AI Is Eating the Web. Same as It Ever Was.
Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) — 404 Media
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I had a call the other day with the Dean of a top-five school of public health, and in between furiously scribbling notes (yes, I still take notes), it struck me that here in the United States we’re simply terrible at making proactive decisions based on evidence. We were talking about the pandemic, and the Dean observed that our public health systems failed us in those dark years, and we all had to fall back on our healthcare system — which of course is designed to react and respond to crises, not to identify, contain, or prepare for them. That’s the job of public health, and in 2020, it was not up to the job.
So now, given all we’ve learned about the pandemic, are we investing in a strong, resilient public health system? Of course not. We’ve decided that our collective health should be driven by the for-profit goals of capitalism, and capitalism will always optimize for short term gain over long term costs. In the US, 90 percent of investment in health care is in the medical industry, and just 3 percent goes into public health, the Dean told me. It’s bananas. Instead of learning our lesson and bolstering our public health defenses, we lean instead on the medical community to do post facto mop up duty.
