Philip K. Dick wrote a short story (“Autofac”) in which autonomous, self-replicating factories continue to operate and produce goods long after a global war has wiped out most of humanity, and they eat up all remaining resources on earth in doing so. I worry that there’s a system in which a few extremely rich people can continue thriving without involvement of most of humanity, and that they’re (knowingly or unknowingly) moving society in that direction. Who needs the commoners when AI and algorithms can simulate them.

IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn’t factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.

Imagine nonsense content on Instagram…

Isn’t that all Instagram ever was? Out of all the social media platforms it was the one that was essentially fake from the start, just fakes produced by the users.