I was just wondering what has come out of silicon valley since say 2003 that has been a net positive for humanity. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's progress.

Now we get to see how OpenAI will do similar harm, more effectively and at much greater environmental cost.

I feel like we have an opportunity to break a feedback loop. SEO worked because of links. No links in my chatgpt discussions. Ah, but what about all the junk ai gen content you may counter, but that stuff only works because of SEO links. As more people abandon searching for links for discussions, the SEO usefulness diminishes. Maybe to the point where many parasites stop making SEO shite in the first place.

I wasn't even talking about the information pollution -- I was talking about boiling the ocean. Not that I'm not concerned about the former.

But to your points. I think the problem with your analysis is that it forgets that the real driver of the junk is the advertising environment. The SEO links were profitable because the advertisers were willing to pay a few cents for space on those pages. Yes, the incentives are changing for the teenagers who are churning out text and adding seo links to their stable of cheap websites, but the advertisers are going to find a way to manipulate consumers that's compatible with the new order. I don't know what that will be, but whatever it is will depend on information pollution just as much as the current one.

Anyone have some good links/citations on the consumer surplus of Google? How much value do we get as users?

Considering the value of time, past consumer surplus is especially valuable now.

Sure, there are systematic flaws causing SEO to ruin the information provided: but it isn't clear what Google can do to fight the emergent system.

I'm not sure that Bing/DDG are any better.

I use search (DDG web, Google/Apple maps, YouTube) all the time and I am regularly given results that are extremely valuable to me (and mostly only directly cost me a small amount of my time some of my time e.g. YouTube adverts). Blaming SEO on Google seems thoughtless to me. Google appears to be the victims of human cybersystems as much as we are.

I'm seeing the trillions in additional productivity argument more often here, especially when trying to defend their monopolistic tendencies. What I've never seen are raw numbers backing this.