests a shift from humans being active explorers of the Internet to AI agents handling the exploration, solely based on “intents.”
The report speculates that web3 may not be about just owning our data, but delegating to AI agents.
I could argue a lot of flaws that's present in these speculations and expectations for the future of the Internet but I want to focus on just one thing: intents.
First off, machines can make guesses of what we might like and what we might not like based on past data we give off, but they can't guess true “intent.”
This is something that isn't quite measurable, at least the way I see it. It is influence by a river of thoughts, hence actively changes it's value.
To truely achieve accurate intent mapping, you need to directly hold connection with a subject’s brain, essentially having a chip in the head to feed data back to AI agents.
This system has to widely advanced to function efficiently, so much that it has to be able to control the host. I do not expect that in any scenarios of complete efficiency in intent prediction that the functioning AI protocol would not have enough capabilities to control the host.
That said, when it comes to the believe that we would somehow move away from an attention economy to something being phrased as an intention economy, we are quite frankly just making hasty speculations that are even flawed by definition.
This flaw is buried in the fact that we cannot fulfill an intention without giving out our attention.
Sure, we can speculate a reduced spend of attention, but even with that, we still are just ignoring the fact that the algorithms designed to capture human attention are simply built on the understanding that the human mind will focus on anything and form a purpose to support this focus.
This is to say that even if we single out an “intention” - it is just a word for something that could easily become an eco chamber of attention sucking content.
The goal is never about exposing one to as much distinct data as possible, no, it's always about whatever traps the mind, so if that means replaying a single data in different ways, it will be done.
Call it intent-serving all you want, there will always be a loophole because the human mind has to wonder - unless of course, as previously stated, we simply are human vegetables at that point, then sure, we totally delegate everything to machines and remain in a dream state, sounds a little like rapture in Sci-fi.
But of course, this is just thoughts flowing over speculations of individuals trying to build an empire on AI.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha