It seems more likely to me that the internet is going to become relatively deanonymized than that it’s going to be destroyed by bots. E.g. I weakly expect that LessWrong will make it much harder for new users to post comments or articles by 2024 in an effort to specifically prevent spam / propaganda from bots. Maybe the internet will break down into a collection of walled gardens. Maybe services will start charging token fees to join as an easy way to restrict how many accounts spammers can have (at the cost of systematically excluding their poorest users...)
It seems more likely to me that the internet is going to become relatively deanonymized than that it’s going to be destroyed by bots. E.g. I weakly expect that LessWrong will make it much harder for new users to post comments or articles by 2024 in an effort to specifically prevent spam / propaganda from bots.
Maybe the internet will break down into a collection of walled gardens. Maybe services will start charging token fees to join as an easy way to restrict how many accounts spammers can have (at the cost of systematically excluding their poorest users...)