Social is supposed to refer to relationships between humans.
And social networks are the result of establishing such relationships.
People connecting with people.
Platforms that allow people to tell whatever is on their minds.
And other people can read it, listen to it, see it.
And give their opinion. With hearts, thumbs or, if you’re feeling chatty, with words.
The funny thing is that it seems that social networks are becoming less and less people-to-people.
I have recently been preparing a talk for university students.
A talk on digital skills.
Basically (and I’m being a spoiler here) the message is that either you get up to speed with the technology that is coming or technology will put you in your place.
And besides talking about current technologies.
And to tell stories about what I have seen in my thirty plus years of experience.
I also took the opportunity to talk about the new technologies that are already arriving.
Among other things, I delved into the topics of AI. Artificial Intelligence.
In recent years, its use is skyrocketing at all levels.
From systems that recommend what series to watch, what music to listen to, what books to read.
To systems capable of generating text, photos, audio, and videos from a simple idea or a partial photo.
And, interestingly, we are seeing a lot of potential for AIs in the generation of texts for websites and social networks.
Systems capable of writing short texts, tweets, email titles, product descriptions, biographies or complete ads for any social network.
To those that can write complete posts or emails on the topic you are interested in.
In other words, not only will the AI decide what content is of most interest to us (or its owners) on our social networks.
It is also more than likely that this content will no longer be generated by people but by other AIs.
We will end up following virtual writers (probably unknowingly) who write about the topics that interest us and who have their own avatars, photos and fictitious biographies.
We are getting closer and closer to the replicants of Blade Runner.
When AIs no longer know whether their lives are real or a pure invention of the virtual world.
We will soon be living in a world of information automatically generated from other information that was automatically generated on top of previous information.
Blade Runner showed us that we are very bad at guessing the future (just look at how it was imagined in the 1980s, Los Angeles of 2019).
But what is very real is that technology is changing our way of life.
And that, whoever knows how to take advantage of it at the right time, has a great opportunity to generate the business of the future.
And the future itself.