<strong>Is there hope for humans in the new world?</strong>

Meta, via Instagram, is launching Threads, which will be a direct competitor to Twitter. So, what’s new, you may ask. If you go back 10-15 years, then the Facebook Feed was relatively static with more personal information. Then Facebook copied the dynamic Twitter feed. Its new News Feed was born, a clone of Twitter. Very soon the LinkedIn feed, which used to be very professional once upon a time, became a Facebook-Twitter kind of place.

When Instagram came out then it was mainly used for photographs, but soon people realized that you could load as much text as you wanted to on an image and voila the Instagram status message was born! TikTok took over everyone’s mind space and soon everyone wanted to imitate them. Insta Reels. YouTube Shorts. Facebook videos. Then TikTok itself decided to make their videos longer.

Time was when you had a separate social media account for personal stuff, professional stuff, videos, and photographs. Now it’s a one size fits all. You can have just one social media account and do everything, or you can have multiple accounts and post in all of them for maximum impact.

The feed is monotonous. The ownership is monolithic. Threads, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are all owned by Meta. YouTube is owned by Alphabet-Google. Or you get onto the Apple ecosystem with their iMac-MacBook-iPhone-Apple Watch and bouquet of services.

Then there’s an estimate that says 64% of all Internet traffic comes from bots. Think over it: How much do corporations control the remaining 36%? If that wasn’t bad enough, then with the Age of Generative AI unleashed upon us, won’t the odds be stacked even more against the humans? With a global population decline and ageing along with the natural tendency of humans to be lazy, AI will have a field day going forward.

No matter how much we try for innovation and diversity, monotony and automation rules for it’s easier to scale up and execute day in and day out. That’s why physical robots along with bots are on the rise. We already have autonomous taxis and robots being used as workers in warehouses. Robots are being taught to play games, fight, help the police, be companions etc. It’s just a matter of time before they come into production.

Alexa and Siri type autonomous robots with the power of Generative AI. Drones of all shapes and sizes. RPA bots to serve as virtual workers. Hundreds of billions of IoTs and trillions of sensors lurking in the background. 5G-6G and Industry 4.0 will enable all of this further.

Humans may well choose to run away from all of this and get buried and live in the Metaverse!