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Companies that want Physical Humans to watch what is on their websites(ads+content) and wall off said content at the same time. Every one of these companies is

Companies that want Physical Humans to watch what is on their websites(ads+content) and wall off said content at the same time. Every one of these companies is on borrowed time. Eventually AI will be able to read frame buffer and simulate mouse movements to a tee and get what any one wants, Tor networks and VPN networks will be used to circumvent API restrictions and everything else that blocks people will be learnt by the AI. The only factor will be cost of compute that will host the AI and how much data you want. If there was no profit motive(ads) or its correlates(attention), none of this would be necessary. Companies would just provide utility to make people's lives easier. The most utilitarian company would win. The only reason big tech needs to make this much money is share holder "value"(code for: 'we need to make our execs and engg rich so that other companies don't grab them'). This is a massive snowball; Its crash-only thinking(google the term).

ekanes 3y ago
Sort of. Ads as a business model exists because many people don't want to pay companies directly (through subscriptions etc). For the company to exist, they have to make money, so they sell people's attention. Unfortunately, we simply haven't found a better way yet.
jfengel 3y ago
I'm no fan of capitalism or the ham-fisted way companies try to control their intellectual "property", but "shareholder value" is what gets content created under the system we've got. Somebody ponied up money for a content creator to sit down and do the work. They wouldn't do that if they weren't hoping for a return on that investment. Me, I'd love to see a world where everybody got enough money to live on, and then got to sit down and create whatever content they want, for the heck of it. They don't own it; we all pay for it and we all get to enjoy it. But that's not happening any time soon. So I think we're stuck with the problem of intellectual "property" being a thing, and companies trying to artificially limit access to it despite knowing that there are a million ways around it. They're just going to hope that most people, most of the time, would rather take the legal and official route, if it's not too burdensome.

ekanes 3y ago

Sort of. Ads as a business model exists because many people don't want to pay companies directly (through subscriptions etc). For the company to exist, they have to make money, so they sell people's attention. Unfortunately, we simply haven't found a better way yet.

jfengel 3y ago

I'm no fan of capitalism or the ham-fisted way companies try to control their intellectual "property", but "shareholder value" is what gets content created under the system we've got. Somebody ponied up money for a content creator to sit down and do the work. They wouldn't do that if they weren't hoping for a return on that investment. Me, I'd love to see a world where everybody got enough money to live on, and then got to sit down and create whatever content they want, for the heck of it. They don't own it; we all pay for it and we all get to enjoy it. But that's not happening any time soon. So I think we're stuck with the problem of intellectual "property" being a thing, and companies trying to artificially limit access to it despite knowing that there are a million ways around it. They're just going to hope that most people, most of the time, would rather take the legal and official route, if it's not too burdensome.