#466 — What Is Technology Doing to Us?

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.