Optimize for What?

Just read Noel Tock’s Human Made Newsletter1 – they are always at the cutting edge of WP development – on how they are building a WordPress integration that uses the Abilities API and the MCP Adapter to basically optimize a website’s content automatically, without a human in the loop. (Sorry for the pun…) From what I understand it will update the content, then check against defined metrics whether it has improved, and so on. This sounds impressive, but while reading it, my thought was: Optimize to what end? While they are aiming to influence human behavior (e.g. improve click rates on a CTA), it’s a funny thought (probably not really funny at all) that more and more of the audience reading (and processing) that content are not people, but other machines. A website optimizing itself, by a machine, for other machines to read (burning tokens and natural resources ad infinitum). To what end, I wonder? The web version of the newsletter was not yet available by the time this post was…