Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
This has been going on for decades and Blizzard started using it almost exclusively with World of Warcraft. They made the game a virtual Skinner Box (look it up and read about the experiments if you’ve never heard about it, pretty much animals will prefer to do things that they derive pleasure from instead of necessary things, like eating), and other companies followed suit. Then loot boxes and IAPs became a thing.
It seems like it’s a recent development in this decade, at least an accelerated form of it.
Almost like recently evolved in corporations got together and decided enmass to start treating their customers more like things to exploit.
Less win-win, and more win-lose.
It’s absolutely gotten worse, but it’s been a thing for decades.