Ads strike me as a laughable local maximum on our ability to monetize spare brain cycles of the human mind. Critical thinking cycles, arguably the most precious resource, is subverted for single digit clickthrough rates. Ad tech makes me cry, and after reading science fiction, depressed. Let's please please gtfo out of this paradigm and figure out how to bootstrap these things between our ears for creation, than consumption, of something.

And to go a bit deeper for a moment, it seems likely to me that what we now call critical thinking is the same thing as what Chomsky and Berwick mean when they use the word "language": an ability to hierarchically represent the world using symbols. Our "external representation" or ability to communicate ideas to one another, according to them is a byproduct of that effect. This was from their recent book, Why Only Us, and go on to point to the specific gene, FOXP2, that they believe caused this ability for the mind, and then assert that this emergence caused us to leave Africa (Out of Africa Theory). And if that's even remotely true, then the human mind is inherently more able and creative than we will ever know. Or said another way, the cross product of Dunning & Kruger with Berwick & Chomsky suggests an almost infinite unawareness of our own potential. - How do we know that the 10% drop off in traffic isn't "just" due to the increase of latency by the nature of adding additional the additional ad package that dispatches and draws on the main thread, slowing everything down (Linden, 2006)?

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-s...