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Yeah, I saw this is actually a big piece I didn’t go into, but I think we should talk about a little bit, is the addiction piece. A lot of times people get stuck on the addiction piece and they don’t see the full chain of events. That’s what I wanted to walk through. In some ways, you can think of the addiction piece like as if you jack our brains into these systems, the addiction is like how deep is the jack into your brain? A lot of times these technologies, they’ve learned very well how to hijack kind of the dopamine hits that we get that are meant to reward us for doing certain life extending behaviors or reproductive behaviors, just sort of like survival mechanisms.

But now we’ve hijacked those mechanisms and instead we’re just getting stuck with dopamine hits that are actually taking us nowhere. I think this shows up very, very poignantly with children. A lot of people who are listening with children will understand that it’s so difficult to take a device away from a child because they’re now getting this hypernormal stimulus, hyper normal meaning beyond what is normal, beyond what is healthy, beyond what the body has evolved to do. Stimulus. These things, like everything is very fast-paced, very… Even the screens, just for very young children, the brightness of the screen already is hypernormal.

If you take a two-year-old or a one-year-old, if you put a TV on or you turn on a phone, the brightness of that screen is brighter than anything around them and so their eyes immediately will go to that in an indoor environment. And so you’ve got this situation where there’s all these hypernormal stimulus. Not to mention, now every cartoon, every YouTube video, every game, every app, they’re all competing for this. We get dysregulated. Once our receptors get trained for that level of dopamine, we don’t do very well when we get normal levels of dopamine. So you find these kinds of horrific situations where children, if you take the phone away, they’ll tantrum. Sometimes they’re even much worse outcomes that happen because their brain is rewired. I think that’s a big piece.

The other piece is this idea of giving people what they want. Companies will often do this and say, “Hey, because people clicked on it, that’s what they want,” when actually it’s what they can’t help but do. They can’t help themselves because if you live on a feed, if you see a sort of sensational image that sort of piques your interest, you’re going to click on that. But that doesn’t mean that’s what you wanted to do. If a big flashing thing comes, your eye will go to that. It doesn’t mean you wanted to look at that. One of the analogies we make is if you’re driving on the highway and you see a car crash, and an AI is kind of observing you and they say, “Oh, wow, look, humans seem to love car crashes. They always look at car crashes. Let’s make a world with car crashes everywhere.”

Obviously, that’s not what we want. We look at car crashes because we know that that’s kind of related to our survival. So we tend to be very kind of on alert there, and we look at that, but it doesn’t mean that’s the world we want. The analogy there is that our feeds are often full of metaphorical car crashes, and in the end it makes us all click on things that we don’t intend to, and it steals our attention and it steals our time in ways that are not aligned with our original intention. The question is, what would be a much wiser world would be a world where the tools that we have or the places where we spend time ask us what our intention is instead of inferring that based on what we click on.

Because those are often almost always not aligned. The problem is, if they did that and they really tried to guide us to what we intend, our time on site would be much shorter. That doesn’t monetize very well. That’s kind of the reality, that no matter what people say, you have to look at the business model behind whatever product, whatever product you’re using. The business model reveals the actual incentive structure. This is why social media companies just can’t be that helpful for you because they really need you to be on site as opposed to, for example, learning the thing you need and then going away and living your life somewhere else like off-screen.

There’s a conflict of interest there, and that’s why they have a really hard time actually being genuinely useful to any large meaningful measure.

You said something very important. You said just because of people clicking and something having many clicks, that’s not necessarily what we want, but that’s actually what pulls our attention maybe because of much more fundamental basic needs of survival and whatever gets triggered by this sensational newsfeed, sensational images. Last year, we had a track on trauma-informed journalism, and we made in a way to point that actually sensational news and social media feeds are detrimental to public health. We are on the way to… I mean, there’s a lot of data that we can collect around that that’s actually not really healthy. It’s creates more polarization, as you said, many things, more stress in the society and all kinds of things.

But there is this argument. There is an economy system behind that. My next question would be, how can we change from where we are? But we cannot just have a good idea because obviously we are where we are out of a reason. There’s a reason why we are here. How can we actually transform into a world that takes in account the economy model that drives a lot of that motivation for the businesses? And then there is this maybe more dysregulated part of me that can’t fully interact with the technology in a way that’s good for me. Maybe you can walk us a bit through what are ways to come into a different world that doesn’t ban technology that we say, “Oh, [inaudible].” How do we do that? Do we get to a more healthy version of-

This is obviously very, very difficult. There’s some answers within the current system, and then there’s questions about the current system. Is that even workable? Is that something that’s going to keep functioning? Let’s start with the easy part, which is within the current system, because the system centers on price, everything is built around supply and demand and prices in the middle, and that’s kind of how the economy works. That’s the thing we track, is the dollars, the revenue in whatever currency.

And so in interactions, basically interventions, that affect price are the ones that are going to be successful. There are ways to do that. For example, The Social Dilemma, when the film came out, that generated a lot of pressure where people understood, hey, these were kind of harmful. And so it creates some negative pressure to use these products, but still, that alone doesn’t affect the price that much because not that many people leave platforms. What it does is it creates awareness so that legislators can create new laws, new penalties for doing the wrong thing.

If you harm children, there’s a penalty for that, and then there can be litigation and lawsuits. There, now you can see the connection to the dollar sign. Eventually, either some kind of government agency or litigation, like a law firm, will sue you, and then the costs of the harms that you’ve done end up back on your shoulders. One of the interesting things that happens with technology is that it advances much faster than our institutions can keep up. A lot of times, I mean all the time, the technology that comes out has effects that we aren’t yet… First of all, often we don’t fully understand it. This is happening with artificial intelligence also. We don’t fully understand exactly how it’s all going to play out, what the harms are, what the measurement of those harms is and all that.

When we can measure and then we can put that back on the company’s balance sheet and make them pay for it, then it starts to affect price. Again, you’re coming back to the dollar sign. Same kinds of things that you can do, you can have ways of inspiring how to build more humane technology. That’s one way of subsidizing the R&D cost of doing the right thing, so you can sort of inspire people, teach people how to do the right thing. There are insiders who can generate pressure. When people whistle blow, when something really bad is happening and a whistleblower speaks out, that’s another way of bringing all those costs back into the company because documents are leaked that show that companies knew there was harm that now needs to be accounted for.

These are all examples. Basically, there’s a set of moves that you can do over there, and that’s all within the current system. Changing systems is a very difficult thing. I think fundamentally the idea that we can keep growing forever, that we can keep extracting and it’s all going to be okay, it just isn’t true. You can sort of look around and it just doesn’t make sense. Whatever you’re extracting from has to regenerate at a rate that’s commensurate to the rate of extraction. If you’re extracting very, very, very quickly… For example, if you take out oil from the earth that took millions of years to form and you expend all of it in the course of just a few hundred years or even less than a few hundred years, that’s a big problem. That’s just not sustainable.

The same thing with… So there’s physical resources and then there’s also our mind. You look at our own minds and if we start to slice up our attention faster than it can regenerate, faster than we can heal, we can sleep, faster than we can make sense of the world, we start to break all of these faculties and they don’t regenerate quickly the conditioning of the mind. This is an interesting topic related kind of to mindfulness and sort of self-improvement. I think we all know it takes a lot of effort and discipline to do the right thing, to do mental training, to do physical training, to do exercise, all of these things.

They’re not easy, to eat healthily or whatever it is that we think is important, but it’s very easy to unlearn those and to do damage, especially now. Again, think about children and their growth because they’re much more malleable. Once they’ve learned the wrong habits, teaching them the right ones is really hard. Once we’ve developed… We may work very hard to develop deeper, longer attention, like sustained attention, more mindfulness, but when you think about it, and the phone is around us for eight hours a day or more doing its training process, and then maybe you would sit and meditate for 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or maybe 45 minutes, which many deep meditators would do more in that direction, but even they would have a really hard time if they used the phone all the time.

That’s kind of undoing the training process. Then with children, I mean that happens much faster. I think these are the kinds of things we have to be aware of as we think about, okay, how can we transition our economic systems to something healthier? This is also not mentioning inequality. The economic system we have right now, one way I like to say it is that capitalism is very sensitive to capital. It’s brought us a lot of benefits over the years, a lot of advances. This kind of competition and extraction has brought a lot of advances in medicine and food, clothing, shelter, like all of these things, technologies, we have all these wonderful technologies to learn things, information, and now artificial intelligence is an example.

But again, all of these do come at a cost and if we allow these things to run in unsustainable ways, I think that is a big problem. That’s where we are. If we think about how we want to change the system, I think the AI situation is one, is maybe a good motivation for solving and addressing some of that because I don’t think it’s going to sustain as we automate millions and millions of jobs. Inequality is going to get even wider. Capitalism, as I was saying, tends to distribute capital unequally. It keeps doing that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly.

There’s this concentration of wealth that happens and now we’re going to have an even more profound acceleration of that whole process. I don’t think that works out well for a large number of people. We have to pay a lot of attention to that. The best news I can say is that maybe this is an opportunity to make some changes.

How do you see, now that you mentioned it already, so there was The Social Dilemma, the film that addressed the kind of social media and the tension economy, and now we are at a different state already. As you said, it develops very fast. Now there is AI, and I don’t know how many people know how it really works, but it’s like how all the processes really work and where it’s going to go. That’s why we are in a moment that is unpredictable, and maybe you can speak a little bit to the moment. What are the upsides, the downsides? What do we need to take care of?

Yes, sure. I think the best thing to hold in mind for anybody listening is technology has always been a great accelerator. Technology is humanity’s greatest accelerator. You could make a good case for that. AI is sort of like the pinnacle of acceleration. It’s accelerating things very quickly. This latest generation of artificial intelligence is extremely capable. Generative AI can produce text, images, audio, video, all at very high quality, and it’s improving very quickly, much faster than Moore’s law, faster than chip technology, than semiconductor technology was improving because it’s compounded. So it’s got semiconductor technology driving, but also algorithmic technology. Just the way we run things, the way we can collect data, the way we can connect computers together in clusters, all of that is powering it. It’s advancing extremely quickly.

And so AI ends up being the biggest accelerator and it’s going to accelerate everything that we have, the way we do things now. If you think about any company out there, they’ve thought really carefully, they kind of went back and said, “Okay, let’s do our strategy. Let’s look at our strengths and weaknesses,” and they’ve made their investments. They’ve made their factories, and their processes, and their people, and they’ve sort of figured out the way they do things. What everyone’s looking at now is, okay, the way we do things is good, but how do we make it better? How can AI accelerate that process? Everyone is asking this question.

If we have already a predominantly extractive system, we are turning that extraction on overdrive. It’s going to be amplified many times over reducing friction everywhere we can. That’s one aspect. There’s another aspect… I think I should say, that is the dominant aspect. I think that’s going to sort of drive our future. Part of that is this process of automation. It’s kind of common sense. If you’re a business owner, everyone’s always looking for new technologies to make business run better, do things faster and do things more efficiently, and so portions of jobs are going to start to be automated, especially the more cognitive jobs, so bachelors and master’s degree in particular. Those types of jobs. That type of thinking.

AI is pretty good at those things. Physical labor is harder. It’s going to come a little bit later, but the robots are being trained too. This is true. But first, it’s going to be these cognitive jobs. When a significant portion of a cognitive job has been automated and only a little bit is left for the human to do, then business owners will start to be like, “Hey, wait a minute. I don’t need four humans. I just need one human here,” because there’s always this extra cost of coordination and humans, we’re messy. We get sick. We have priorities. We need vacations. We need healthcare. And machines don’t need any of those things.

And so you’re going to find this kind of… It’s just going to be good business and people are going to make the business choices. This is the same reason why trickle-down economics doesn’t work, is that that’s just not how human psychology works. Whenever there’s a chance to simplify, and automate, and reduce cost, business owners are going to do that because that’s what they’re rewarded to do. This is sort of the trend that we can expect. That’s the dominant trend. We should also be fair and say that at the same time, there’s no question that artificial intelligence is highly likely to advance medical research, to advance climate. Drawing down carbon is one of the things that might be possible.

New sources of energy, so battery technology or just more sustainable, high yield energy sources, medicine, all of these things, they’re just great things that can happen. There’s no question about that, but we always emphasize that there’s an order to these things. You can’t get to all the good things if society breaks down before that. It’s sort of like a doorway that you have to get through, and the doorway involves good sense-making, being able to make sense of the world, good choice-making, being able to make wise choices and not losing ourselves in the process. All these questions about jobs and people need to have some kind of security. We need to have a system that’s actually aligned in a way that doesn’t create even wilder inequality than we have now. Ideally, we should reduce it. And then we can get to that bright future.

They have to be done in the right order. And instead of course, just like the social media companies before them, every company now is caught in this race to figure out how they can deploy artificial intelligence and maximize revenue as fast as possible using the latest round of technology without stopping to assess the harms, mitigate, make the kind of investments that would be needed to prevent unpredictable harms from happening. We like to say social media was our first contact with artificial intelligence, and this round of AI is the second contact. Just like the first time, we couldn’t see all of these downstream effects.

We saw this attention thing, but we didn’t see the downstream effects very clearly. Same thing