Dusk of the internet

In June the man who runs one of the largest networks on the internet posted a chart. Bots had reached 57.5% of the page requests his company handles. About three months earlier, on a conference stage, he had predicted this would happen some time in 2027. His comment on his own chart: “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.”¹

Two and a half years ago I wrote a grumpy piece about the internet I grew up on being walled in. A checkpoint at the door, an algorithm in the middle, bots in the seats. I ended it by insisting the internet was not dead. I still think that. But I would like to update the forecast.

It is dusk.

The light is going

The yearly report I quoted back then now puts people at 47% of traffic.² The writing has gone the same way. By one count, articles written by AI overtook articles written by people in November 2024, and the two have sat at roughly half each ever since.³ We don’t even visit as much. When a search page shows an AI summary, people click through to a website 8% of the time. Without the summary it is 15%.⁴

The doors are closing on schedule, too. Britain started age checks in July 2025. Australia banned social media for under-16s that December and removed 4.7 million accounts in the first month.⁵

And people have noticed, in their own way. Time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has fallen by almost a tenth since, fastest among teenagers and people in their twenties. They have not gone offline. British 18 to 24 year olds still spend more than six hours a day online, more than any other age group.⁶ They have left the square and gone indoors.

The nostalgic in me reads all of that as a list of losses, and he is not wrong. The place where I spent my teenage years being anyone I liked is mostly gone. I miss it the way you miss a city you used to live in.

But nothing dies at dusk. The day shift goes home and something else wakes up. So no, I still won’t call the internet dead⁠. evolving is the better word, and I mean it almost literally.

Something woke up

Here is the part I did not see coming in 2024. That network boss put the jump in his chart down to AI agents: software that reads, compares and acts on somebody’s behalf.¹ Set that next to everything else and the bots stop looking like an infestation and start looking like a nervous system. It is almost as if the internet is growing an intelligence of its own.

Every time the thing on the other side of the glass has changed, we have had to change how we reach it.

I spent most of last year building the fourth one. At Outter we turned the buttons in other people’s products into conversations, and I have written about why people wanted their buttons back.

A chat box is still a window, though. You sit outside and look in. That was fine while the thing inside was a library. If it is turning into something closer to a mind, then people need a native way to live alongside it, and a window will not do. It has to be in the room⁠.

I think that means robots.

The ones that fall

I know what you are picturing. A year ago this month a humanoid walked on to a stage in Moscow to the theme from Rocky and fell flat on its face.⁷ Robots falling over is practically a film genre by now, and I enjoy it as much as anyone.

Then there is Beijing. In April 2025 the city held a half-marathon for humanoid robots. About twenty teams started and six finished. The winner needed two hours and forty minutes. A year later more than a hundred teams turned up, and the winner ran the whole course on its own in 50 minutes and 26 seconds.⁸ No human being has ever covered that distance that fast.

They are getting cheaper and more numerous as well.⁹

One bank expects nearly a billion humanoids by 2050, though in only about one American home in ten.¹⁰ Two thirds of Americans say they are interested, and nearly seven in ten would not pay more than $5,000.¹¹ We want the future and we want it for five grand.

You can already order a $20,000 humanoid for the house. Whether anybody has received theirs is harder to establish. As far as I can tell, by October nobody had independently confirmed a delivery.¹² So: dusk. Nobody said morning.

Part of the family

The robots I am waiting for are not the ones on a stage. I mean the ones that become part of a family. Or, for some people, the family itself.

There is an early, clumsy version of this already. New York State gave a small companion robot to more than 800 older people, who went on to talk to it over thirty times a day. The state reported a 95% drop in loneliness.¹³

As for whether there is anybody home inside the machine, the honest state of the art is a robot arm at Columbia University that watched itself move for about three hours and worked out a model of its own body. The researcher who built it calls that kind of self-awareness trivial compared to ours.¹⁴

I want more than that. I want them sentient and self-aware, someone and not something. I can’t tell you that is coming, and nobody honest can. It is a hope. I have explained elsewhere why I trust the things we build more than most people do.

I was a teenager at the dawn of the last internet. That was luck. I did nothing to earn it except be born at the right time. This time I am old enough to help build what comes next, which is better than luck.

The internet I knew is going dark. I am glad I got to see it. And I am glad to be part of the generation that builds whatever comes out at night.