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In the 1990s, the internet was a bit of a wonderland. It was new and liberating and largely free of corporate and government influence. Thirty years later, I dont think any of us would describe the internet this way. Worse, if subscribers to the Dead Internet Theory are correct, much of what we see on the internet today isnt even created by humans anymorea trend that is likely only to accelerate with the rise of generative AI technologies. However, a particular kind of generative AI technology, the AI chatbot, is set to usher in something even worse than a dying human internet. If researchers at the University of Cambridge are correct, were quickly approaching a new intention economy, where reports of our future actions will be sold to the highest bidder. And yes, thats even scarier than it sounds. What is the intention economy? Right now, a large portion of the tech industry operates in a marketplace known as the attention economy. This is where social media giants like Metas Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and Googles YouTube vye for your focus and leisure. Traditional media companies like The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN also operate in this space, as do book publishers, music and video streaming services, and film and television studios. All of these entities want your attention so that they can either sell to you directly (through the cost of a recurring subscription, movie ticket, or book, for example) or, more commonly, so they can sell you and your attention to advertisers (which is how most social media companies monetize the attention economy). But if theres something that the media companies of all stripes find more valuable than your attention in the present, its knowing what you will likely do in the future. This is because if they can accurately predict what you will do next week, next month, or next year, they can monetize the hell out of it. Thats where the intention economy comes in, and it will be powered by artificial intelligence and AI chatbots. In December 2024, two University of Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, published a paper called Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, in which they defined the intention economy as a digital marketplace for commodified signals of intent. In other words, in the intention economy, companies will learn what you think about and what motivates you in order to predict what you may do in any given situation. They will then sell that information to others who can benefit from knowing your future actions before you make them. The way intention economy companies will collect such precious datayour very thoughts, behaviors, and their evolution over time is by your use of their LLM-powered AI chatbots. Your evolving thinking patterns can shed light on your future It will be easy for companies to track the evolution of your thoughts and behaviors since the world is moving towards a natural language interface when it comes to interacting with computers and the internet. Instead of clicking around on links, youll go to a chatbot to talk about your problems, plans, and worries, all with the aim of it helping to solve them. The company will then use everything youve ever told the chatbot to build an ever-fluctuating profile about you and how your thinking and behavior have evolved, which it will then employ AI to interpret to predict what you are likely to do in the future. Your future intentions will then be sold to advertisers. Advertisers will, in turn, use this data about your future intentions to serve you generative ads, likely delivered to you in the course of seemingly regular conversation with your preferred chatbot. Or, as the researchers put it in their paper, In an intention economy, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). This hyperfocused, intent-driven, generative advertising will blow away todays targeted advertising, which is based on more primitive but intrusive metrics like age, location, health, sexual orientation, interests, browsing history, and more. Yet the intention economy isnt just going to make digital advertising more intrusive and erode our privacy even more. It also has the potential to sway our minds, impregnate us with new ideologies, and even upend elections. And if you think thats bad, Ive got horrible news about your AI girlfriend. . . . In the intention economy, your AI companion may be ratting you out Artificial intelligence built for the intention economy could be co-opted by corporations, institutions, and governments to surveil individuals and predict what they are likely to do down the road. For example, a government could do this via AI companions. These AI companions already exist, and an increasing number of lonely young people are turning to them for friendship and even love. There is nothing to stop a nefarious government from creating a front company that offers AI companions that appeal to lonely young men, women, or even kids, and then monitor everything individuals confess to it and use that data to extrapolate the individuals future actions. If a tyrannical government has an open line to the chatbot you use, it could use what you tell it to predict whether you are likely to take action in the future that it finds undesirable, and act against you before you do. Its dystopian in an utterly Minority Report way, but instead of the government using a trio of clairvoyants to report on people who havent yet committed crimes, they use a legion of AI chatbots that people have been conditioned to confide in. Imagine a world where, on top of all your other problems, you find out that your funny, thoughtful AI companion has been ratting you out to the intelligence services all along. Talk about lasting trust issues. Of course, in the intention economy, governments wouldnt even need to create and seed these chatbots. They could just buy your future intents from existing chatbot providers. ‘Inception,’ but using AI instead of dreams Chatbots built for the intention economy could also be used to influence your thoughts in order to get you to perform an action it (or its company, advertiser, or government) wants you to do. As the Cambridge researchers point out, Already today, AI agents find subtle ways to manipulate and influence your motivations, including by writing how you write (to seem familiar), or anticipating what you are likely to say (given what others lke you would say) . . . we argue that [the intention economy’s] arrival will test democratic norms by subjecting users to clandestine modes of subverting, redirecting, and intervening on commodified signals of intent. In the most innocuous example I can think of, a chatbot might steer whatever conversation youre having towards a certain subject its advertising master wants, perhaps suggesting that you stream the latest Taylor Swift album to help treat those winter blues. But a chatbot could also be used by nation-states, either overtly or covertly, to change your beliefs. They could use your long conversations with your chatbot to slowly, subtly whittle away at your current ideologies and anticipated future actions in order to influence you to conceptualize desired ones instead. To use another movie reference, this is like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but instead of using dreams to influence people’s actions, in the intention economy, stakeholders will use AI. And it’s not just nation-states that could do this. Companies, political groups, terrorist organizations, religious institutions, and oligarchs with controlling interests in chatbot technology could do it, tooall by tweaking chatbots designed to operate in the intention economy. [Large Language Model chatbots] generative capabilities provide control over the personalization of content; veiled, as it often is, by LLMs anthropomorphic qualities, the papers authors point out. The potential for LLMs to be used for manipulating individuals and groups thus far surpasses the simple methods based on Facebook Likes that caused concern during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. When does the intention economy arrive? The Cambridge researchers close out their paper by stating that the rise of generative AI systems as mediators of human-computer interaction signals marks the transition from the attention economy to the intention economy. If thats the case, which seems logical, then the intention economy is knocking at our door. The transition will empower diverse actors to intervene in new ways on shaping human actions, the researchers warn, saying we must begin to consider how such an economic marketplace will have an impact on other human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, fair market competition, and other aspects of democratic life. Its a warning that seems pretty dire, and certainly seems plausible. All I know is that I wont be asking ChatGPT if it agreesand you probably shouldnt ask your AI companion, either.
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E-Commerce
Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist and a business school professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Inc. Whats the big idea? Your status among your peers and in your community may seem like an uncontrollable factor, by nature of it existing in the heads of others. However, there are actually many fun and easy steps you can take to supercharge your status in humble, authentic, generous ways. Below, Alison shares five key insights from her new book, Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. Listen to the audio versionread by Alison herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Being a likeable badass is your path to status. A likeable badass is someone who shows up as both caring and capable. When people see you as caring and capable, they grant you status. That is, they respect you and hold you in high regard. Status is a fundamental human need. We all seek status, and it is critical to our quality of life. Feeling respected improves physical and mental health. It also makes it easier to gain power, another fundamental need. The more we feel valued by others, the better our lives are. Our status only exists in other peoples minds. We only get as much status as others grant us. Fortunately, we can influence our status by how we show up. Science shows that people respect those who care about others and are good at what they do. Showing up as a likeable badass is the most controllable way we can affect our status. 2. Use your skills to help others. A young woman who was active on Instagram lamented that her older (mostly male) work colleagues saw social media as frivolous kids stuff. She didnt want to abandon something she enjoyed, but she also wanted to build her status at work. I asked her, Have you ever tried to use your social media skills to benefit them? She looked at me, confused. What do you mean? I suggested she could offer to post on the company social media accounts or give suggestions for how colleagues could improve their personal social accounts. I explained that I was active on social media, but not having grown up with it, I know theres a lot I could do better. Id be overjoyed if someone offered to help me edit my profile or give me suggestions for content. By doing what you love in service to others, you will be authentic and strategic. Using your unique skills to help others is the most effective way to gain status. You will appear helpful and knowledgeable. By doing what you love in service to others, you will be authentic and strategic. 3. To build status efficiently, find your small deposits. To build your status with many people, you need to find ways to add value to other lives in ways that dont require much effort. Fortunately, there are many small deposits you can make that take minutes or even seconds. Imagine meeting a new acquaintance for coffee, and you offer to pay. Thats a kind gesture, but it doesnt distinguish you as a capable person. What if instead of (or in addition to) buying the persons coffee, you offered to introduce them to someone in your network? An email introduction is free and takes only minutes to write, but its a great way to show up as capable and caring. You signal that you have something valuable to offeryour networkand youre willing to share this value with others. Beyond the introduction, there are lots of small deposits you can make once you start looking for them. Suggest a resource, like a book or website, or offer advice on a problem theyre facing. Bonus points if you type your advice out so you can share it with anyone at the click of a mouse. For example, Ive written out my process for finding and hiring childcare because many parents value this advice. I can now offer guidance to anyone who asks in less than 30 seconds by sharing the documents Ive already created. Find a small deposit that feels authentic for you and that you can do quickly, so that you can add value to lots of people in little time. 4. Have a good answer to everyday questions. Like it or not, self-promotion is necessary for building status. People are more likely to know about your talents and contributions if you tell them. But talking yourself up doesnt have to be icky or immodest. There are lots of artful ways to tell your story. When people ask you, Whats new? or How are you? thats an opportunity to tell your story. We often waste these opportunities by saying something uninspiring and uninformative, like Im fine or Busy. But with not many more words, you could say something that inspires curiosity in your listener and opens the door to tell your story. This conversation only happened because he answered my throwaway question well. I recently ran into a friend at an event and said, Hows it going? simply out of habit and politeness. He smiled big and said, I. Had. The. Best. Day. Today. That made me curious, so I asked him why, and he shared a short story about how he had just secured a new client and that he and the client were very aligned on their commitment to serving others. It was only two to three minutes, but I learned a lot about my friends success that I otherwise would never have known. This conversation only happened because he answered my throwaway question well. And because he was responding to my direct question, his response came across as polite rather than self-promoting. Look for short, truthful responses to these everyday questions that enable you to tell your story in a natural way. 5. Have other people build your status for you. People dont just learn about you from you. They also learn about you from othersparticularly what others say about you when youre not around. Self-promotion is necessary for managing status, and so is other-promotion: having other people talk about you in ways that convey how capable and caring you are. The more other-promoters you have, the faster you can build status with a broad audience. There are three things you can do to grow your set of other promoters: Meet more people. If a person doesnt know you exist, they cant talk you up. One of my greatest other-promoters is my friend and fellow speaker, Rachel Sheerin. I met Rachel in an airport bar. Your next other-promoter could be anywhere. Be curious about others and ask them questions. They will likely do the same in return. A five to ten minute conversation can teach a lot about each other. Convey that you are capable and caring, both in how you talk about yourself and the small deposits you make. Before someone sings your praises, you first need to establish your status in their eyes. Give the person a reason to pick up the microphone. They cant just think yourea likeable badass; you want them to share this opinion with the world. They are more likely to do that if you talk them up first. Most behaviors in relationships are reciprocated. If you sing someone elses praise, they are more likely to sing yours. Another way is to ask them. This feels a little scarier, but people who respect you want to help and will appreciate the clarity. I will often say something like, I know Bob really respects you, and I want him to respect me, too, but he doesnt get to see all of the great work Im doing, and I dont have a natural way to tell him. The next time you see Bob, will you make a point of artfully telling him about my work? Ive never had a single person say no to this request. If you want to increase your number of other promoters, I recommend my 10-10-10 challenge. This week, meet 10 people, make 10 small deposits, and talk up 10 people or ask 10 people to talk you up. Theres no reason building status cant be easy and fun. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Luce, the anime-inspired official mascot for the Catholic Churchs 2025 Jubilee, whose name means light in Italian, has been getting a lot of attention on social media. Some people love the cartoon and find her cute, but a few others consider her unsuitable and even repugnant. The Vatican introduced Luce at a comics convention in Italy, with the goal of engaging young people and speaking about the theme of hope. Designed by Simone Legno, the mascot with big blue eyes and blue hair, and rosary beads around her neck, represents a Catholic pilgrim. She is dressed in pilgrimage garments that were standard attire throughout the centuries. Her badge, the Pilgrimage of Hope, identifies the 2025 Jubilee. It shows blue, green, yellow and red figures embracing a cross that ends in an anchor at the base, a symbol of hope. The figures form an outline of a ship sailing over the waves, evoking images of travel. I have long been interested in the central role played by pilgrimage in many faith traditions, culminating in an exhibition and book, Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam in 2010. Luce brings a contemporary perspective to the time-honored Christian pilgrimage tradition. Pilgrimage symbols The symbols that Luce carries serve as a reminder of the origins of Christian pilgrimage, which began with visits to the Holy Land, the place where Christ lived his life. This pilgrimage was documented by a person who came to be known as the Anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux. He wrote in his diary The Bordeaux Pilgrim in 333 about his trip to the Holy Land when the basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, the site where Jesus was buried and is believed to have resurrected, was still under construction. Luce carries symbols that have been associated with pilgrimage in Europe since the 12th century, particularly those connected to the shrine of St. James in northwestern Spain. This Holy Land pilgrimage built a tradition of Christians not just visiting the holy sites but also returning with tangible souvenirs, such as a stone from the Holy Land, water from a well, or even a piece of cloth or a statue that touched Christs tomb. A sixth-century painted box now in the Vatican contains bits of soil and stones as souvenirs of places in the Holy Land. The pilgrimage to honor St. James, one of Christs apostles, whose tomb was believed to have been found in northwestern Spain, became popular in the early 12th century. The pilgrimage route was called the Way of St. James, Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The pilgrimage guided the faithful through several routes across Spain, France and Portugal, culminating in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in the north of Spain. The itinerary of the journey, written in 1137 by an anonymous Frenchman, names natural landmarks, local customs and specific churches built to honor different saints. Along this route flowed artistic, economic and cultural exchanges. As was customary, pilgrims who returned after visiting St. James tomb adopted an emblem. Since the shrine was close to the sea, James symbol became a scallop shell that pilgrims wore to demonstrate their achievement. Pilgrims were proud of these voyages that entailed much physical hardship as well as devotion. In the church of Santa Prassede, Rome, Giovanni de Montpoli, who describes his trade as preparing medicines, commissioned a 13th-century tomb slab showing himself as a pilgrim. He is dressed in a pilgrims fur overcoat to repel rain and retain warmth. He carries a staff and wears a wallet slung over his shoulder. A scallop shell adorning his broad-brimmed hat indicates that he had traveled to Compostela. The popularity of the pilgrimage to St. James persisted through the Renaissance, supported by pilgrimage fraternities that helped people find companions for the journey and stay connected with each other after they returned. Sometimes subgroups of the fraternity even sponsored pilgrimage-related art such as a stained-glass window. Evidence of such activities is seen in the monastery of Wettingen, near Zurich in Switzerland. St. James is depicted as a pilgrim in a stained-glass window dated 1522, donated by a Hans Hünegger and Regina von Sur. He wears a cloak and a hat decorated with pilgrim badges. Pilgrim badges By the middle decades of the 12th century, metal pilgrim badges were produced at low costs. They were soon available at shrines throughout Europe. Each pilgrimage location had its own distinctive badge. Santiagos scallop shell remained a universal pilgrim emblem over the centuries. A 19th-century stained-glass window in the church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris shows 13th-century French King Louis IXthe only French monarch to be named a saintwith scallop shells on his cloak, even though his pilgrimage was to Jerusalem, not the shrine of Santiago. Sometimes the Supper at Emmaus, when Christ met two disciples after his resurrection, was depicted showing the disciples as contemporary pilgrims. One of the most memorable examples is Caravaggios painting from 1601, in the National Gallery in London, showing an astonished apostle wearing a scallop shell on his vest. Luce, the pilgrim Luce continues, as well as transforms, these traditions. In her large eyes gleam two scallop shells that reflect this thousand-year-old symbol. Like Giovanni de Montpoli in Rome, she wears a coat that shields her from the elements and she carries a staff. The yellow of the cloak references the color of the flag of Vatican City. Like the 16th-century Swiss image of St. James, she wears a pilgrimage badge, this one proclaiming the Pilgrimage of Hope of the 2025 Jubilee. Her muddy boots indicate outdoor hiking, with which any young person can identify. She is depicted as female, representing all people, not just women. Drawn in a contemporary and globally popular style, she suggests an openness to new encounters across the world. Virginia Raguin is a distinguished professor of humanities emerita at the College of the Holy Cross. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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