So obviously ignore this discussion prompt if it seems dumb or out of scope. Its maybe not as "direct" a connection to the future of coding. Lately I've been finding myself wondering more and more often what kinds of agents might be sneaking into different spaces and for what different purposes. On places like reddit, instagram, or bluesky, we know that there are plenty of bots engagement farming or pushing misinformation or advertising or simply acting as fake followers to boost accounts. However, we know that bots/fake accounts are also a common vector for scraping, as it can bypass rate limiting or private areas like this slack. In the last several years, as social media platforms have become enshittified, and the average user has felt less inclined to post, and started spending more time in messaging and group chat spaces like whatsapp, discord, signal, slack etc. In small group spaces, like a personal friend group, you obviously wouldn't have a bot sneak in, but a group chat like this one has thousands of members and it likely would be easy for a bot to get in. Who knows, there may be one or more here now. So here are my questions: - do you think there are bots here? - If so, does it bother you? Do you feel like you want to preserve human discussion spaces from spying, interference, scraping, or being trained on? - Do we need to consider more deeply how the future of computing will be affected by so many non-human users including many malicious actors? - Do we need an improvement at the infrastructure/ecosystem level to securely/practically enable the kind of end-user programming that is commonly discussed here? To own your connections/contacts/community. To have better protocols/standards/etc for communication. Are we really stuck on email as the only really open mainstream communication standard?

100% sounds like a question a bot would ask

hahaha, well, I guess the fact we can't be sure is sort of a case in point

jokes aside, this feels like it overlaps with predictions around increasingly sophisticated and capable AI pushing more of human interaction offline and into the real world

yeah, I do anticipate that, for sure - but maybe as we remember what we like about IRL spaces: intimacy gradients, human scale interactions etc. - maybe we consider how to bring that back into computing?

Very interesting topic! I've worked on automation detection for almost a decade so I'll try to take a shot at your questions: • Re: Are there bots here?: let's say we count a bot as third party using one of the official slack's clients or slack's internal API endpoints that effectively pretend it's a human user (as opposed to for example scraper written by @Mariano Guerra). It would be possible to mostly answer this given slack's logs and a few weeks of statistical analysis. Or with some clever challenge - response mechanism that would verify the client's & it's environment integrity. But even then there is usually a grey area of users of accessibility tools / lurkers that are hard to distinguish from automation. So we're not in a position to answer this question. There are certainly no spam bots here. There may be some actors motivated by data collection but those would have to be very long term oriented ones since Slack's API may be a cheaper way to collect data. There may also be some account farmers but also unlikely as I've never seen any online offers that sell Slack accounts. Overall I'd bet no bots here. • Re: does it bother me?: yes. The asymmetry of knowledge & influence that botting leads to is obviously very bad. • Re other points: absolutely. There are some cryptography techniques that could effectively stop bots right now. Secure boot chain of trust is one. Government issued keys are another. Both of those can be done in a privacy preserving way (using batch keys or zero knowledge proofs or trusted computing), but are typically misrepresented in online discussions as privacy invasive. It's hard for me to say whether that's ignorance or (puts on a tinfoil hat) organized influence campaigns. Bot owners are capable of strategic thinking. Given the amounts of money that some players in this space make, I wouldn't discount the latter option.

Both of those can be done in a privacy preserving way

Are there any other downsides to these techniques — for example, centralized control of who can and can't use the internet?

About as centralized as DNS or the SSL infra

I don't mind bots if they are clearly recognizable as such, and provide (via their profile) a pointer to a description of what they do and under whose control. As so often, the real issue is not the technology, but the context of their deployment.

private areas like this slack

Half of https://futureofcoding.org/community.html is a description of the software people have set up to ensure that this is not a private area. I would love if we could have "human-scale interactions" here, but that's not what we've set up.

Whatever private means these days... We (society at large, not our little group here) are going through some form of boundary crisis. Everyone wants to be inclusive, but wants that word to mean "only nice people" and maybe not too many either. We talk about privacy, knowing fully well that it hardly exists in the digital sphere. Certainly not in any obvious or verifiable way (did you ever check that fancy encryption technology actually works as advertised?). So it's all a big mess. Which is actually fine with me. National boundaries are fuzzy as well, disappearing in many essential aspects (climate, pollution) and becoming the topic of ever more polarized political debates about their desired permeability to people and to goods. I guess I could come up with more examples if I worked seriously on it.

I actually think it’s interesting the balance between trust-in-organization like DNS/TLS Certs vs trust-in-cryptography like blockchain. Cryptography is necessary, but I’ve been feeling lately like the complete elimination of trust by relying on crypto alone (like some of the defi/crypto hype type talk) seems likely to be a dead end as well. By this, I am not bashing cryptography, as much as the dream of a world where we don't need/want trust in people anymore at any level. Instead, I think its valuable to think about what's missing, and what can be best solved through math and what can best be solved by humans and organizational/system thinking.