Facebook Autopilot © 2031

It's a warm spring day in the year 2031. Alex listens to the birds singing at the start of a new day when he suddenly realizes that he has not used social media for almost 2 weeks.

Alex isn't an outlier. Most people don't use social media anymore, or only very sporadically.

The decline of social media began with the introduction of services offering to improve people's content. Initially, they were not much more than toys. Yet less educated and less creative people quickly noticed that using such services caused their media to generate more likes than before and their tweets to be shared more frequently. In some sense, these services were leveling the cognitive playing field.

When they began to generate substantial revenue, considerable improvements were implemented. Most importantly, the multimodal artificial neural networks they employed began to be fine-tuned for each user based on their social media history and the feedback they received.

As the services evolved, the suggested improvements began to make up an ever-larger share of the original content created by their users. Eventually, people began to notice that the autogenerated content offered as "inspirations" was often better than what they could think of themselves.

The companies being keen on offering new features they could charge for took the hint and started to offer fully automated social media posts.

Initially, many people were skeptical. But after testing the "autopilot" features for a few weeks it turned out that they not only agreed with everything the artificial intelligence posted but realized that it actually represented a smarter, wittier version of themselves.

There was just one catch. Social media was more than just generating content and likes. It was also a source of entertainment. But services that could generate content on behalf of people were also able to filter information for them.

Many people decided to only have the most exciting interactions and content being forwarded to them.

These days almost all social interactions take place between so-called beta-level simulations: artificial neural networks designed to mimic a person in appearance, mannerisms, and thought patterns. This freed up massive amounts of time and vastly improved people's well-being and mental health. The consequence was an explosion of productivity.

The deep learning revolution continues at a breathtaking pace. Dating apps and marriage are now also in steep decline as advancements in robotics enabled the creation of human-like sexbots.