There's a guy who makes a giant slide deck of social media trends every year. It's infotainment because, if you're not actually in marketing or not trying to become a thought leader, it's not all that useful. One slide from this year's deck has stuck in my memory:
This reminds me of the line in the "I'm rich and bored" essay from the cofounder of Loom: he found everyone at the acquiring company to be NPCs. The same was echoed in any number of pieces out of Silicon Valley this year: if you're not working in AI, then you're not a real character in its game. The idea of main character vs. non-player character is a simple description of the incredible self-absorption humans have always been capable of. It's not new to arrogantly look down on other people. What's notable is where it seems to be coming from: it's a way virtual experiences degrade our ability to be good people in the real world. The more we use screens, the less loving we are.
Even the most misanthropic people don't start out aim use their speakerphones in the company cafeteria or watch TikToks on the train at full volume, to take two examples from my day yesterday. They stumbled into it, much the way any of us early Twitter users kept checking for likes, mentions, and replies. To take a more frightening example, the people who started asking ChatGPT for relationship advice did not think they'd end up quoting its reasoning to their soon-to-be ex-spouses. To take their stories from the top link below, they started out wanting a pseudo-theraputic relationship and ended up with a breakup coach. They had no idea what they were doing.
There is a better way. Much like the solution to speakers-on-in-public-places is to gently tell people what they're doing (*cough* use headphone *cough* tends to work), thinking about the impact of your decisions leads you to make better choices. The calm tech approach describes in the second link below gives us a nice picture of this better way. No one thinks about the pen they pick up to write with—they think about the writing. That's a great piece of technology. Aiming away from distraction, away from loudness, and away from always-noticeably-on is a great idea for what we should be doing.
The last link is the best of the bunch: a tech billionaire has a new idea for how education could work. He didn't start by just doing things, he started by crafting theories, researching approaches, and building a strong idea from the ground-up. Unlike the no-idea "give the kids iPads and see what happens" approach, this seems really promising.
Reading
ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners
"My family is being ripped apart, and I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why."
The Ambient Revolution
Ever wonder why some products feel familiar while others stress us out? Why calm technology matters more in the age of AI.
Class Dismissed
As an elementary school principal, a feared software tycoon, a genial recluse, and a technology zealot determined to redefine childhood for mankind, Joe Liemandt is many things that shouldn’t go together—and a human Rorschach test for what we care about most