A fascinating piece. Related to your points, I was talking with one of my sons, who was born in 1991, about memories, and the experiences that shape our lives, and he explained that many of the experiences that shaped him happened in the virtual world. We were talking about the common events, which for my generation were the achievements, failures, childhood crushes, fights, births and deaths of people we know, getting lost, making things, etc. You know, life. He was very clear about it---many of the analogous major life experiences for him happened on a computer and involved people he never met in real life. As a man in his early thirties, he was more or less grown before smart phones replaced flip phones. (The WWW was invented just about the same time he was.) Another son was born in 1992. Interestingly, they both agree that someone even five or six years younger than they are is of a different generation because of smart phones. They say the generational difference between them and their step-sisters who were born in 1997 is as big as the difference between their generation and mine. My experience with all of them tells me that this doesn't seem to be an exaggeration. The connected world has had some absolutely remarkable effects for the good, but on balance, so far, IMO, it has been a psychological and social disaster for many, possibly most, people. TV, and the explosion of the availability of media imagery in the mid-Century, lest we forget, was also enormously socially dislocating, as was radio and cinema for the preceding generation. But my intuition is that the computer/networked/Internet is an order of magnitude more devastating, and adding the capability of AI to generate pseudo-human input to the muck-stream is shaping up to be a terrifying increase in the power of networked connection. By loose analogy, AI today is where cinema was in roughly 1930, or the internet was before the introduction of the WWW. Its power to synthesize mental activity that belongs solely to human minds is increasing literally exponentially. The danger of AI isn't trivialities like job-loss or AI powered weapons. It's in vaporizing all that is distinctively human, and reducing real existence to second-hand participation in a fever dream that belongs to robots.