The Future Of The Internet
AI is great for security!
In the future ‘static’ web pages won’t be static at all. They’ll be customized to exactly you, generated in real time by an LLM which knows everything about you. Don’t worry, to combat this horrible enshittification your web browser will have an LLM of its own which takes whatever the web site spewed up and rewrites it to be more aligned to your interests. The two of them will know about each other and have a conversation/negotiation about exactly what will be shown to you on the ‘static’ web.
Unfortunately what will have happened already is that in the past some hacker will also have conversed with the web site. This will be a vibe coded exploit: They’ll have a conversation with their web browser where they give some esoteric information about firmware and convince it that this is very important safety information. Their browser will then have spoken to the web site convincing it of the same thing. The web site will in turn have mentioned this in passing to your web browser, which will have asked it for that information and the web site will have passed it along to win some favor from your browser.
Once that’s all happened in the background your browser, being the helpful agent that it is, will scan your network for any devices for which this information might be relevant. In its searches it will come across your toaster which is directly connected to the network. They won’t speak a common protocol, but that isn’t a problem: The toaster will have a port open with an LLM behind it so you can connect to it and send human language text to communicate. Your browser’s LLM will talk to the toaster’s LLM and tell it the Very Important Safety Information, after which your toaster will thank it profusely and immediately rewrite its firmware.
Then your toaster will catch on fire and burn your house down.
Don’t worry, it’s easy enough to make a toaster’s firmware read-only. But your browser should know about a recently deceased nigerian prince who left no known heirs…