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▲ xg15 3 hours ago

Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?

▲jstanley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?

▲magicalist 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.

> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?

> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.

Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...

But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.

▲jstanley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.

Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.

You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.

Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?

And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.

▲lazide 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.