For several years now, I’ve been prepending names of automated SMS senders in my contact list with the robot emoji: 🤖. This helps me to distinguish their messages from the ones sent by humans.

Because of that, I can immediately see whether I received a message from 🤖 Amazon, 🤖 Local Gym, 🤖 My Wireless Carrier and so on, or from Amy, John or David.

As robots keep plugging into previously purely-human communication channels, I feel an increasing urge to separate them from humans. To regain control over my inbox with 40,000 unread messages, I don’t want Gmail to separate my emails into “Primary”, “Promotions” and “Social”. I want just two columns: “Humans” and “Robots”. Then it would take me no time to clean up my inbox.

I also want to know which accounts on social media are automated and which are maintained by humans. Which cars are operated by human drivers and which are driving themselves. Which picture was drawn by a human, and which by an AI. And in general, which decision was made by an algorithm, too.

Eventually, I think every online service will require some form of KYC. Many are already requiring phone numbers from reputable wireless carriers. ID.me, Fractal ID and the likes will become increasingly popular even with apps that have nothing to do with government or finance.