While I don't play, and this post is about the in game economy, I think it well supports traditional principles of IRL economics I am vaguely familiar with. For me this principle of supply and demand is a fundamental reasons I am absolutely against bots on Hive, and to a lesser degree against automating social interactions. Hive is people interacting, as all social media platforms are, including the internet itself. The imposition of AI on the internet lately has greatly reduced it's value to mankind, IMHO. Myriad AI videos and pics are dramatically deranging our understanding of very real issues, not least the horrors of war, often with malice aforethought, or just for lulz, by the botmasters. I feel this intrusion of bots/automation is extremely ill-advised, and no one will more regret it than those pushing it hardest as the consequences of devaluing people to the level of toasters impact them. It is impossible to elevate toasters to the value people have to us.

There is a qualitative boundary that separates people and things I remain convinced cannot be transcended, despite the astounding capacity of AI to weight text and image data to cobble together comments and images useful and surprisingly relevant to people. Further, I think that astonishing relevance conceals that qualitative difference from many, and particularly devs working in that field. Electrical engineering computational networks does not mimic consciousness whatsoever. It mimics - at best - brains. What it conceals is the ineffable - at least to date - nature of consciousness, what we are, truly, rather than a pile of goo, and the fundamental structure of the universe, in myriad ways we are barely capable of conceiving presently.

We have no idea what consciousness is, the very thing persons are, nor where it comes from (it is provably not the brain), why it comes, what differentiates conscious things/entities (and what conscious entities that aren't physical things are), and an endless list of attributes that are utterly formative of our existence, perception, and conceptions. AI is demonstrably not conscious, while an animate single celled creature, without any neural capacity whatsoever, provably is conscious. The human brain uses about 12 watts of electrical energy to provide processing services to our consciousness, and most of that is automatically managing our 'hardware', the above mentioned pile of goo. An AI neural network might use megawatts to perform a comparable level of computation, which indicates just how crude our current technology is relative to biological systems providing computations. I suspect - but have no means of proving - that consciousness isn't created by living things. Perhaps the reverse is true. How could we find out? We can only detect consciousness indirectly, by observing animate living creatures acting in ways that demonstrate they remember, learn, and decide.

Hive is rather thoughtlessly enabling bots to interfere in human interactions, without much understanding of any of the possible effects, particularly adverse effects, such intrusion of automation on society might have, mostly because doing so is more emunerative to those with the most stake. Of late the orders of magnitude increases in utility of AI have prompted influential devs to look at more, and more emunerative, ways of infesting our social interactions with bots. Because of our almost complete lack of understanding of what people are, and of the import of our personal interactions, we are leaping off cliff in a cavern deep underground in absolute darkness, in terms of knowing what the consequences of doing so will be for the society using Hive to interact. But AI is not like a pen, is not just a means for people to interact. Bots displace people, and more to the point, replace people.

Like genetic mutations, such blind changes are extremely unlikely to be beneficial, IMHO. Most people hardly even grasp these are matters that fundamentally impact them, having formed basal beliefs arising from our cultures, traditions, and indoctrinations from our earliest youth, which we mostly adopt instinctively. The degree to which we are intentionally acculturated and indoctrinated to benefit those able to sculpt our world views is unknown, hardly considered, for the most part, and upon investigation could well be done malevolently by psychopaths incapable of self-reflection due their narcissism and inability to even conceive they might be wrong to do so. That might even be happening on Hive, too. How could we tell?

People are of inestimable value. We really have no idea what we are, as conscious, living beings, but whatever that is, nothing laps against the soles of our boots in value to us relative to what we are. Mike Tyson said that Don King would sell his momma for a dollar, and most normally socialized people consider this a scathing condemnation of the greed and inhumanity of Don King by Tyson. I would certainly divest myself of everything I own to have my mother restored to life again, right down to my socks. We are far more valuable to one another than mere money or goods. All too often the desirability of money causes us to fail to reckon the costs of getting it, and we have all made mistakes that have cost us relationships - and self respect - we regret losing, if we have the capacity to self-reflect, and a conscience.

Someone I cherish is today facing neurosurgery as a result of a mass growing in their brain, and as our relationship was lately strained by behaviours I could not understand, I bitterly regret that nescience of the reasons for their unreasonable actions that left me unable to more quickly recognize their medical need, and get them help that may - or may have had I been more prompt to realize what was behind their behaviour - save their lives. It was only two days ago I managed to get them to Urgent Care, and I hope fervently it is in time to keep them alive, and still availed of capacity to live independently, laugh, and love. I am sure you can recognize how heartbroken I am, and how deeply I regret not understanding the reason our relationship was being strained.

Just so the intrusion of automation into social interactions on Hive, I fear. Despite I have been on Hive for eight years, and clearly care about this platform, using it daily for that entire time, it isn't a person. It's just a way to connect with folks I do care about, but has no means of connecting us on the intimate level that sitting across a table can. My world would be impoverished without Hive and that connection to people I care about here, and I would gladly part with all my stake to ensure that connection was durable and robust. The exigency of my dear friend has driven home to me the value of our connection, and the value of Hive to the people that interact here is illuminated by that light.

I would hate to suffer the loss of our society here because bots make the platform unusable, as they have so many sites that once were vibrant and populated with communities greatly benefiting from their personal interactions, that infestations of shills and bots have degraded to inutility, and have collapsed into disuse. Bots displace people, all too easily. Because of supply and demand, as Hive's user base shrinks, our token enjoys less demand. It is their desirability to people that creates Hive token value, and reducing Hive to a few botmasters competing for tokens will utterly eliminate the value of our token. It's just supply and demand. That danger to Hive is very real, and almost completely ignored, but we still have the opportunity to save Hive from the growing mass of socially toxic AI that threatens to replace people.

Thanks!