Sadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)

I don't know man, I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair? And like we could vote periodically to make sure that our rules continue to be useful and relevant.

You can't trust everyone, but that is basically the exact use case for government: to enforce basic standards of behavior so that we can all live more efficient, happy lives, rather than live in an arms race of personal methods to fuck eachother over and prevent ourselves from being fucked over.

I don't think society could come up with a truly comprehensive way of eliminating the evil part of advertising but I think we could do a lot better than we are doing if people would just wake up and insist that the government actually do what it is supposed to do.

  > I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair?
      

you mean, like some kind of... democracy?

idk, one of our internet vulture-capital magnates was on cnn the other day proclaiming "thats not gonna happen"...

> you mean, like some kind of... democracy?

Yeah, I think that was the point.

And yeah, I agree, except governments are slow and, most of the time, corrupt. I really, really wish it worked! (There are counterexamples, I’m sure.)

So while I’m waiting for a GDPR 2.0 that would outlaw the bullshit data collection altogether (and not just put it behind a cookie banner), I’m still going to install an adblocker on every of my friend’s computers – because it works today.

But it will be ok. Ads already stimulate over-consumption and thereby destroy the climate/planet. With an AI acting against that perhaps it will stop.

I mean adblockers are pretty good, does that stop ads? No they just find ways to circumvent and it's a cat and mouse game.

If most humans can tell it's an ad, then so can an AI. Probably ...

You just described pretty much all life.

Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.

Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.

energy is abundant.