Transcription
The market.
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Many American workers are worried about AI and potential job losses. Joining us now, Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks. He is host of the Office Hours podcast, and his latest column for The Free Press is titled Inside the Mind of an Internet Troll. Is that, you?
"Know, oh, no, no, no, I'm just channeled it."
"I'm a troll critic. I mean, I've been writing for a long time for various outlets and autobiographical."
"No, no, no, no, this is just the, the comment sections. They're a perfect ecosystem for people who have dark triad personality characteristics. As for narcissists go to make other people's lives miserable."
Yeah, Twitter. I see it with all the things we now have in modern society to worry about, right? Is AI. We're going to layer that over the top job losses from AI, I guess is the new thing. Anything that makes any technological advance that makes us feel like we're out of control, that makes it look like something's going to come along that we can't understand entirely, that actually might take our jobs or split apart. Our relationships is going to freak us out, but that's nothing new about that. We've been freaking out about something for generations. It turns out that this one is just a little bit more advanced, a little bit more down the road is the way that that works. But what we can probably expect is that, yeah, there will be displacement, there will be a lot of trouble from it, but within a not too long a future, we'll figure out how to use it. And once we figure out how to use it, it's going to make our life a lot better.
So in figuring out how to use it, can can the government help with guardrails or will the free market handle it? Will there be pains, growing pains as we, you know, try certain things and we realize they don't work? I mean, we really didn't manage social media very well with our kids. It's just a very, very hard thing to to very hard thing to regulate. But the thing to keep in mind is that the way that artificial intelligence works, people think that it's extremely human. It's not the essence of humanity. The essence of what it means for us to be human is something that occurs in the right side of our brains, the right hemisphere of our brains. That's where mystery and meaning exists. That's where love and happiness exists. The left side of our brain is analysis and engineering and technology. And what AI is really good at is helping us solve very complicated left brain problems. The problem right now is that people are using it for these right brain things. They're using it to get advice as if it were their therapist. They're using it for the girlfriend experience or to be their buddy, and that's why they feel lonely or lonelier when a technological phenomenon actually is used to solve your loneliness, you're going to get lonelier as the bottom line. Just ask anybody who's gotten stuck on social media or a dating app to find the perfect partner.
"Well, you know, AI didn't replace social media, so we're that was my point. We're layering, layering more and more of these potentially depressing things that cause depression or cause inadequacy or insecurity. It's hitting us from all sides."
"Yeah. But if we use it wrong, that's exactly the case. You know, social media is promises that it would wipe out loneliness and it made loneliness worse, of course, except for people who use it appropriately. And we're finding that younger people today are actually better at social media than people slightly older than them. My kids are 28, 26, and 23 now. Two of them are U.S. Marines, so they have restrictions on how they can use social media. But all of my kids use it in such a way that it doesn't make them lonelier. It doesn't cut them off from other people. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to have figured out how to use that. And that same thing will happen with AI. There can be problems getting from here to there, right?"
"Well, what is the proper way to use it?"
"The proper way to use AI is to do the things that actually that employ the left side of your brain, the complicated the tasks."
"And then where do you go for the other side?"
"The other side? You go to your."
"Family, to your family."
"You go to church, you actually hang out with your friends. You do all this stuff that people actually find love in."
"Their lives."
"When it comes down."
"To maybe comfort."
"If dogs are your thing. Absolutely. But the whole point is, look."
"Not cats."
"You know perfectly what makes you happy. I know what makes you happy is being with your family is being with the people that you actually love. And there's no technological intermediation for that. AI will never substitute for that. The more you try, the worse it gets."
And so what do you expect at this point in terms of guardrails? What if you could design them for the government to not screw things up?
"Yeah. I mean, probably we should start with what people are talking about with proper guardrails for social media and take some lessons from that. And what we're learning is that proper age guardrails, making sure that we're not using them inside institutions where people are supposed to be talking to each other in real life."
"What's your age cutoff? So Rahm Emanuel is out there saying that we should be like Australia and some other countries in Europe, 16 years old."
"I think that's right to begin with. And that's Jonathan Haidt, you know, from from NYU. He talks about that. I think that's the best way to do it is to start with 16. 13 is too young. But actually the better institutional guardrail for all of these technologies is out of the schools. I mean, there shouldn't be a classroom in America from from kindergarten through PhD, where you're allowed to use your personal devices. You shouldn't have them in there."
And it's not it's not just personal devices. At this point, every kid has issued a laptop from the school. And by the way, that's probably a good thing just in terms of preparing them for the way the world operates. The first time you see a laptop is once you graduate from high school.
"Yeah, but we can't actually have them hooked up to the internet. Actually, in schools, that's the biggest problem. And one of the things that John Hiatt and others have shown in many other scholars are showing is that a lot of the other technologies, including the iPads that they were issuing, just standard to students in schools, they've been very deleterious in learning. They've been really bad for fragmenting kids attention, and we shouldn't have done it in the first place. We actually need less. Tech is what we need in school, even though there's going to be more tech in life and we need these relatively tech free zones. And by the way, the most important time to not have the devices is during lunch for kids because that's when they're supposed to be talking to it. We're rewiring our brains to become lonely and depressed."
Do you believe in things like the Khan Academy? Right, that uses technology to try and get learning and, and tutors to, to kids who would never have access to it.
"That's different than the internet, where we have unfettered access to information. We didn't see the biggest problem."
"Just a."
"Closed system being bombarded by facts and information we didn't seek, which is pushing us away from mystery, meaning, love and happiness."
Then where do you land? Do you know what the Alpha School is? Have you heard of the Alpha School?
"No. Tell me."
There's one in New York. There's one. There's one in Texas. I think there's a couple in California and some other places. This is a new AI oriented school. Bill Ackman is an investor. Yeah. There's been a whole bunch of attention on these schools. These are, I believe, K through 12 schools that are supposed to superpower your ability to learn, right? It's all AI based. Let's say you're a third grader and you're a boy who loves basketball and Marvel Comics. Instead of reading some book that they'd hand you, they will generate reading material at the third grade reading level and possibly even customized reading level, depending on where you actually are. If you're if you're better than that, it'll keep moving up, but it will tell you stories about a basketball player who happens to also be a Marvel comic character, because that's what you love to try to get you engaged and involved in it. And apparently they say it, you know, multiplies your ability to learn at speed."
"Well, I'm willing to I'm willing to entertain any particular idea, but."
"You are in front of a computer for the most part. There are teachers in the room, but you are working by yourself with a computer for hours in the morning."
"Problematic. That's really problematic for the brain that's pushing us to the left hemisphere of the brain. And most of happiness and most of understanding. Life itself comes from the right hemisphere of the brain. Too much screen time is actually breaking our brains at the bottom line. So you can say, good, you're going to give the kid something that's interesting. So the kid will learn better. But one, one more thing. It's really important to point out we are not Homo economicus, you know, we don't exist so that we can learn as much as possible and become these perfect little economic agents. We actually need to learn how to live socially. We need to learn how to develop friendships. We need to learn how to love each other. And that's one of the most important things you learn in school."
"I believe that that makes sense."
"I mean, that was I mean, that's what do you remember from school? I don't remember anything. I learned what I remember my friends."
"What was that old book? Everything you need to learn about life. I learned in kindergarten."
"Yeah, probably before I knew how to read in the first place. But that's the whole point."
"Take a nap, be kind."
"Anything that is a screen."