We’ve all heard about the utopia envisaged by Elon of “optional employment” where we will while away our time with video games and growing vegetables. Sadly, I doubt that is reality for most of us.
In the short term I think we’ll all be working super hard on building a machine-scale world, and figuring out how to benefit from it.
Welcome to the land of the er, rats
Everything is a question of scale – to a rat, a cat is a monster. So far we humans have been the big cats in the world. Using our superior brains to compensate for some creatures being bigger than us. Now, there is a bigger cat on the block – the bot.
The US this week banned the import of robots from China. This is driven by fears that these humanoids might be up to no good – could send data to their remote bosses, collaborate with each other, or attack critical infrastructure. A very valid fear, and not just from China-made ones.
But what about those invisible bots with no arms and legs that are spreading on the internet?
The packs of cats we can’t see – who are breaking the internet
In June this year bot traffic on the internet overtook human traffic for the first time. AI-driven traffic grew about 187% across 2025, roughly eight times faster than human traffic over the same months, per HUMAN Security’s 2026 State of AI Traffic report. Agentic AI traffic, where software acts on a person’s behalf, grew 7,851% year over year. It makes sense – a human can research a few sites at a time – even those who have 100 open tabs like me. But a bot can query thousands of sites, easy peasy. The largest volume of traffic is training crawlers, then AI agents and fetchers who are looking at live sites in response to a query, and then malicious bots.
Our digital infrastructure was built for human usage, at human scale. Our systems were not built to handle this volume of ceaseless traffic. The giants are over-running our Lilliput Land.
Do you speak machine?
Much of what is on the internet was not designed to be read by machines. A bot prefers structured data, in a format that it can easily consume and compare.
Imagine that you are buying a shirt online- you care about the how the colour looks in the photo, the size mentioned, the brand, the price and maybe the speed of delivery. The bot on the other hand would prefer to know the pantone shade of the colour, the dimensions of the shirt, the fabric used, thread count, number of buttons, place of manufacturing, any data that adds to the credibility of the claim. It would note the brand but would probably also be able to detect an identical product with a different brand – a dupe. It would use these characteristics to search across multiple sources that deliver to my location and then recommend the best option, based both on the functional characteristics and delivery, returns and usage feedback.
Building the parallel internet – for the new cats
The way customers – whether B2B or B2C find you and purchase your products – is dramatically changing. The agents prefer content they can use and read. And if you don’t accommodate these agents and bots, it is the equivalent of slamming the door on ALL your customers, as one way or another AI is a part of commerce now.
So you will have to relook at your infrastructure to handle the new volumes of “buyers” and create a parallel internet where the bots will feel at home, with machine readable content.
Essentially, the work ahead is for humans to build for the bots. Then, maybe, if you’re lucky, utopia will strike. Meanwhile plenty of work to be done if you know how to do it!
Now that we’re no longer the big cats, what do we do?
1. Put in governance processes to ensure that our bots don’t harm us or other.
2. Realize that business has already changed and if you don’t accommodate the bots you will not survive.
3. Advocate for equitable distribution of wealth. Bots are the ultimate scaling engine. They can rapidly accumulate wealth for those with an advantage of capital or skill.
4. Universal access to healthcare, childcare, housing, literacy needs to be legislated so that the robots and bots implement it when the time comes.
The Rat Pack
I want to celebrate being human. I want to hang out as a group, to collaborate, to experience joy and sorrow as a community. To enjoy sitting in the garden on a beautiful day. Maybe it is a good thing we got moved from the cat to the rat category – cats are rather solitary, and, dare I say it, a tad selfish? Rats are way more social.
My fellow bandicoots, gerbils, and related species which are cuter, would love to hear from you on how you feel about our new position in the pecking order? What work are you doing to benefit from the influx of bots? Hey, we’re the species that cooperated to take on the wooly mammoth and invented UGG boots 🙂
As a human I crave interaction – do post a comment!