Many if not most of us have wondered about advertising revenue once Google started to provide an AI answer first. One supposes that they are aggregating eyeballs again in the ingrained certainty that monetization with follow. Once you own the network, you get it all by virtue of the network effect.
But the really radical notion would be to harness AI to provide honest advertisements. It would seem trivial to parse the web to let us know which thingamajig or whatchamacallit is the best thingamajig or whatchamacallit.
We all know we've been suffering gaming by the ad industry since forever. Well, at least since radio and television. The creatives in the industry look for ways to make mediocre seem really really good. As a kid I wondered why they often touted what was worst about the product in some sort of reverse psychology bid. Tout the things the viewer doubts.
The real question underlying all this stuff is why we cede the public good and goods to the wealthy for their exploitation? Do we really buy their own self-assessment that they deserve their wealth because of "merit."
Merit is a word that can be parsed so very many ways; none of them providing any satisfaction about usage. In our particular economy, merit is approximately equivalent to getting away with something, meaning one small step away from theft. Cory Doctorow provides sound enlightenment on this topic in his Enshittification thesis.
But really the key term here is "gaming." As in, the bigger the company the more it games us. And guess what, now we offer ways to game the future by way of prediction markets. Seems to me that this might incentivize destruction, given how much easier that is than to make something. Entropy and all.
It also does seem a given that AI will pretty much level the field (I'm being ironic) for prediction, making this a fraught topic for regulators. It was quickly obvious that one shouldn't be able to bet on a human's future demise. But what about disease trends or costs or climate change?
If you're motivated to make money on the basis of doing no demonstrable good for anyone, you're certainly likely to devote your personal quota of cleverness toward making as much money as possible. Our uniquely American form of religious capitalism provides the perfect cover. Greed is almost your duty here. All praise creative destruction!
I'm by no means a mortal enemy to capitalism, properly regulated. Global corporate capitalism should not be something we want to encourage though, since for capitalism to operate properly there must be competition. Once upon a time we understood this. More recently we seem to have decided that consumer cost is the proper measure for anti-trust actions, or lack thereof.
But a good AI prediction engine would have to be able to demonstrate how different the temporary price relief is from destructive competition when you use investors' money to sell below cost and drive all the small fry out of business. It's perfectly predictable that the result is uniformly higher prices, after a relatively short while. Then there's the ultimate nightmare of Amazon which can dictate the price for nearly anything. We're always being sold a pig-in-a-poke. It's just that the scale has become immense.
My own pet measure is the growth in income disparity between workers and the ownership class. And the biggest trouble there is that the economy has now been groomed such that we are all forced to put retirement funds into ownership-class holdings in order to keep from losing money ever more quickly. And we still can't touch the growth available to those who control our stocks and bonds.
We're almost literally enslaved to self-destruction now that investment in your own business risks almost immediate failure unless you're lucky enough to be a sellout. You might have the choice to purchase a franchise or a brand dealership, though you'd better have some sort of insurance. Your doctor, your insurance agent, your old-folks home will all sell out sooner or later.
Meaning you could join a hedge fund, but then you'd have to join the forces of destruction and strip the world for parts. You need real wealth to do that.
In my personal memory it was once quite trivial to find a place to live affordably on minimum wage. When I started college it was at the most expensive university on the planet, but the $5K, which included room and board - when books were cheap - was held by me in a savings bank from paper-routes, lawn mowing, pool cleaning and work in a bicycle shop.
What happened!! Corey Doctorow provides a pretty good start. But in my simpler terms, we've simply shrunk the cost of amoral behavior. Everybody's doing it. Morality is impossible without physical interaction with other people. We Americans have wiped that off the map. Once a week in a big box church doesn't count.
That's because, ironically enough, the bigger the church the more blasphemy. Isn't the impersonation of God the biggest blasphemy of them all? Meaning you make a person of God, then you get your personal God and then your put words in His mouth, and learn to channel the enchantment of we-the-people who think that following rules will make us straight. Following a ruler. Ruling the world. Be square.
Really it should be no wonder that evangelicals follow MAGA. This president is the very definition of ironic, given that he demands respect but shows none.
I did once ask a Chinese fellow who wrote a very popular book on humor. He was techie and with-it, in the technical sense. But when I asked about irony in Chinese, he quoted a stock sort of humor devoid of any irony at all. Which got me thinking that maybe you actually need God to have "real" irony. Absent God, there's no real standard about what to expect. There's always plenty of humor, but not the sort which undermines certainties. The MAGA folks seem not to know irony.
Happy semiquincentennial! May God have mercy on us all. Orthogonal relations are not natural. God is not a square. There is no manual for goodness. You're an idiot if you don't know God; reality incarnate.
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