People are just going to get sick of the Internet, if they haven't already, and start to look at it like a necessary evil they have to use to do certain things instead of what it once was which was fun and exciting. It's sad.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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A much larger segment of people than you think are already off. You just don't hear about them, because, well, they aren't online. Lmao
Yep. The internet is becoming what a mailbox in real life is. An abused gateway that has a narrow set of legitimate uses.
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We will have private mesh nets
Overlay networks are also feasable.
funded by whom? (legitimate question)
Currently private users and enthusiasts. As networks grow, there will probably be universities joining. Eventually corporations will start marketing plug and play equipment while selling access to server space and long distance connections. Other businesses will join and finance their services by selling subscriptions, advertising, and user data. Various government agencies will add hardware they can also use to track traffic. Someone will inevitably bring in bots, AI models, and internet connected devices. After that someone will coin the term “dead mesh network theory” and all the nerdlings will start developing the next knitted network or something.
The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).
I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all "junk mail" and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.
I migrated the important stuff to "electronic mail", where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with "spam".
I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn't care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.
Our attention is the prize, and it won't matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.
The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it's only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.
The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that'll be harder than getting protections in law... so small steps.
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Bots don't generate money you dough brains.
why focus on money? what about culture, humanity, and actual interesting interaction between humans?
ah, I forgot humanity have devolved into beings of statistics. Leaving feelings, positive long term planning, and religion behind.
If only that last one was true.
Bots don't do that either.
I believe it is an attempt to use an argument that they will care about. You could write a brilliant piece about how that many bots hurt culture and society but if the ones you want to convince don't gaf about either of those, they probably won't even read what you have to say, let alone change anything because of it.
Or, more likely, they won't even see anything here, at which point that comment becomes more of a "they aren't even very good at what they want to be good at".
Like from my pov, the top of the corporate world doesn't just not care about those things but is actively trying to destroy them because they think they'll do better in a world where none of those things are as they currently are.
Guess I'll just have to hang out with humans in the physical world.
You won't be able to tell which of your neighbours was replaced by a metal mimic, and got shipped off to the Soylent factory.
Peter Thiel did mention humans will end up like horses, going to the glue factory.
Well, if you were a billionaire who owned AI system trained to influence and extract money from humans, and there's no humans online, what would you do?
And so that brings us to how robots actually will become a reality...
We'll just destroy the environment and privatize the land that isn't.
In the early 1900s the Collier family made themselves a big pile of money and bought what later became Collier County, Florida. Pretty much all of it was privately owned by them, along with a collection of every type of Porsche ever made and a bunch of other "gee, what can I do with ALL this money" activities... Property taxes encouraged them to sell the land off and now what once was a private family "farm" about 100 years ago is now home to over 400,000 people.
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I'm looking forward to an open mesh outside the realm of government and corporate control
Their was a video about how to start building something like that, I'll edit this with a link once I get back home from work.
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I want the bots to start scamming each other now.
You should watch Kitboga’s scam bots handle scammers; it’s gravy.
Well yeah. Of course it would, given the examples they are talking about.
It makes sense right? You have a computer, you can program it to do things. I have programmed mine to scrape data or examine websites, and even in some cases to pull entire directories down.
Now we have an agent do that. In other words a programmed computer tool that is acting on someones behalf using natural language as the question. Note the example given is an AI is looking across as many websites as it can for a review. Or maybe instructions to put something together. Or maybe a list of the highest peaks in the world with the least snowfall. Who knows, but that is endless.
So this "traffic" is still human driven. Its just using a computer to do the work. I think that changes the perspective a little bit. It is all human intention driven.
Also, all traffic by http plus every other request is still human, so that is a bit misleading.
Interestingly, its not like we havent been here before if you look at traffic. The syncing of usenet for a period of time was the largest user of all traffic. So all computer connections, much, much less humans.
Most traffic today is video, then gaming, than music, financial, screen sharing, p2p, and AI makes up a tiny portion. It just is making a huge number of requests for HTTP, but it is growing, and fast.
This is neither pro AI, nor anti AI. I am just trying to examine the landscape instead of the over simplistic headline that really is about Cloudflares business model.
That's not the point. Let's put aside that an LLM driven agent is not deterministic ie, not always doing what the user intended, just like regular text autocomplete messes up as well regularly. The point is that like with e-mails when spam became so easy to generate that it flooded the system, now more sophisticated actions on the internet get easier to do (that said, most of it was possible already before, just required more skill), at least as long as LLMs are not charged at real costs but highly subsidised.
At some point something has to give. Either tools will be developed to somewhat reliably classify the nature of the traffic or things will start to be priced out as everyone will have to pay the bill for this new kind of spam (ie low value high volume traffic, or ill intended traffic)
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already there mate.
World governments will be delighted to find that they've driven their populations off of the internet. As much as they'll hate being engaged in 24/7 automated cyber warfare to stop their power plants exploding.
I mean of course, how many pedestrians are on roads versus cars? Used to be lots of people walking on roads until cars were invented.
I had a realization recently that with driverless cars becoming more common that one day I'm going to be stuck in traffic surrounded by dozens of other cars that are completely empty. They'll just be going to pick up a human driver somewhere or going to park and no one will care because instead of eliminating traffic we'll just ensure humans are entertained while stuck in it.
Why bother to fix traffic congestion if you can just play PlayStation the whole time or whatever?
If most cars are autonomous, and capable of coordinating with each other (via mesh network, for example), then traffic congestion might become much easier to ~~prevent~~ reduce and ~~solve~~ mitigate. (Edit: Based on responses, I may have chosen my words poorly)
You're probably not wrong though. I imagine it'll get worse before it gets better.
Traffic congestion will always be a thing. The real world is too unpredictable. You can't pack a highway full of cars and expect them to drive highway speeds. One animal jumping on the road and you'll have a massive accident because nobody can avoid anyone
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