What's the (p)doom for culture?

In the AI space, (p)doom is the "probability of doom"; a number between 0 and 1, indicating how likely it is that AI will kill everyone or permanently screw over humanity.

With current technologies, I have a different fear. Maybe not everyone will be dead, but culture as we know it could take a massive hit.

Or one will lead to the other? Who knows. I'm not here to make predictions; in this note I collect worrying tendencies when it comes to the impact of technolgy on culture.

The Effect of Social Media

Social Media was first contact with AI – and it didn't go well for us. Facebook was launched in 2004 – that's more than twenty years ago. I first thought that social media caught us off guard, we weren't prepared or wise enough to deal with it to not make us addicted or mentally ill. Now, 20 years later, it doesn't look promising. Social media have gotten better and better at hooking us, and I don't see any strong signs of people fighting back successfully.

AI, Fake News and the Erosion of Trust

AI generated content, especially images and videos, gets better and more indistinguishable from real photos and videos. This probably has several effects. For one, people who fall for fake images will be convinced of things that are not real and true. Others (or eventually, most) will become very distrustful of anything they see online. This corrodes our common ground.

AI Influencers and the Loss of Human Contact

Right now, social media is very algorithmically driven – but it's still humans watching humans, mostly. What we'll probably see is AI content getting more and more attention, at the cost of human creators.

In the words of Mark Zuckerberg:

it’s just going to be this huge explosion in the amount of content that’s available, very personalized and I guess one point, just as a macro point, as we move into this AGI future where productivity dramatically increases, I think what you’re basically going to see is this extrapolation of this 100-year trend where as productivity grows, the average person spends less time working, and more time on entertainment and culture. So I think that these feed type services, like these channels where people are getting their content, are going to become more of what people spend their time on, and the better that AI can both help create and recommend the content, I think that that’s going to be a huge thing

It's very unclear to me what the effects will be, but it can't be good.