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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

At the same time, it's not necessarily pleasant to consider the prospect of an internet where 99.9% of traffic is generated by AI-powered spambots engaged in adversarial games with AI-powered anti-spambots.

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If you haven't read Accelerando, I'll suggest it - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

The open internet will be a dark forest, beautiful but mostly populated by metal-brains, meatb-brains will retreat to their human only spaces, local Facebook or Instagram where you know everyone in person or WhatsApp chat groups.

Interesting - going to have to read this more in depth.

I also note that I missed it when it went past the front page at the start of the month. For any others who also missed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34243709

Also the Reticulum of Anathem which was mostly full of spam-generators that were run by the spam-filter vendors to make their products necessary.

Btw, the chants from the book are real (and part of the interludes if you get the audiobook - which I recommend since the initially boring but ultimately important parts it aren't skippable without effort).

https://soundcloud.com/ztutz/sets/iolet-music-from-the-world...

The Thousander Chant is fun if you've got the right audio setup.

https://longnow.org/store/iolet/

> In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, the Decanarian Erasmus’ daily chore is to ring the Clock bells in his “Math” in a special sequence each day as he chants out the sequence. Those sequences and chants are all based on mathematical formulae that composer and coder David Stutz has put together into an album called Iolet.

I like the thousander chant but I only have regular laptop speakers. What do you recommend to really "get" the song? What would I hear beyond those super low basses?

A good pair of headphones would be my next choice.

It's not much "under" it - but rather the fill your senses with what it would be like to be in the Mynster as each nave did their chats in the great octagonal hall. And while its a passage about the Hundreders...

> We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant.

Or the description of a Thousander chat

> ... As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.

> The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.

> I could have stood there watching and listening for hours. I got the idea—which might have been just my imagination—that {spoilers} was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn. Certainly it was music of cosmographical slowness. Some of the notes went on for longer than I could hold my breath. He must have some trick of breathing and singing at the same time.

Just let the sound fill everything.

Also in Reamde and later Fall. I forget exactly, but i think in Reamde they flood the internet with shit, and then some years later in Fall everyone has curated echo chambers of content, such that people signed up to different streams are basically living in different realities. Which i guess is just the logical conclusion of what we have now.

I thought we are already nearly there? I remember reading 90%+ of emails are spam and this was a while back

90% is a lower figure for how much of HTTP traffic is bots scraping sites, too.

There are still solutions in that case. Email addresses only allocated to verified humans, which only accept email from the same addresses or specifically allowed outside email addresses.

Alternatively, email addresses that are necessarily paid for that have maximum sending limits or extra costs above those limits, so those addresses are not profitable for spam bots to use.

I could imagine some kind of “super priority email” that costs a dollar or something, that gets prioritized and is very unlikely to be marked spam.

More ideas: Maybe the amount paid per email sent changes depending on the percent of previous emails marked “accept emails from this sender”. Maybe some percentage of the e-mail fee is given to the recipient of the email.

Note that if a highly spam resistant email account is adopted by everyone the amount of spam sent may fall significantly. Gmail doesn’t count because it still isn’t as good as a system where sending millions of spam emails is simply too expensive.

Cyberpunk 2077 features a world after this has happened. Not because it happened, its just after. If there is a reference to an older internet it features its disuse due to this.

Every day we get closer to the Slug from Accelerando (by @cstross): a self-owned sentient corporation/419 scam

Why is that bad? As long as it is invisible to humans and doesn't cause bottlenecks, who cares?

For one, it's a waste of energy.

Banks also waste energy deterring people from robbing them. Internet or not, we'll have to stomach a good amount of bad stuff in order to get to the good stuff.

dead internet theory: https://dailyfreepress.com/2021/10/21/the-dead-internet-theo...

But it does make for an interesting idea as a plot device in speculative fiction!

Cyberpunk 2077 features this reality. Its not discussed much, but basically only local small scale networking is done (like citywide scale) because the broader internet protocol has either crumbled or is polluted by adversarial bots. So its pretty taboo to go there or simply unused.

I'm sure someone else knows the lore better. There is a lot of supporting literature, just not a key component of any stories.

I think the lore is that the wider internet was intentionally taken down by a virus made by a master hacker in the past. Any attempts to connect with it gets you killed by either the virus or "feral ais", but some of the mega corps pay people to explore it every once in a while looking for stuff.

I think the opportunity cost of better employee will make it hard for that to scale.

If you’re that good at scaling systems like that someone with legit traffic would be able to pay more than the spam companies.

Part of this is what I imagine is behind the “Blackwall” in the Cyberpunk universe.

Honestly the most likely source of computers becoming self-aware.

That's basically the plot of the novel Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.

And a plausible way for them — on either team — to take over completely. Both treating us not even as pets but as grass. In this analogy the good AI are gardeners, the bad AI are cow farmers.

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