With this quick hack I drained my bank account! I set up an Instagram bot to browser for 30 minutes a day. It had a 2% chance to click any of the ads I saw. This aggregated URLs of products I wanted. To simulate bad late night purchase I set a Chrome headless instance to crawl these page at 11pm each night. This had all my form-saved information. To model drop off from bad UI, it would recursively auto fill the forms and try to proceed through the purchase, this gave me about a 70% drop off rate once in the checkout process.

(Just to be clear I didn't actually do any of this.)

What if we made a version of product search that sorted results by the number of times your reading bot saw the product advertised in your social feed (from bots). The entire social media enterprise could be supported with zero human effort.

I had a shower thought once that between the time all humans died and the Internet goes down (all that infrastructure still need human maintenance), Twitter would be just filled with bots posting their spam under the top trending hashtags, creating feedback loops as the system sees other hashtags the bots use and push them up as trending.

And the last machine that'll be running will probably be a machine desperately trying to talk to a payment API because it needs to bill their long dead client after some other algorithm overspent the client's ad budget...

You should check out the short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury

My favorite chapter in "The Martian Chronicles". I will never forget it.