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A society is composed of humans. But there are (very stupid) AIs loose on the Internet that aren't going to respect human etiquette.

By analogy: humans drive cars and cars can respond to human problems at human time-scales, and so humans (e.g. pedestrians) expect cars to react to them the way humans would. But there are other things on, and crossing, the road, besides cars. Everyone knows that a train won't stop for you. It's your job to get out of the way of the train, because the train is a dumb machine with a lot of momentum behind it, no matter whether its operator pulls the emergency brake or not.

There are dumb machines on the Internet with a lot of momentum behind them, but, unlike trains, they don't follow known paths. They just go wherever. There's no way to predict where they'll go; no rule to follow to avoid them. So, essentially, you have to build websites so that they can survive being hit by a train at any time. And, for some websites, you have to build them to survive being hit by trains once per day or more.

Sure, on a political level, it's the fault of whoever built these machines to be so stupid, and you can and should go after them. But on a technical, operational level—they're there. You can't pre-emptively catch every one of them. The Internet is not a civilized place where "a bolt from the blue" is a freak accident no one could have predicted, and everyone will forgive your web service if it has to go to the hospital from one; instead, the Internet is a (cyber-)war-zone where stray bullets are just flying constantly through the air in every direction. Customers of a web service are about the same as shareholders in a private security contractor—they'd just think you irresponsible if you deployed to this war-zone without properly equipping yourself with layers and layers of armor.




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