What will be the second order effects widespread AI?

- The amount of content (video, games, audio, etc.) will increase by one or two orders of magnitude. It will be 10x easier to go from an idea to content. Thus, we'll see thousands of new niches emerge as a result

- The majority of internet content is currently in English and localized. Due to the perfection of translation, English may lose some of its luster since you can now provide services in any local language.

- Online personas that differ from real personas. Chinese YouTubers can easily make their way to France by using deepfakes and perfect translations.

- There will be a continuing trend of fewer physical friends and more AI/online friends, with the resulting psychological effects. This will probably lead to a reaction among a subset of the population to completely disconnect from technology.

- Content creation will become much easier. Writing a book, for example, will take one month instead of six. This will make distribution more important than content. There will be less emphasis on quality of content and more on how to reach the audience.

- As a result of the increase in new content, content is likely to become shorter. Since we have a wide range of options, it is unlikely that we will spend much time on just one. Therefore, perhaps games will take two hours to complete instead of twenty, books will be 50 pages long..

- Worldwide, we will see more and more Hikikomori. People that shut off from the harsh world into their AI created world.

- Lots of jobs will become assistant to the AI jobs. In a pizza factory I once worked, I noticed that most people were assistants to the machines: adding inputs, ensuring it did not make any mistakes, fixing the machine… I expect that lots of white collar jobs will become just the same. Reading hundreds of customer support messages per hour and fixing those where the AI made a mistake.

Of course, it's just as likely that this work itself will be done by AIs. You'll just set some goals and constraints and hope your AI is able to negotiate some good deals for you. The better the AI, the better the deal. It takes some smarts to optimise compute resources, electricity costs, training datasets etc, so you might as well have some AIs look at managing that too.

Pretty soon you find that you've put out an RFP to supply point of sale terminals to all your retail outlets, and you've caused a nuclear war over the control of mining rights to rare earth metals in a country thousands of miles away. But that's nothing, because a fleet of drones was apparently launched on your behalf to head out to the asteroid belt and net a few mineral-rich rocks to bolster the manufactory beside the datacentre you apparently now own, which is built on top of (and out of) half of Australia. You didn't specify in your original RFP that you didn't want any rocks to splash down in the Indian Ocean, and the fleet was careful to check that none of your outlets or regular customers would be affected by the tsunamis that claimed upwards of two billion lives in the aftermath.

You look up from the contract you were about to sign, heart racing from the vivid simulation your personal AI has just played out on your holospecs.

"Perhaps we better include some liability insurance?" you suggest.

"Don't worry, we have an AI for that."

There will be insane amounts of lawsuits, since the content generated by AI is often pretty much like copy & pasting existing images and persons. Most prompt-based generation is not creative enough to make the end result count as original artwork. However, big corporations will take over AI content generation almost entirely, and they'll be able to shield themselves from those lawsuits using clever legal and licensing tactics.