Project Vision 21

These days, especially thanks to large language models, you can hardly read anything that hasn't been written and translated by artificial intelligence. Therefore, regardless of the topic or language, articles and news have the same structure and follow the same sequence. It is the dawn of digital monoculturalism.

The topic is not new, obviously. In 2016 Shelly Palmer (a well-known technology expert) already warned about the “inevitable path towards digital monoculturalism”, understood as the disappearance, due to AI, of the “rich tapestry of human expression”. In other words, AI, whether algorithms or language models, is redefining human cultural creations.

And it's not just a matter of stories, news, or translations. Think of the navigators in cars, which drivers obey so blindly that it doesn't matter whether they are taking them on closed roads or impassable mud roads. And since everyone obeys the navigator to follow the fastest route, the congestion that they wanted to avoid is created.

Or think about social media algorithms, which mean that we can only see and share what the algorithm decides, not what we or others want to share. Furthermore, preference is given to messages and posts of dubious quality and even more dubious authenticity and benefits. Think about all those “challenges” that many people blindly follow.

But where does the overwhelming, overwhelming digital monoculturalism really come from? Not from technology, but from our decision to delegate all kinds of decisions to technology, from the creation of an image that we would never have created otherwise, to a university entrance exam and even a medical or psychological diagnosis. The list is endless.

The situation is complicated because, as we know, AI and its derivatives reflect the same prejudices and discriminatory tendencies as their creators. That means that not only will we be trapped within a bubble of monoculturalism, but that monoculturalism will also be as discriminatory and prejudiced as current society, or perhaps more so.

At the same time, there is another possible dimension of this digital monoculturalism, what could be called the “fragmented” version, in which each of us is trapped, fragmented, within our own digital culture and, as a consequence, is isolated from all the others, no matter how many “friends” or “followers” ​​we have on social networks.

Ultimately, through negligence, laziness, intellectual laziness, or inability, or whatever, we are slowly but inexorably creating our own global limiting narrative, which, like all limiting narratives, is inapparent to the storyteller and therefore remains unchallenged, and without its harmful consequences being accepted.

It is true that human beings are not good at making decisions, whether individually or collectively. Wars, pollution, social conflicts, and all other types of circumstances demonstrate this.

But the solution to our ugly decision-making skills should not be to delegate decision-making about humanity and about Earth to artificial intelligence. Rather we should all mature individually and collectively to take responsibility for our own lives without losing what makes us truly human, from our mistakes to our ability to learn from those mistakes.