Personally, while I don't believe there is a "root problem" -- they are impact each other -- in my view the most fundamental of all the related problems is information dissemination and curation, including fake news and informational manipulation. I cannot see how we can make any progress on anything if our information exchange channels are unreliable. And they are, today, and more so all the time:
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* Fake news is everywhere, and you have seen nuthin' yet in a year or two when "everybody" has turned on their AI "writers" and "photographers" at scale ...
* The "objective" news media keeps losing ground in favor of ... I don't even know what to call that.
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