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Comment by rendx | Hacker News Reader

The next logical step is an ad 'blocker' that simulates ordinary user behavior by still downloading the ads, in the background without displaying them, and added random walks by simulated 'clicks' on advertisement. This allows all the creepy tracking that comes with loading the spyware, but if done right has the potential of disrupting the already disgusting mind-manipulation while silently giving back to the content publishers.

Happy arms race.

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The step after that is to create artificial humans that surf the web just like real ones, build up marketing profiles just like real ones, "view" ads just like real ones - but aren't actually people. And then computers can market things to other computers. We might even get a shadow economy where it's computers all the way down, sorta like how 75% of Twitter traffic is (used to be?) bots.

Skynet, here we come.

And then computers can market things to other computers.

Charlie Stross already wrote that: Accelerando.

I looked up the summary on Wikipedia[1]. It sounds like an interesting read. It was released under a Creative Commons license, so it can be read online for free.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29

Read it recently, excellent book. Take the time if you have it.

Who says that's not already happening, in the fraudulent sense? I would be a huge swath of traffic that gets reported is fake, same for ad clicks.

I see the next logical step is simply extracting the content and distributing it through ad free means.

Disable all thirdparty javascript unless whitelisted ones would solve 99% of the CPU hog and ads problems.

That's how I browse, using NoScript. I enable JS for specific sites when they do something I care about, but it's easy to leave all the background analytics crap disabled.

Definitely a way to go. Some browsers already have the "reading mode" feature which accurately distills useful content for display while the page is rendered in background. But it would be really nice if advertisers considered making ads more tolerable.

Obligatory SMBC reference to the future of advertising. Not quite what you're hoping for. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2490

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