#466 — What Is Technology Doing to Us?
A discussion between Sam Harris and a guest about how information technology has harmed society over the past decade, exploring social media toxicity, AI's impact on human behavior, and the potential for both technological solutions and social adaptation. They examine how anonymity enables bad behavior online and how AI might change human interactions both positively and negatively.
Summary
The conversation begins with an assessment that the last decade of information technology has been quite harmful to society, contributing to polarization, mental health crises, and surveillance concerns. The guest predicts it will take half a generation to recover from these negative effects, drawing an analogy to environmental pollution that was eventually cleaned up. The discussion moves to personal experiences with social media, where the guest describes abandoning Twitter due to toxicity and AI-generated content, moving instead to BlueSky for scientific discussions. They explore potential remedies for social media problems, including the role of anonymity in enabling bad behavior online, comparing it to how masks historically disinhibited people. The conversation shifts to AI's broader implications, with the guest expressing confusion about conflicting expert opinions on AI's risks and benefits. A key focus emerges on how AI changes human-to-human interactions, illustrated through the 'Alexa example' - how children learning to be rude to voice assistants might transfer that behavior to interactions with other people. The guest's research focuses on using 'dumb AI' as a catalyst to improve human collective performance rather than replacing human cognition. The discussion concludes with speculation about humanoid robots and whether perfectly human-like robots would require the return of social graces, with references to the philosophical implications raised by shows like Westworld about the ethics of interacting with human-like machines.
About this episode
<p>Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about technology, society, and human nature. They discuss the harms of modern communication technology, polarization and anomie, how AI agents can improve human cooperation, the social implications of humanoid robots, Christakis's experience at the center of the woke moral panic at Yale, the Trump administration's assault on American universities and science, the collapse of public trust in institutions, and other topics.</p> <p>If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at <a href="http://samharris.org/subscribe">samharris.org/subscribe</a>.</p>
Key Insights
- The guest argues that communication technologies of the last 10 years have contributed significantly to polarization, mental health crises, and surveillance threats in society
- The speaker claims that anonymity online contributes to bad behavior, drawing parallels to how masks historically disinhibited people at events or in mobs
- The guest's research focuses on using simple AI as a 'catalyst' to improve human-to-human interactions rather than developing superintelligent AI to replace human cognition
- The discussion suggests that AI-generated content ('AI slop') may eventually lead people to re-privilege traditional reputable news sources as they become more skeptical of online content
- The guest expresses feeling torn between conflicting expert opinions on AI, comparing it to the Fiddler on the Roof character who agrees with contradictory viewpoints
Topics
Transcript
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Thanks, Sam. Too much to talk about. I think I want to start with the question of, I guess I just want your post-mortem on the present. This last decade, what has technology, specifically…
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