How bots are overtaking humans on the internet

Remember when the internet was like this? "With America Online, you get instant news and sports, financial updates, online magazines." The year was 1995, and the digital world brimmed with possibility. Fast forward a few decades, and now the internet is like this: "This is Muse. Personal AI agent from Meta built for you and your goals." Meta introduced Muse in September, and millions of Facebook users have downloaded it. "I'm trying to save for a car. Where can I cut back? I gave Muse read-only access to my bank statements. And just like that, it built me a dashboard complete with a budget and spending."

These days, you are just as likely to run into a bot on the internet as a fellow human. In fact, bots now outnumber people online. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company, reported that for the first time this year, more than half of all internet traffic is non-human. This shift has consequences for the economics of the internet—how we access information, how we pay for things, and what happens when the roads are full of trucks instead of cars.

The creeping sense that something is off