In an episode host and industry veteran Robert Jacobi joined host David Lockie to banter about the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, open source, and the shifting definitions of freedom and digital innovation. During their conversation, Robert reflected on the changing nature of the web, the pivotal role AIs are beginning to play in both content creation and consumption, and how these developments are reshaping our understanding of human participation in the digital space.
“There are less humans on the open web than there ever have been. And it’s only getting worse. I mean, even where I’m at now at Blackwall, we do these internal reports on how much traffic we’re seeing, and it’s 55-60% of all traffic is bot agent driven at this point. So who is actually benefiting from all the content? How are you as an SMB, whatever platform you’re using, benefiting from the content? Are humans actually even interacting with you at all? …
Now you have like 0.3 seconds to actually read the internet because it’s not you reading the internet, it’s, you know, your agent, your RSS feed, your whatnot, that’s making decisions for you… The adoption around agentic is, is not huge today, but when everyone has an app on their phone that says, I’m your happy agent, let me do whatever you’d like me to do, uh, that traffic will all of a sudden take over 90% of the web. And, and how do we understand what that traffic management does for us you as, know, site owners, site developers, you know, e-commerce owners? Are we building out separate API-driven interfaces directly for those agents?
Does that mean now we have to do twice the amount of work, but 90% of the work is only for the agents, and, but we have to spend way too much time on the humans that might accidentally visit our sites at this point? Those are the kind of questions that kind of bug me about, like, who’s actually using the internet?”
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