The smallest unit of a community where one co-exists with others for their day-to-day life activities or leisure.
Currently, human beings are connected with one other in a way that has not happened before in the history of mankind. This connectivity is made possible by wiring themselves digitally, than physical presence, by means of mobile telephony.
Digital connectivity on the other hand has limited the need to move around physically and it means people are confined to their space whilst involved in making digital connections.
For these reasons, the base unit of society is not a township anymore but a physical property where people congregate for day-to-day life or leisure.
We, as human beings, are more satisfied sitting on a couch and browsing through mobile applications and reading and enjoying the content made available. In fact billion dollar industries exist in that space to serve the needs of human beings.
Two to three decades ago, the Township was the base unit of society with people migrating in large numbers from rural areas to township or one town to another. That migration still exist but movements within the town are increasingly limited to serving personal needs and communal living is dying.
Even when people are on the move, the focus is to hold their mobile devices and check the latest content of influencers, friends, and family. People rest themselves more on the couch browsing content than meeting others and doing activities together. The base unit of the society has shrunk to a building, something one might not have predicted three decades ago.
The paradigm shift in life patterns has opened up new opportunities as well as issues.
The opportunity fell to the hands of internet companies and the effect is quite similar to the gold rush that history saw in the 19th Century. Advancements in Computing capabilities and Artificial Intelligence have set fire to technology advancements and the velocity of innovation has surprised both younger and older generations.
One of the problems of this changing life pattern is Loneliness. In 2023, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Gallup published a report highlighting that one in four people in the world are feeling lonely. Refer to Tackling Loneliness by Empowering Micro Communities for more information.
Causal AI systemizes causes and effects in relationships and is a type of AI quite different from other types like generative AI and LLMs which systemizes correlation.
Community managers are now increasingly trying to bring back communal effect to their micro-communities. In order to bring back vibrancy in micro-communities, Causal AI is expected to play a significant role in helping community managers understand underlying causes and relationships.