7 ms·

The Internet Economy

100 points by avyfain 10y ago

lowglow 10y ago
Ambient Intelligence is the phrase a lot of people are searching for when talking about this stuff. There's also a bunch of stuff about Second-order Cybernetics and Adaptive and Collaborative Multi-Agent Systems people should seek out and read. I've co-opted some terms and am now speaking of this as Second-order IoT. Where previously we were concerned about our personal networks and systems, this next wave will be concerned about how these systems work together and enlist one another to carry out some task or contract autonomously. Chaining these contracts is where the cool stuff comes in. Observing and influencing these systems and letting them create efficient networks on our behalf is the reason we should be building this. Agents are what people are talking about when discussing bots, and agents are basically the AI program that can conscript if not completely become part of the operating service on a device. Like little plug 'n play souls that carry along information about you and what you need within some context. For instance, when you step out of your autonomous vehicle, it can use a service (Playa) to look up physical interfaces offering recharging. It will be able to negotiate and transact a recharge on your behalf, then contract itself out to an uber-like service while you sleep to help pay for itself. I'm building the infrastructure/platform to support all of this, giving rise to a fully autonomous global logistics and supply chain -- I call it Playa (http://getplaya.com/ http://getplaya.com/) It's at first an open service exchange (marketplace) for autonomous intelligent agents to learn from us, and act on our behalf with other services and agents (both digital and physical). - If Artificial General Intelligence is the ruler, then Playa is its throne. Here is the project site http://getplaya.com/ http://getplaya.com/ and here is our Baqqer site if anyone wants to sign up and follow our progress: https://baqqer.com/projects/playa https://baqqer.com/projects/playa We've also started a meet-up group in San Francisco if you want to learn more: http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/ http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/ If you're interested in building this vision of the future, please reach out. I'm happy to grab a coffee in San Francisco and chat more about the current state as well as long term social and political implications of this if you'd like.
- actionwords 10y ago
  making the world a better place.
- 7373737373 10y ago
  The next step would be doing these interactions - service registration, search, negotiation, usage, payments, certification etc. without a trusted, centralized intermediary. Have a look at the https://ethereum.org https://ethereum.org project to see how this could work out. If these kind of distributed systems for messaging, data distribution and storage as well as consensus scale, intelligent agents will be able to interact with services and each other faster, efficiently and more secure than before.
  - lowglow 10y ago
    I definitely think ethereum is a cool project. Unfortunately, I'll be a contrarian and say I don't think the answer is a completely distributed system. I think there is a few mixed options, but the totality must collapse to a central authority at some point.
    - 7373737373 10y ago
      I'm not a maximalist either. Distributed networks are always less efficient than hierarchical systems at specific tasks. Some projects, such as the Bitcoin lightning network or Ethereums' Raiden therefore try to build faster payment or state networks on top of the distributed systems with them as point of last resolve in case of conflicts of cooperation or availability. Doing the inverse of this might also lead to interesting results.
      - lowglow 10y ago
        What are you working on now? Care to reach out and chat? I'd like to pick your brain about some things.
- notliketherest 10y ago
  Imagine we gave life to inanimate objects and those objects could speak to each other and us. As you described, our car would speak to a charging station. The charging station would advertise "I can charge you for a fee!" And the car could say "charge me here is money". Forget the "internet" of things, these objects only need to speak to other objects in their "domain". Imagine it like this: you walk down a street towards a sitting dog. Once you get close, the dog looks at you and observes you walking by. Once your sufficiently far away, the dog looks away and you're no longer in its domain. Have you thought about the " language" for this inter object communication? Essentially the "api". Words like "charge" and "you" and "money" in my example.
amelius 10y ago
> Google of course needs a vibrant web for its search engine to remain useful So why did they build Android on top of Java then? Wouldn't it have been much smarter to build Android on top of Javascript+HTML where suitable, possibly extending the standards where needed? All these "apps" nowadays represent a move away from the web.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices. And there were no sufficient, complete and useful HTML5 standards that could allows web apps to compete with local software. Extending the web standards would simply have been too much work and caused too much trouble.
  - amelius 10y ago
    > That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices. Well, the most important thing people do, even on low-end devices, is browse the web.
    - c1sc0 10y ago
      No, that would be IM/chat these days
      - amelius 10y ago
        Ok. But does that require more performance than webbrowsing?
        LoSboccacc 10y ago
        See: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest...
    - 0xsnowcrash 10y ago
exolymph 10y ago
I'd just like to note that Aggregation Theory totally explains this: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
exelius 10y ago
> The hope is that this will not only create compelling user experiences, but also unlock access to the tens of billions of ad dollars that are currently spent on TV. This is simply not gonna happen. I used to think that as well -- until I did a stint working with one of the biggest sellers of TV ad inventory. It's a completely different game. TV ads are bought and sold in enormous, packaged deals. There's very, very little transparency in the TV advertising game. Everyone on both sides knows Nielsen ratings are total crap with very little bearing on reality, but they trust each other even less, so Nielsen it is. All anyone knows is that TV is great for brand advertising, and you can get a rough estimate of how many eyeballs saw your ad on a given night. With brand advertising, all you care about is the number of brand impressions you make on your target consumer in a given month to keep the brand value fresh in their mind (i.e. "Ford trucks are Built Ford Tough"). TV ads are sold based on personal relationships between reps at advertisers and publishers. That's it. The ad rates you can get for ads sold through traditional TV sales channels are 30-40% higher than digital ads on a per-impression basis. The reason for that? The buyers are more senior, have larger budgets, and less accountability. That TV ad money is literally just disappearing as audiences scatter to various media platforms -- these older, more senior ad executives don't understand digital so it's left to the younger guys who have a much larger culture of accountability and measuring by the metrics. The Internet has created so many opportunities for advertising and so much transparency around pricing for those ads that nobody can justify TV-like rates for digital ad impressions. Think of the things that advertise on TV: they're nearly all high-value goods or services that need to establish a brand reputation. They can (and do) do that online for a lot less per impression, and they don't need to run an equivalent dollar amount of impressions because the online publishing space has created so much inventory they can't even sell it all (creating so-called "remnant" inventory filled programmatically by algorithms at rock-bottom CPMs). But only the "premium" publishers (i.e. anyone with a non-advertising revenue stream like New York Times) can afford to limit their inventory in such a way as to demand higher CPMs: everyone else is in a race to the bottom just to survive. But it's gotten to a point where ad rates are so low that for premium publishers able to succeed with a subscription model, they may not even be a material amount of money. See: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc. In 5 or 10 years, we may get to a point where all "premium" video services are delivered through a subscription model without advertising. That TV money has to go elsewhere, but it's likely to be spent on non-digital forms of advertising (e.g. outdoor/billboards, corporate sponsorships, product placement, etc.) tldr: Online will never see the type of ad money that TV generated because the balance of power has shifted from the publishers to the advertisers. The next generation of ad buyers will be much more savvy, and the digital publishers have created far too much ad inventory. There's a tragedy of the commons situation with publishers that will continue to drive down CPMs while inventory increases, because if they don't then they will die. Because of low ad rates, it's not really worth it for premium video publishers to compromise their user experience by subjecting their paying customers to advertising -- thus driving the ad money from the big brands out of premium video content and on to other, non-digital forms of brand advertising.
caseysoftware 10y ago
I've been reading "Darknet" via Kindle and it has this idea of "autonomous companies" that do high frequency trading, shuffle around money, and eventually even start "replacing" people by email and video chat. As we have more and more of these systems tied together - usually via APIs - I think it's getting more more likely where things can "just work" transparently. If I need gas for the car, it can go get it, billing to my account on file. If I need diapers for the kid, the system detects that, orders them automatically, delivers them automatically, etc. There are few humans involved anywhere. It's a fascinating and has society-shaking implications.
- lowglow 10y ago
  Check out my comment. I'd love your reply/thoughts since you've been thinking about this as well. :)
- xivzgrev 10y ago
  I agree that will be a start. But knowing that you need more diapers isn't particularly revolutionary - just order the same ones, we are almost there - just have to connect the cabinet to Amazon dash. What will blow my mind is when we have computers that can take an idea - "shit, I just had a kid, I need diapers" - and successfully mimic my purchase criteria and find the diapers that I would've found in my own research process. It wouldn't need me to define my purchase criteria - it would already know me well enough to successfully predict in most cases. At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way.
  - TAForObvReasons 10y ago
    > At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way. For years, Target has been trying to find likely pregnant women based on shopping patterns. There's a strange anecdote where a daughter received pregnancy-related ads and it turned out she was actually pregnant! NYT article discussing this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
Apocryphon 10y ago
And where is the room for a sixth empire? Is Uber trying to claw in from the physical logistics side of the loop?
chiefalchemist 10y ago
More shit we don't need, but faster and cheaper. If that's progress then we're in trouble.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
norea-armozel 10y ago
I find this sort of stuff creepy since it's always built with the concept of giving you the idea to buy something even if you didn't really want it. It's nothing like Futurama brain slug but it's still just as disturbing. It's probably why I'm always unsubscribing from email advertisements from various companies I tend to buy things from (since I'm not a regular customer for anything but utilities, rent, and groceries). I want my choices of consumption to be driven more by necessity than just some slick ad or product placement. Hell, I didn't own a smart phone until just last year. How's that for weird?

100 points by avyfain 10y ago

Ambient Intelligence is the phrase a lot of people are searching for when talking about this stuff. There's also a bunch of stuff about Second-order Cybernetics and Adaptive and Collaborative Multi-Agent Systems people should seek out and read. I've co-opted some terms and am now speaking of this as Second-order IoT. Where previously we were concerned about our personal networks and systems, this next wave will be concerned about how these systems work together and enlist one another to carry out some task or contract autonomously. Chaining these contracts is where the cool stuff comes in. Observing and influencing these systems and letting them create efficient networks on our behalf is the reason we should be building this. Agents are what people are talking about when discussing bots, and agents are basically the AI program that can conscript if not completely become part of the operating service on a device. Like little plug 'n play souls that carry along information about you and what you need within some context. For instance, when you step out of your autonomous vehicle, it can use a service (Playa) to look up physical interfaces offering recharging. It will be able to negotiate and transact a recharge on your behalf, then contract itself out to an uber-like service while you sleep to help pay for itself. I'm building the infrastructure/platform to support all of this, giving rise to a fully autonomous global logistics and supply chain -- I call it Playa (http://getplaya.com/ http://getplaya.com/) It's at first an open service exchange (marketplace) for autonomous intelligent agents to learn from us, and act on our behalf with other services and agents (both digital and physical). - If Artificial General Intelligence is the ruler, then Playa is its throne. Here is the project site http://getplaya.com/ http://getplaya.com/ and here is our Baqqer site if anyone wants to sign up and follow our progress: https://baqqer.com/projects/playa https://baqqer.com/projects/playa We've also started a meet-up group in San Francisco if you want to learn more: http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/ http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/ If you're interested in building this vision of the future, please reach out. I'm happy to grab a coffee in San Francisco and chat more about the current state as well as long term social and political implications of this if you'd like.

actionwords 10y ago
making the world a better place.
7373737373 10y ago
The next step would be doing these interactions - service registration, search, negotiation, usage, payments, certification etc. without a trusted, centralized intermediary. Have a look at the https://ethereum.org https://ethereum.org project to see how this could work out. If these kind of distributed systems for messaging, data distribution and storage as well as consensus scale, intelligent agents will be able to interact with services and each other faster, efficiently and more secure than before.
- lowglow 10y ago
  I definitely think ethereum is a cool project. Unfortunately, I'll be a contrarian and say I don't think the answer is a completely distributed system. I think there is a few mixed options, but the totality must collapse to a central authority at some point.
  - 7373737373 10y ago
    I'm not a maximalist either. Distributed networks are always less efficient than hierarchical systems at specific tasks. Some projects, such as the Bitcoin lightning network or Ethereums' Raiden therefore try to build faster payment or state networks on top of the distributed systems with them as point of last resolve in case of conflicts of cooperation or availability. Doing the inverse of this might also lead to interesting results.
    - lowglow 10y ago
      What are you working on now? Care to reach out and chat? I'd like to pick your brain about some things.
notliketherest 10y ago
Imagine we gave life to inanimate objects and those objects could speak to each other and us. As you described, our car would speak to a charging station. The charging station would advertise "I can charge you for a fee!" And the car could say "charge me here is money". Forget the "internet" of things, these objects only need to speak to other objects in their "domain". Imagine it like this: you walk down a street towards a sitting dog. Once you get close, the dog looks at you and observes you walking by. Once your sufficiently far away, the dog looks away and you're no longer in its domain. Have you thought about the " language" for this inter object communication? Essentially the "api". Words like "charge" and "you" and "money" in my example.

amelius 10y ago

> Google of course needs a vibrant web for its search engine to remain useful So why did they build Android on top of Java then? Wouldn't it have been much smarter to build Android on top of Javascript+HTML where suitable, possibly extending the standards where needed? All these "apps" nowadays represent a move away from the web.

Natanael_L 10y ago
That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices. And there were no sufficient, complete and useful HTML5 standards that could allows web apps to compete with local software. Extending the web standards would simply have been too much work and caused too much trouble.
- amelius 10y ago
  > That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices. Well, the most important thing people do, even on low-end devices, is browse the web.
  - c1sc0 10y ago
    No, that would be IM/chat these days
    - amelius 10y ago
      Ok. But does that require more performance than webbrowsing?
      - LoSboccacc 10y ago
        See: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest...
  - 0xsnowcrash 10y ago

exolymph 10y ago

I'd just like to note that Aggregation Theory totally explains this: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

exelius 10y ago

> The hope is that this will not only create compelling user experiences, but also unlock access to the tens of billions of ad dollars that are currently spent on TV. This is simply not gonna happen. I used to think that as well -- until I did a stint working with one of the biggest sellers of TV ad inventory. It's a completely different game. TV ads are bought and sold in enormous, packaged deals. There's very, very little transparency in the TV advertising game. Everyone on both sides knows Nielsen ratings are total crap with very little bearing on reality, but they trust each other even less, so Nielsen it is. All anyone knows is that TV is great for brand advertising, and you can get a rough estimate of how many eyeballs saw your ad on a given night. With brand advertising, all you care about is the number of brand impressions you make on your target consumer in a given month to keep the brand value fresh in their mind (i.e. "Ford trucks are Built Ford Tough"). TV ads are sold based on personal relationships between reps at advertisers and publishers. That's it. The ad rates you can get for ads sold through traditional TV sales channels are 30-40% higher than digital ads on a per-impression basis. The reason for that? The buyers are more senior, have larger budgets, and less accountability. That TV ad money is literally just disappearing as audiences scatter to various media platforms -- these older, more senior ad executives don't understand digital so it's left to the younger guys who have a much larger culture of accountability and measuring by the metrics. The Internet has created so many opportunities for advertising and so much transparency around pricing for those ads that nobody can justify TV-like rates for digital ad impressions. Think of the things that advertise on TV: they're nearly all high-value goods or services that need to establish a brand reputation. They can (and do) do that online for a lot less per impression, and they don't need to run an equivalent dollar amount of impressions because the online publishing space has created so much inventory they can't even sell it all (creating so-called "remnant" inventory filled programmatically by algorithms at rock-bottom CPMs). But only the "premium" publishers (i.e. anyone with a non-advertising revenue stream like New York Times) can afford to limit their inventory in such a way as to demand higher CPMs: everyone else is in a race to the bottom just to survive. But it's gotten to a point where ad rates are so low that for premium publishers able to succeed with a subscription model, they may not even be a material amount of money. See: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc. In 5 or 10 years, we may get to a point where all "premium" video services are delivered through a subscription model without advertising. That TV money has to go elsewhere, but it's likely to be spent on non-digital forms of advertising (e.g. outdoor/billboards, corporate sponsorships, product placement, etc.) tldr: Online will never see the type of ad money that TV generated because the balance of power has shifted from the publishers to the advertisers. The next generation of ad buyers will be much more savvy, and the digital publishers have created far too much ad inventory. There's a tragedy of the commons situation with publishers that will continue to drive down CPMs while inventory increases, because if they don't then they will die. Because of low ad rates, it's not really worth it for premium video publishers to compromise their user experience by subjecting their paying customers to advertising -- thus driving the ad money from the big brands out of premium video content and on to other, non-digital forms of brand advertising.

caseysoftware 10y ago

I've been reading "Darknet" via Kindle and it has this idea of "autonomous companies" that do high frequency trading, shuffle around money, and eventually even start "replacing" people by email and video chat. As we have more and more of these systems tied together - usually via APIs - I think it's getting more more likely where things can "just work" transparently. If I need gas for the car, it can go get it, billing to my account on file. If I need diapers for the kid, the system detects that, orders them automatically, delivers them automatically, etc. There are few humans involved anywhere. It's a fascinating and has society-shaking implications.

lowglow 10y ago
Check out my comment. I'd love your reply/thoughts since you've been thinking about this as well. :)
xivzgrev 10y ago
I agree that will be a start. But knowing that you need more diapers isn't particularly revolutionary - just order the same ones, we are almost there - just have to connect the cabinet to Amazon dash. What will blow my mind is when we have computers that can take an idea - "shit, I just had a kid, I need diapers" - and successfully mimic my purchase criteria and find the diapers that I would've found in my own research process. It wouldn't need me to define my purchase criteria - it would already know me well enough to successfully predict in most cases. At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way.
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  > At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way. For years, Target has been trying to find likely pregnant women based on shopping patterns. There's a strange anecdote where a daughter received pregnancy-related ads and it turned out she was actually pregnant! NYT article discussing this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

Apocryphon 10y ago

And where is the room for a sixth empire? Is Uber trying to claw in from the physical logistics side of the loop?

chiefalchemist 10y ago

More shit we don't need, but faster and cheaper. If that's progress then we're in trouble.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

norea-armozel 10y ago

I find this sort of stuff creepy since it's always built with the concept of giving you the idea to buy something even if you didn't really want it. It's nothing like Futurama brain slug but it's still just as disturbing. It's probably why I'm always unsubscribing from email advertisements from various companies I tend to buy things from (since I'm not a regular customer for anything but utilities, rent, and groceries). I want my choices of consumption to be driven more by necessity than just some slick ad or product placement. Hell, I didn't own a smart phone until just last year. How's that for weird?