Seeing Chatbots as People Is Not New. Some See Cars That Way
It's actually a natural tendency but it certainly comes with risksAnthropomorphism has nothing to do with electronics as such. But there are new perils.
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Addicted to Social Media: Are We the Customer or the Product?
A lawsuit has revealed social media company strategies that seem to promote addictionMeta and Google recently lost a bellwether case accusing them of exacerbating children’s mental health struggles by intentionally addicting them to unhealthy social media.
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Kids and Chatbots: How Dissenting Views Got Me Disinvited
As a lifelong software engineer, I am an insider on a topic like this and I know that their programming makes them unsuitable for childrenI also believe that their programmed tendency to lead to addictive relationships makes them unsuitable for adults as well but that’s another topic.
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The Dismaying Harms of “Harm Reduction”
Do we love our addicted countrymen enough to insist that they diligently engage in programs to restore themselves to lives of dignity and self-respect? Harm reduction isn’t thatFacilitating drug abuse — which is what “harm reduction” does — causes terrible harm, often to the people it purports to help.
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AI’s Sweet Talk: How Artificial Companions Steal Our Humanity
Andrew McDiarmid and Janet Parshall discuss the sometimes tragic consequences of needy people becoming dependent on AI-fueled fantasy relationshipsFourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer’s suicide in Orlando offered a window into the problem of lonely people confusing confuse digital imitation with real intimacy.
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Glued to Our Phones. Our Troubling Addiction to Social Media
It's disconcerting to see people out for a nature walk — completely absorbed in the traffic on their phonesSocial media addictions clearly cause harm among minors but the tech giants who profit by them won’t regulate themselves in any meaningful way.
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LLMs Are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things
LLMs may well become smarter than humans in the near future but not because these chatbots are becoming more intelligentAs people become attached to and dependent on their AI friends, they become less interested in their fellow humans.
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Snapchat Has Been Totally Exposed
Employees admit the harms of the camera appLosing a streak, for the hyperconnected fifteen-year-old, may feel tantamount to losing a friendship.
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Sports Gambling: The New Addiction Storming America
Making money off your favorite team just got wildly popular. But is it healthy?Super Bowl 2025 is less than two weeks away, with the Philadelphia Eagles finding themselves in a rematch with reigning champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. Sports engagement has ballooned over the past few years through the medium of online sports betting. Formerly illegal, sports betting has taken the U.S. by storm, with major celebrities and sports stars going on air advocating the practice. Making money off your favorite team just got wildly popular. But is it healthy? A recent article titled “I Got Divorced Because of Sports Betting” shows the dark side of the gamble. Pitched as an easy way to make money online, no one talks about the mad fury that ensues after your bet fails to deliver, your Read More ›
TikTok Is Banned in the U.S. No It’s Not. Yes It Is. No It’s Not…
The political stew aside, we need to look at the key ways TikTok differs from typical social mediaWhen the app serves up extreme, sometimes perverse, content to a young user, that data is stored on Chinese servers and could be used later.
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AI and the Destructive Lies of the Tool Trope
You've heard this, right? “Technology isn’t good or bad; it’s a tool, it’s just how you use it that matters.” False.Because LLM AIs never understand a single word, image, video, or line of code, they can’t know whether anything they say is right, true, or good.
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TikTok Is Not Just Overgrown Chatting and Email
Foreign adversary’s AI-empowered threats to national security tip Supreme Court scales against TikTokSocial media like TikTok today interconnect active speakers and active viewers in all directions. The system monitors and stores all the communications, extracting volumes of data for each individual user. In China where the law allows it, the government can scan and analyze not only the speakers and viewers but can also retrieve specific facts about all of them. The government can restrict messages based upon speaker, viewer, and content — and use AI to craft and send personalized, tailored messages aiming to influence users’ buying and voting decisions, not to mention their psychological well-being. TikTok and the First Amendment Broad-band internet services, multi-billion-dollar social media, and expanding central government are merging into a muscular octopus of surveillance, data Read More ›
Australia’s Social Media Ban and Children’s Mental Health
An Australian psychiatrist hopes that his job might become easier in the future due to Australia's coming ban on underage use of social mediaIs it any wonder that Silicon Valley CEOs ban their own children from social media? When did a phone become more fun than parties and people?
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Beyond Social Media’s Impact on Mental Health
Social media addiction can harm more than our moodsA young writer, herself a member of Gen Z, has dared to point out the obvious about social media. Sure, it’s verifiably making us sad and anxious, but it goes beyond that: it’s turning us into bad people. Freya India, a columnist at Quillette and a new contributor to Jonathan Haidt’s Substack After Babel, notes that while it’s important to talk about social media and mental health, it’s just as vital to talk about what this stuff is doing to our character. She writes, Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image — it’s taking a toll. Maybe subconsciously. But I think deep down we know it. We know when people are using Read More ›
David Foster Wallace: If Screens Are Your Main Media Diet, You’re Going to Die
The novelist warned about the pitfalls of the online life“If we ate like this all the time, what would be wrong with that?” So asks David Foster Wallace, compellingly played by Jason Segel, in the 2015 film The End of the Tour. Wallace is in the car with a Rolling Stone reporter, David Lipsky, cramming down sweets from a gas station when he says that. After Lipsky quips back about obesity, Wallace says, “It has none of the substance of real food, but it’s real pleasurable.” The End of the Tour is set in 1996 shortly after Wallace’s gargantuan novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene and impressed the nation with its length, wit, tragedy, and insight. A massive book about loneliness, Infinite Jest takes place in a semi-futuristic Read More ›
Escaping the Dopamine Cartel
We can't even be bothered with "entertainment" anymore.Ted Gioia investigates the impact of the “dopamine culture,” our modern tendency to flit among tabs and scroll endlessly through fifteen-second-long video clips.
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Facebook and Instagram Allegedly Hook Youngsters with Dopamine Triggering Tactics
If parents don’t want their children addicted to stimuli and behaviors in the same manner as to drugs or tobacco, then parents need to protect their kids.
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Is This a Moral Reckoning? 41 States Sue Meta for Knowingly Addicting Young Users
The lawsuit claims that Meta's platforms are harming its young users. The data backs it up.The lawsuit coincides with a new article from Jean Twenge, known for researching “Gen-Z” and their painful relationship with addictive digital media.
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In Neuroscience Flap, Science Media Tackle “Pseudoscience” Claim
As the leading theory of consciousness is tarred by neuroscientists as “pseudoscience,” science media struggle to outline just WHAT science isIf materialism collapses — and this episode seems like an early warning — what will science look like? Will the same people continue to dominate?
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Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life
Turns out the solution is simple: don't use things that overstimulate you.“Don’t use things that cause overstimulation,” Newport says. “The dopamine system is powerful, so don’t give it the targets it’s going to fire up for.”
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