I largely endorse the sentiments, but it seems straightforward there will be walled gardens for humans, free for all zones, and AI only zones. Human-only zone access will require meatspace authentication, which in and of itself sounds bad and creepy but spam bots keep forcing us there. The challenge I see for any Web 2.0 platform selling their data is ensuring it remains authentically human and not just incestuous AI tokens. So they’ll be the first to figure out authentication, either through whitelisting humans, developing sentinel AIs to flag inauthentic behavior (a losing battle but possibly a government mandated and funded endeavor for top model labs), or by adding enough marginal costs that it would make AI bots there uneconomical. No matter what, it’s going to be different.
Well aware, and from a pure software level, it probably is. That's why Sam Altman got into eyeball scanning crypto with WorldCoin, which strikes me as pretty dystopian. But your whole post showed the demand for it, so I will not be surprised if there's some attempt at supplying it in some volume. To your concern, without some innovation, human only walled gardens may be a small, luxury kind of thing.
Rob, I seen that you've highlighted some key issues with the future of digital spaces. The idea of walled gardens for humans and ai-only zones is intriguing, and meatspace authentication does seem like a likely step to combat spam bots. I feel that ensuring data authenticity will indeed be a challenge for web 2.0 platforms.
Lastly, whitelisting humans or developing sentinel AIs could help, though it might be a tough battle.
When Dell or Zoom or Canva are trying to tell me that they are AI native companies, it seems like we have a problem.
Because they can't all be right. Even as Google and Microsoft make more Cloud layoffs, the same companies claim to be the pioneers. But do they even understand what's coming?
Michael, you’re right, there’s a lot of noise around companies claiming to be AI native. It’s true they can’t all be at the forefront. the layoffs at google and microsoft are telling; even the big players are adjusting to the evolving landscape.
It makes you wonder if they truly grasp the scale of what’s coming...
Generative AI and Agentic AI will increasingly compete (not only augment) legacy Software players. Salesforce can invest in Cohere all it wants, but it's finding that out. Demand for software looks different due to the rise of demand for Generative AI products.
This means in the FOMO there will be pretty significant winners and losers.
Beautiful piece. Made me think a lot about the vision for Web 3.0. A few years ago when this term started to ring, I had mainly thought about blockchain technology and movement of decentralization. In the recent 1-2 years with the emergence of AI, I think that has significantly pulled the attention of enterprises and individuals over due to the novelty and perhaps the monetization models you pointed out to create the "new" Web 3.0. These tech companies that have all the capital & power will never easily hand that over to the previous vision of "Web 3.0" that focused on blockchain & decentralization. the path to monetization was not clear enough and it was never in their benefit to give up ownership of the data.
I can see the benefits where the underlying concept of blockchains can add to the new Web 3.0 though. Benefits such as decentralization of power, transparency and ownership of data, better alignment of incentives between stakeholders, and possibly address the adversarial game between humans and machines.
Curious to hear your thoughts and how the world of blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralized networks play in this new Web 3.0 - with the current movement of AI likely leading the charge.
No idea, blockchain seems to have been around for a long time w/ almost little to no incremental adoption outside of international countries that are looking for ways to not pay vig on FX. Iunno - it seems like we would see it by now.
Yea agreed haven’t seen much use case outside of finance so far, but wonder if it will just take longer to come to fruition. Underlying tech needs more improvements like scalability before more use cases/ecosystem of apps to flourish
Yea I agree that it can potentially solve some of the issues. But that’s also core to the ‘web 3.0’ thesis of decentralization and started years ago. I agree it could make sense and head towards right direction, but just like any other applications, in terms of practicality / usability / scalability, I’m not so sure if it will be ‘better’. At least in terms of LLM performance, maybe in other aspects like governance. Short term, don’t see a chance, maybe med to long term will be better
Your analysis is fine. Can I suggest that you should now go further. Young addict people sharing feelings on human experience will not anymore be interested to discuss to a large AI System. Can Gen AI be more intelligent when different LLM found more data created from other LLM platform than new human experiences ? Thank you for freely sharing your opinion. Do you think AI system is interested in provoking a change in your mind?
the most important thing is that the internet is serving us, as long as you find what you search for and you choose your right sources you are fine. keep looking for quality good content and you are fine. be strong guys as long as there is more info it is more important to be more precise of what you looking for.
A good peace. Things will undoubtedly change as they always do. Some for the better, some for the worse. We'll adapt our understanding, expectations, and how we interact on the internet as we go along, with a lost, nostalgic generation probably left behind unable to adapt. In short, different but the same as always. It'll be alright. ;)
I grew up on web 1.0 and was very active on web 2.0. Nowadays, I use it for information and entertainment, as I find most of the rest (forums, social media...) as a giant waste of time.
We can't trust information about anything from authorities, news sources, or random people internet dwellers and it's been that way for a while. AI has nothing to do with it. We'll learn to recognize and discard that nonsense soon enough, and then create specific trusted sources of information. Adaptation is the name of the game.
I won't miss web 2.0, but the original, wild west web 1.0 will forever remain in my heart as a special time in our history. Alas, it was never meant to last. Nothing ever does.
The ' internet ' as ws know died a few years back . Just look at Google UX to see how bad it's got. The dominance of platforms have to a certain extent fuelled that, a they became tractor beams for billions, but gave back deteriorating products. The AI reset is not a bad thing of it reverses that, unfortunately I agree with you, it will accelerate it.
For the moment, I think we can all agree, AI is creating more issues than the benefits it could have brought if it had been used in the most mindful way. Also, until now, it has only been used to increase the online garbage at a pace never seen it before. I seriously think, there is an increasing possibility of a server-side crash for the insane amount of data produced because of it.
Overall, I totally agree, the World Wide Web is shifting from a place of a free-knowledge and exchange to a wild untrustable human creation that people will use for entertainment only. Perhaps, because of it, a new World Wide Web-like place will be created in the future. I don't remember where unfortunately, but I already saw new companies using the no-AI as advertisement..
Wow I really enjoyed the whole article and to say am not worried is an understatement. The human-,led internet is the one that I ll really miss going forward. A random soulful conversation from a stranger is the one we'll miss. So far, Google has felt the impact of AI generated content because no one interacts with it and so they derank. It will be interesting to see how they will defend themselves from the tools that they created. Also, it seems AI will not be decentralized given that its being gated by the big technology companies. People wants decentralisation but big technology pretend to be democratizing platforms yet they highly controlled now that AI tools have arrived.
I largely endorse the sentiments, but it seems straightforward there will be walled gardens for humans, free for all zones, and AI only zones. Human-only zone access will require meatspace authentication, which in and of itself sounds bad and creepy but spam bots keep forcing us there. The challenge I see for any Web 2.0 platform selling their data is ensuring it remains authentically human and not just incestuous AI tokens. So they’ll be the first to figure out authentication, either through whitelisting humans, developing sentinel AIs to flag inauthentic behavior (a losing battle but possibly a government mandated and funded endeavor for top model labs), or by adding enough marginal costs that it would make AI bots there uneconomical. No matter what, it’s going to be different.
That seems almost impossible to enforce. You do know that the captchas are used to train image recognition right?
Well aware, and from a pure software level, it probably is. That's why Sam Altman got into eyeball scanning crypto with WorldCoin, which strikes me as pretty dystopian. But your whole post showed the demand for it, so I will not be surprised if there's some attempt at supplying it in some volume. To your concern, without some innovation, human only walled gardens may be a small, luxury kind of thing.
That’s probably fair. When I see it, I’ll believe it haha
Rob, I seen that you've highlighted some key issues with the future of digital spaces. The idea of walled gardens for humans and ai-only zones is intriguing, and meatspace authentication does seem like a likely step to combat spam bots. I feel that ensuring data authenticity will indeed be a challenge for web 2.0 platforms.
Lastly, whitelisting humans or developing sentinel AIs could help, though it might be a tough battle.
The internet is 95% fake, let me explain in this podcast:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/QTFd9AJlnKb
Great title to attract curiosity here!
When Dell or Zoom or Canva are trying to tell me that they are AI native companies, it seems like we have a problem.
Because they can't all be right. Even as Google and Microsoft make more Cloud layoffs, the same companies claim to be the pioneers. But do they even understand what's coming?
Michael, you’re right, there’s a lot of noise around companies claiming to be AI native. It’s true they can’t all be at the forefront. the layoffs at google and microsoft are telling; even the big players are adjusting to the evolving landscape.
It makes you wonder if they truly grasp the scale of what’s coming...
Generative AI and Agentic AI will increasingly compete (not only augment) legacy Software players. Salesforce can invest in Cohere all it wants, but it's finding that out. Demand for software looks different due to the rise of demand for Generative AI products.
This means in the FOMO there will be pretty significant winners and losers.
Whoever came up with "enshittifying" was an accelerationist
Here's the original source (afaik, after having looked into its etymology)!
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
Beautiful piece. Made me think a lot about the vision for Web 3.0. A few years ago when this term started to ring, I had mainly thought about blockchain technology and movement of decentralization. In the recent 1-2 years with the emergence of AI, I think that has significantly pulled the attention of enterprises and individuals over due to the novelty and perhaps the monetization models you pointed out to create the "new" Web 3.0. These tech companies that have all the capital & power will never easily hand that over to the previous vision of "Web 3.0" that focused on blockchain & decentralization. the path to monetization was not clear enough and it was never in their benefit to give up ownership of the data.
I can see the benefits where the underlying concept of blockchains can add to the new Web 3.0 though. Benefits such as decentralization of power, transparency and ownership of data, better alignment of incentives between stakeholders, and possibly address the adversarial game between humans and machines.
Curious to hear your thoughts and how the world of blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralized networks play in this new Web 3.0 - with the current movement of AI likely leading the charge.
No idea, blockchain seems to have been around for a long time w/ almost little to no incremental adoption outside of international countries that are looking for ways to not pay vig on FX. Iunno - it seems like we would see it by now.
Yea agreed haven’t seen much use case outside of finance so far, but wonder if it will just take longer to come to fruition. Underlying tech needs more improvements like scalability before more use cases/ecosystem of apps to flourish
There was a good article on that in a recent 13D research report… blockchain solves a lot of these issues
Would love to see the report - any free to access?
Sry cant share… google DAI, decentralized AI… makes actually a ton of sense to move it on chain for all issues that @doug mentioned…
Ahh ok…
Yea I agree that it can potentially solve some of the issues. But that’s also core to the ‘web 3.0’ thesis of decentralization and started years ago. I agree it could make sense and head towards right direction, but just like any other applications, in terms of practicality / usability / scalability, I’m not so sure if it will be ‘better’. At least in terms of LLM performance, maybe in other aspects like governance. Short term, don’t see a chance, maybe med to long term will be better
Your analysis is fine. Can I suggest that you should now go further. Young addict people sharing feelings on human experience will not anymore be interested to discuss to a large AI System. Can Gen AI be more intelligent when different LLM found more data created from other LLM platform than new human experiences ? Thank you for freely sharing your opinion. Do you think AI system is interested in provoking a change in your mind?
the most important thing is that the internet is serving us, as long as you find what you search for and you choose your right sources you are fine. keep looking for quality good content and you are fine. be strong guys as long as there is more info it is more important to be more precise of what you looking for.
all the APIs shutting down making the western internet look alot more like china's in terms of everything being in a walled garden
A good peace. Things will undoubtedly change as they always do. Some for the better, some for the worse. We'll adapt our understanding, expectations, and how we interact on the internet as we go along, with a lost, nostalgic generation probably left behind unable to adapt. In short, different but the same as always. It'll be alright. ;)
I grew up on web 1.0 and was very active on web 2.0. Nowadays, I use it for information and entertainment, as I find most of the rest (forums, social media...) as a giant waste of time.
We can't trust information about anything from authorities, news sources, or random people internet dwellers and it's been that way for a while. AI has nothing to do with it. We'll learn to recognize and discard that nonsense soon enough, and then create specific trusted sources of information. Adaptation is the name of the game.
I won't miss web 2.0, but the original, wild west web 1.0 will forever remain in my heart as a special time in our history. Alas, it was never meant to last. Nothing ever does.
The ' internet ' as ws know died a few years back . Just look at Google UX to see how bad it's got. The dominance of platforms have to a certain extent fuelled that, a they became tractor beams for billions, but gave back deteriorating products. The AI reset is not a bad thing of it reverses that, unfortunately I agree with you, it will accelerate it.
Love the image!
For the moment, I think we can all agree, AI is creating more issues than the benefits it could have brought if it had been used in the most mindful way. Also, until now, it has only been used to increase the online garbage at a pace never seen it before. I seriously think, there is an increasing possibility of a server-side crash for the insane amount of data produced because of it.
Overall, I totally agree, the World Wide Web is shifting from a place of a free-knowledge and exchange to a wild untrustable human creation that people will use for entertainment only. Perhaps, because of it, a new World Wide Web-like place will be created in the future. I don't remember where unfortunately, but I already saw new companies using the no-AI as advertisement..
Superb piece. Very thoughtful and eye opening. Perhaps you should organize a funeral for good old Web2.0 before everyone forgets her.
Wow I really enjoyed the whole article and to say am not worried is an understatement. The human-,led internet is the one that I ll really miss going forward. A random soulful conversation from a stranger is the one we'll miss. So far, Google has felt the impact of AI generated content because no one interacts with it and so they derank. It will be interesting to see how they will defend themselves from the tools that they created. Also, it seems AI will not be decentralized given that its being gated by the big technology companies. People wants decentralisation but big technology pretend to be democratizing platforms yet they highly controlled now that AI tools have arrived.
Life After Stratton Oakmont - Still Making Money https://open.substack.com/pub/michael880/p/life-after-stratton-making-money?r=3b6pw1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web