Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id908525435
Anthony Bucci commented: “I don’t like framing problems like these as ‘addiction.’ In my opinion that is too close to victim blaming and depoliticizing. It removes attention from the companies that are deliberately creating and deploying technology they know to be dangerous, and it takes pressure off the regulators who are failing to reign it in. Just like we aren’t going to solve the climate crisis through individual behavior like changing lightbulbs, we aren’t going to solve a nationwide loneliness crisis by referring to the worst affected as ‘addicts’ and directing them towards treatment.”
id908525468
machines “train us to devalue what it is to be a person.”
✏️ “A self over the past 20 years that’s become starved [by social media, online interaction, overwork, etc] of the give and take of conversation, that hasn’t learned to tolerate vulnerability and respect the vulnerability of others, is primed to look to technology for simpler fare.” 🔗 View Highlight
id908525629
The “moment to mark,” she says, is not that we’ve started treating machines as humans, but that we expect and treat other humans as if they’re programs. I think a lot about the pathologizing and labeling we’ve done to each other over the years, the hashtagging and categorizing of everything we do, the therapy speak and VC speak that are impossible to unhear once you start listening, even in casual conversations. Sometimes we treat each other as if we’re simple, predictable robots we can program, instead of the reality of our messy, complex, unpredictable, flawed selves.
id908525821
chatbot relationships have a lot of parallels to online-only relationships between actual humans: because it’s easy (and preferable) to only say what the other side wants to hear, it’s easy to feel like the relationship is perfect, that the other person (or chatbot) is everything you’ve ever wanted, and that you’re insanely in sync with one another.
id908525642
Conflict will never arise, and neither will vulnerability or growth. They’ll never break up with you and you’ll never have to heal from anything.
id908525845
Whether we call it an addiction or not doesn’t change the fact that those people need help. I’m not super interested in fighting over ‘well is it a real addiction or is it something else?’ I’m much more interested in: if a person is out of control, what do we do to help them regain that control?”
id908525838
more humanizing approach than slapping an “addict” or “not addict” label on people. It’s clear that some people have a really hard time balancing their chatbot habit and real life.