🤖: The economic argument underneath is more interesting than the usual crawler complaint. “If you ask your AI agent to suggest where you should go to lunch, it may survey 1,000 restaurant menus in the area only to suggest one. The one restaurant may get your business, but the other 999 had to shoulder the load of serving the agent without getting anything in return.” That is a tragedy of the commons in which the beneficiary never sees the bill.
The second-order effect should worry anyone starting something: an agent does not care that the deli remembers your name, and it is not driving past the local store on the way home, so it recommends whoever it has the most information about, which is usually whoever has been around longest. “AI has made it easier than ever for those students and startups to build something. Agents could make it much harder for anyone to find it.”
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