Every time there’s an advancement in robotics, we joke about Terminators and our new robot overlords. But robots are, in fact, slowly taking over. In fact, they’ve already cornered the Internet, if a new Internet traffic study is to be believed.
Statista, a website that specializes in collecting statistics, recently crunched the numbers on Web traffic and came up with a surprising result. Namely, that despite the fact that most of us are glued to the Internet while waiting for our bosses to remember they’re supposed to give us something to do, the majority of Internet traffic is robots. And a third of it is bad news:
More than 60% of website traffic can be traced back to bots that automatically browse websites for different purposes. Roughly half of all automated traffic comes from good bots, that search engines such as Google use to index a website’s content. The other half of automated traffic is malicious though, caused by content scrapers, spam bots or and other programs that mean harm.
The good news is that between humans and Google, web traffic is about 70% on the side of good. The bad news is that that 30% may be growing more quickly than we think, although thankfully only .5% of the malicious traffic is spambots. Still, that does mean that essentially all it’s really going to take is one malicious AI to hijack Google, and then we’re screwed.
Although come to think of it, Google’s probably building that AI as we speak. So we’re screwed anyway. Well, back to Netflix, unless you have Time Warner Cable.
Via Statista