Game theory is still inevitable. Its application to humans may be non-obvious.

In particular, the "games" can operate on the level of non-human actors like genes, or memes, or dollars. Several fields generate much more accurate conclusions when you detach yourself from an anthrocentric viewpoint, eg. evolutionary biology was revolutionized by the idea of genes as selfish actors rather than humans trying to pass along their genes; in particular, it explains such concepts as death, sexual selection, and viruses. Capitalism and bureaucracy both make a lot more sense when you give up the idea of them existing for human betterment and instead take the perspective of them existing simply for the purpose of existing (i.e. those organizations that survive are, well, those organizations that survive; there is nothing morally good or bad about them, but the filter that they passed is simply that they did not go bankrupt or get disbanded).

But underneath those, game theory is still fundamental. You can use it to analyze the incentives and selection pressures on the system, whether they are at sub-human (eg. viral, genetic, molecular), human, or super-human (memetic, capitalist, organizational, bureaucratic, or civilizational) scales.

Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.

You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...

Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products.

https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...

> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.

This is a good point, and I’m willing to concede that I may be wrong here, that predictive power can be gained from (possibly mis-) applications of abstractions onto a real space, which is what one of the real reasons to favor abstract thinking in business in the first place.

A practical formula:

1) Identify coordination failures that lock us into bad equilibria, e.g. it's impossible to defect from the online ads model without losing access to a valuable social graph

2) Look for leverage that rewrites the payoffs for a coalition rather than for one individual: right-to-repair laws, open protocols, interoperable standards, fiduciary duty, reputation systems, etc.

3) Accept that heroic non-participation is not enough. You must engineer a new Schelling point[1] that makes a better alternative the obvious move for a self-interested majority

TLDR, think in terms of the algebra of incentives, not in terms of squeaky wheelism and moral exhortation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

As a recent example, Jon Haidt seems to have used this kind of tactic to pull off a coup with the whole kids/smartphones/social media thing [0]. Everybody knew social media tech was corrosive and soul-rotting, but nobody could move individually to stand up against its “inevitability.”

Individual families felt like, if they took away or postponed their kids’ phones, their kid would be left out and ostracized—which was probably true as long as all the other kids had them. And if a group of families or a school wanted to coordinate on something different, they’d have to 1) be ok with seeming “backwards,” and 2) squabble about how specifically to operationalize the idea.

Haidt framed it as “four simple norms,” which offered specific new Schelling points for families to use as concrete alternatives to “it’s inevitable.” And in shockingly little time, it’s at the point where 26 states have enshrined the ideas into legislation [1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/19/jonathan-haidt-on-smartphone...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/cellphones-phones-school-ban-stat...

Great.

Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage.

FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now.

YMMV

AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

Unfortunately, it's going to destroy the Internet (and possibly society) in the process.

That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?

> AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

AI slop, unfortunately, is just starting.

It is true that nobody trusts anything online... esp the Big Media and the backlash against it in the last decade+ or so. But that's exactly where AI slop is coming in. Note the crazier and crazier conspiracy theories that are taking hold all around, and not just in the MAGA-verse. And there's plenty of takers for AI slop - both consumers of it, and producers of it.

And there's plenty of profit all around. (see crypto, NFTs, and all manners of grifting)

So no, I dont think "nobody will read it". It's more like "everybody's reading it"

But I do agree on the denouement... it's destroying the internet and society along with it

He didn't cause that, he is just riding the wave. The call to ban them has been going on for years, it was just put on pause during the pandemic.

'defect' only applies to prisoners dilemma type problems. that is just one, very limited class of problem, and I would argue not very relevant to discussing AI inevitability.