If the incentives of the social internet are status and validation, if the social internet is merely a convenient venue to get what we want from other humans, proliferation of strong AI will kill it because AI will digitally represent us better than we do.

I think you're on to something here. It is obvious that the social internet is already mostly fake and the new AI tools will just increase the velocity of fakeness. I hadn't thought about this before in regards to social internet but many things in human history swing from extremes. I suspect the more and more AI / fake the internet gets the more desire for real things will rise.

I think we are still in the early phases of adapting as a species to the always connected internet. I think we are finding the edges. Some of us, especially those that work on the systems have long been aware of the negative side of this connectivity to an artificial world that presents itself falsely as real. More and more the users of this world are seeing the issues with it. That will continue. I wonder how fast it will happen though.

Your post reminds me of Dune (book) which predates Star Wars and I've heard was a strong influence. In Dune there is a ban on the use of computers. If you mentally suspend how unenforceable something like this would be, it is an interesting idea. I believe the idea Herbert had was that human kind was limited in its potential by computers. This might seem like a luddite idea but I think there may be some merit to it. When I watch people glued to their phones swiping TikTok videos full of nonsense I wonder how much potential is being wasted. I wonder how much we are being dumbed down by the algorithms built to entertain and addict us to these little dopamine hits. How close are we to finding the edge of this world and moving back into reality?

I sometimes wonder what it would look like if we had a world wide economic catastrophe like the great depression? If even a few systems just stopped working? If some key people died. How many people would even know how to survive with slightly less modern conveniences? It hasn't been that long since the Covid pandemic gave us a little taste of what it might be like. The scary thing to me is that when I look around and talk to people it doesn't seem like most people learned any lessons. Few seem concerned about preparing for a really serious pandemic. I think we were very lucky it wasn't much worse. We are still recovering from IMO mostly self inflected wounds. What would a very deadly catastrophe bring? Does the average person even have a weeks worth of food? Do they have a means to protect their family? Do they know how to survive without power from the utility company? What if the Visa system went down? I know that I learned many things since 2020 because of how exposed and unprepared I felt.

I think we have many hard lessons ahead. One may be a gift from AI. Getting us off the slow death feeding tube of fake connection. Maybe we need to OD first. I think we will lose many people. Many are already lost. Just don't be one of them.

Dang, I didn't mean to get that dark but you got me thinking @k00b. Need to check my generator now.

I seriously don’t understand this model.

A) I’m going to either screenshot or copy/paste the article as soon as I open the page

B) because I don’t want to pay per time spent on a site, because I don’t want to be constantly doing cost analysis in my head