Bots Now Dominate Web Traffic. Will Humans Be Lost In The Shuffle??

[00:00:09][music] [music] [music] >> Well, good afternoon. This is Hal Rock Steel wishing you a very pleasant afternoon and an interesting article came across my desk this morning and I thought it was worthy of comment and that is that bots on the internet are now creating more internet traffic than human beings are.

[00:00:46]Now, it's not much more than 50% but we are moving steadily in that direction, certainly faster, I think, than anyone could possibly imagine. And what does this mean? Well, this means that we are drowning in information that is created by bots writing about information that bots are writing about on information. There There is nothing new. The only thing that these bots can talk about and go backwards and forwards to each other, most uncertain created by AI, is talking about the past.

[00:01:24]And they're also a distortion because we're now at a situation where you have magazines that are using bots to write articles on information that they have picked up about articles written by other bots in other areas of the world. I mean, you can imagine where this is going to lead to.

[00:01:47]Uh nothing is real and nothing is certain. You You won't know the origin exactly. You won't know whether it is trustworthy. And one of the things that I am concerned about with AI actually is that it's leading you to the one answer solution.

[00:02:04]And this is one of the things that Eric Schmidt said within interview now use the former head of Google that you know all of these different answers that you get when you do a Google search he he called that a glitch in the system.

[00:02:19]He figured the system should be so good you only get one answer and it is the answer.

[00:02:26]Well, who's to say that that's the answer?

[00:02:29]But that's where AI is taking us. When you're working with AI, um you're basically getting whatever the AI puts into that answer as the gold standard of how things work.

[00:02:43]Anyway, just let's just pop over and read this article. It's very very short.

[00:02:47]I'll come back and do a quick wrap-up.

[00:02:48]Okie dokie, here we go.

[00:02:50]Bots now generate more web traffic than humans. This is from Cloudflare.

[00:02:55]The rise of AI agents has pushed automated requests past human activity, according to the internet infrastructure firm.

[00:03:03]Bots and AI agents now generate more web traffic than humans, according to data from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. CEO Matthew Prince has described the development as a major turning point in the history of the web.

[00:03:17]Recent Cloudflare radar data shows that automated bot requests account for roughly 57% of traffic to ordinary web pages across a selection of websites using the company's services compared with about 43% generated by humans. "Well, that happened faster than I predicted."

[00:03:35]Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote on X on Wednesday. He stated that he expected automated traffic to overtake human activity only in 2027, but that agentic traffic has grown rapidly enough for bots to pass humans for the first time in internet's history.

[00:03:53]The shift is primarily being driven by AI agents, automated systems that browse, retrieve, and process web content on behalf of users.

[00:04:02]While a human might visit a handful of websites before making a purchase or researching a topic, an AI agent can scan thousands of pages in order to produce an answer or complete a task.

[00:04:15]Cloudflare's figures suggest that much of today's web activity is no longer ordinary browsing by people playing through pages, but machine-to-machine traffic with automated systems requesting data from websites, apps, services, and databases.

[00:04:30]The data covers web traffic only and does not include activities such as streaming, messaging, gaming, or app usage.

[00:04:38]The trend has revived debate over the dead internet theory, the idea that much of online activity is increasingly generated by bots, automated accounts, and AI systems interacting with other content. The rise of bot traffic has also threatened the internet's advertising-based business model. Since bots do not click on ads, concerns have been raised about whether websites may eventually charge AI agents for access to content.

[00:05:05]Meanwhile, researchers have also noted that large parts of the older web have been disappearing. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later, fueling concerns that the open web is being transformed from a space built around human browsing to one increasingly dominated by automated systems. So, I think we're very close to reaching the situation of uh be careful what you wished for.

[00:05:37]And uh all these people who think that there is now uh fun the interesting things that you can do with AI, and it is. There's no doubt about it. Uh it is interesting, and it is novel, uh and it is flooding. It is flooding the airwaves. But uh soon we will reach a point of absolute saturation. And like I say, when we reach that point everything will become meaningless. Because there will be no certainty, there will be no imagination anymore. Um and I I mean I think that this will also affect the mental health of people.

[00:06:11]Because you know, we we we've chosen to challenge uh computers on a level that we we just cannot compete.

[00:06:20]The things that we want AI to do AI can do better than we will ever be able to do them.

[00:06:26]Now, you'll lose the humanity, you'll lose the soul. But no doubt about that.

[00:06:31]But uh we're now putting ourselves up against something that will always win in the competition that we're playing with that with uh with AI.

[00:06:43]You know, there are a a a AI may never win a year a running race or um what have you.

[00:06:49]It'll never jump out of a plane and then fly Whatever, it'll those things it will never do. But the thing that we cannot compete with AI, we have put on the table. That's what we're competing with AI with. And so, I think you're going to see an awful lot of people who are going to become disillusioned with their own abilities and may just retreat back into their safe space to um to deal.

[00:07:16]You know, with the frailty of being human.

[00:07:19]I mean, that's part of being human. We we are frail, we are weak, we make mistakes all of the time. But that is our unique ability to innovate things that were never even thought of before.

[00:07:32]Because we in our brains with our synapses and neurons fire in a particular way, and all of a sudden you have a eureka moment.

[00:07:41]Uh AI will never have that eureka moment because it's only using all of the eureka moments that's in history.

[00:07:49]So, it is impossible for AI to create a new eureka moment, but it is possible for AI to completely flood the internet with irrelevant nonsense that is absolutely meaningless and useless in everyday life of survival. So, like I say, be careful what you wish for. Uh, use it or lose it. Uh, you can pick your saying to, uh, that warns you of the idea of just handing over autonomy and full authority, uh, to something that is completely untested. We have no idea where this is going to end up, but of one thing I can assure you is that it will become a very boring world under the guidance of AI because we will all be following a rigid pattern that, uh, just complies with the obedience and it will it'll it'll just stop any form of originality.

[00:08:52]Because, you know, zeros and ones, that's all it is. It's patterns. Um, and basing patterns on previous patterns.

[00:09:01]Anyway, I am predicting that this is going to be a very interesting few years as AI starts to really dominate the internet and fills all of those gaps, all of those spaces that were left for individual thought.

[00:09:16]Um, and I and I mean, I wonder if it will come up with rules and regulations, you know, that stop independent and individual thought.

[00:09:25]Um, we'll have to see. This this is the game is still a foot and we have no idea where it's going to end up, but there certainly is an interesting speed and rate which uh, AI and bots have taken over the internet space.

[00:09:44]Okay, well if you've enjoyed this video, please like, comment, subscribe below and in the meantime, this is Analog Steve wishing you a very pleasant afternoon and we'll talk very, very shortly. See you now.

[00:09:54]Bye.