On Wednesday, Cloudflare announced that, for the first time, bot traffic had surpassed human traffic online. Before generative AI, bots accounted for ~20% of traffic, but most of it was from crawlers. As autonomous agents acting on behalf of users have proliferated, bot traffic share has skyrocketed to 57%. The primary mechanism driving this explosion is intrinsic to how AI works. When a person goes to buy a camera, they might visit five or six sites; when agents even just recommend a camera, they may visit 5K+ sites.
The fear of robots taking over, however, is overblown. This is a tale as old as technology. Any time we automate something, the mechanisms of automation quickly outnumber humans. James Watt’s famous steam engine became useful only after he added a flyball governor, a simple mechanism that regulated the engine’s speed without human intervention. By the time we get to the Industrial Revolution, any given factory could have 1,000x as many governors as human workers. The same was true of transistors; what started as a simple electrical switch quickly grew to the point where a cutting-edge chip today can have over 20 billion transistors!
The real enabling force in any revolution is information and control, not raw power. Agents will run amok, but the real value will come from how effectively we can control those systems.
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