Cacophony Revisited … And you thought Space Invaders was an arcade game from the 1980s.

Last year I published an article about the noisy, information-saturated world we live in.

I revisited this topic in my “Something To Sleep On” newsletter a couple of weeks ago (you can sign up here to get on my mailing list).

I am becoming convinced that the advent of AI, or artificial intelligence, is responsible in large part for the cacophony that inundates us daily. Bots now make up more than half of all Internet traffic, according to the security firm Imperva. They have seamlessly insinuated themselves into our lives, largely without our knowledge. At first, we viewed them more as a curiosity than the pervasive intruders that we see today.

Remember, the “devil you don’t know” is much more insidious than the “devil you know”. At least that’s what my grandmother used to tell me. (By the way, I often wonder what she would think about these odd, invisible creatures invading our lives through something called the “cloud”.)

AI is a great thing and has the potential to improve our lives in so many ways. But there is a downside … and our challenge will be to learn to control it and to harness its power for the better good. Meanwhile, we should be ever-mindful that much of what we see and read on the Internet may have been created by alien, non-human visitors.

Please email your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.