
The Internet Economy - avyfain
https://medium.com/@cdixon/the-internet-economy-fc43f3eff58a
======
caseysoftware
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.

~~~
xivzgrev
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
> 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.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.html?_r=0)

------
lowglow
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.

~~~
7373737373
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
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
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
What are you working on now? Care to reach out and chat? I'd like to pick your
brain about some things.

------
amelius
> 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.

~~~
LoSboccacc
I don't think cpu were ready back then. Sure you had that blackberry thing
using the equivalent of the modern embedded webview but you couldn't do much
heavy lifting with it.

Also many standard didn't exist. Maybe today, with webgl and asm.js and web
workers It's viable, but in the days native access was the only way to provide
a smooth experience. See: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-
our-biggest...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-
mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/)

~~~
amelius
Good points, but I think that Facebook's problems might have been more about
integration than about performance.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Found the technical writeup [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-
coremob/2012Sep/0...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-
coremob/2012Sep/0021.html)

Two main issues back then were scrolling perrformance and memory constraints.

We're working at image heavy microsites at lookcast and I can confirm memory
issues and composition performances are still constraining what we can do on
devices.

------
norea-armozel
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?

------
exelius
> 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.

~~~
WalterBright
Watch "Detroit Muscle", "Truck Tech", etc. on TV. Those are shows that show
you how to hack your car. The sponsors of the shows provide the tools and
parts that the mechanics use. It is advertising, but in a way that people want
to see. It's a very organic form of product placement.

~~~
gregpilling
yep, entirely an ad. I was once their customer (2006ish), and paid about $1000
per minute. Was not worth it. Would not do again the way that it was done.
Counterintuitively, I think I would have been better off to spend more and
dominate the focus on the show.

In this light I think just producing my own content for Youtube is the smarter
strategy. I have to acquire new skills, but who doesn't when they run a
business?

~~~
exelius
> In this light I think just producing my own content for Youtube is the
> smarter strategy. I have to acquire new skills, but who doesn't when they
> run a business?

This is the route it's going. Larger brands will hire professionals and
celebrity hosts, but smaller guys can get in on the game as well (i.e. the
"Will it Blend" videos).

Sure, you'll probably have to do some ad spend to get some eyeballs to your
videos, but it won't cost anywhere near what TV advertising does.

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

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

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

