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Episode: ICYMI: The Promise and Peril of AI

Author: TED Audio Collective / Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai, & Felix Oberholzer-Gee
Duration: 00:37:05

Episode Shownotes

In case you missed it: In this episode, Felix, Sarah and Mihir discuss Chat GPT, if AI is truly transformational, the future of search, and how to digitally detox from all this AI talk. (Originally aired March 1, 2023). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
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00:01:19 Speaker_00
Hello everyone, you're listening to After Hours. I'm Felix. I'm Mir.

00:01:22 Speaker_01
I'm Sarah.

00:01:23 Speaker_00
Hey, Sarah's back. Good to have you, Sarah.

00:01:25 Speaker_01
It's so great to be back. Thank you guys for having me back on.

00:01:28 Speaker_00
Of course. Mir, I actually had a question for you. With all this excitement around technology and AI, I know you've often confessed to being a Luddite of sort. Are you softening up?

00:01:41 Speaker_04
Yeah, you know, that's in part why I wanted to talk a little bit about technology today, because I'm trying to figure it out, Felix. Oh, okay. So I actually thought we could begin by talking a little bit about ChatGPT.

00:01:53 Speaker_04
We had a fun exchange about it at the end of the year when it first came out. We had that poem that it wrote for us.

00:01:59 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:01:59 Speaker_04
You know, the last three months have been kind of dominated by it, and we haven't really tackled it fully. So I thought I'd love to get your thoughts about that, in part, Felix, to figure out the answer to your question. Good. Okay.

00:02:10 Speaker_04
What did you bring, Sarah?

00:02:11 Speaker_00
Do you have a topic for us?

00:02:13 Speaker_01
I do. It's also related to technology. So unlike me here perhaps, I have been sort of a proud early adopter of a lot of technologies. And I actually find myself perhaps now moving in the opposite direction and asking where can I prune back?

00:02:27 Speaker_01
Where can I unplug? So I would love to talk with you about digital detoxing.

00:02:32 Speaker_00
So this episode is really about technology and self-discovery. There you go. I like it. So Mihir, AI and ChatGPT in particular, what's on your mind?

00:02:49 Speaker_04
Yeah, it's just remarkable what's happened in the last three months.

00:02:52 Speaker_04
So since ChatGPT was released, which is effectively an AI chatbot by a company called OpenAI, it has just become remarkably dominant as a consumer technology in a way that we have not seen since the advent of at least the iPhone or perhaps before.

00:03:08 Speaker_04
So it has become pervasively used and maybe even more just talked about as this remarkable moment in technology. To give you a couple of markers for that, first, of course, it impacted the world of search.

00:03:21 Speaker_04
We had both Microsoft with Bing release a version that was powered by ChatGPT, and then Google really stumble with their version called BARD, wiping off tens of billions of dollars of market capitalization because of a small difficulty they had.

00:03:36 Speaker_04
And then, of course, you have had it

00:03:37 Speaker_04
rear its head in weird ways, which is there was a famous New York Times columnist who had a very odd interaction with chat GPT, which is vaguely hallucinatory in some ways, where the AI chatbot tried to convince him that he didn't love his wife.

00:03:52 Speaker_04
And then you have had pronouncements that range from someone like Jensen Huang, who runs NVIDIA, a very important technology company in the world today, saying that this is the most important technological change since the advent of the Internet and the iPhone.

00:04:08 Speaker_04
And so I'm just curious about how transformational this is and where you think the transformations will be. So Sarah, what do you make of all this?

00:04:17 Speaker_01
I go back and forth on it, but fundamentally, I guess the question for me is how quickly will I lose my job? I'm sort of laughing, but also just to hide the pain.

00:04:27 Speaker_01
I wrote a column and it took me a couple of days to do the research and then to write it up. And then I thought, I just want to see how much faster chat GPT could do and how good it would be.

00:04:37 Speaker_01
And so I prompted it to write a draft in the style of Bloomberg opinion about the topic, which was understaffing. And it wrote a very prosaic 800-word column immediately about why understaffing is bad.

00:04:53 Speaker_01
And it even used some of the same examples that I had used in my column. It wasn't very entertaining. It was a little bit dull. But I thought, if this is what this thing does at basically the moment of birth,

00:05:05 Speaker_01
What's it going to be doing five years from now or 10 years from now? I feel like we are seeing the dawn of something really new.

00:05:13 Speaker_01
And any solace you take right now from the fact that it's not always very good at what it does is sort of a false hope, because it will rapidly improve, is my prediction.

00:05:23 Speaker_04
Right. And just to be clear, Sarah, some of those problems will likely get conquered over time. It can be inaccurate, for example. It seems to stumble on math in a weird way. So there are definitely certain things about it that are limited.

00:05:35 Speaker_01
Well, and I asked it to be funny. Like, the first draft was so boring. I was like, could you do that again, but this time make it a little funnier?

00:05:41 Speaker_01
And it was so completely unfunny that I was like, OK, as long as human beings can get paid for being a little bit funny, maybe I'll hold on to some income.

00:05:51 Speaker_00
One of the things that is really interesting to me is whenever a new piece of technology comes out that feels really new, immediately we jump to this point of how similar is it to us? Humans are just really self-obsessed.

00:06:07 Speaker_00
The first question you want to know, oh, push the boundaries, try to see where it can go. How much is it really like a human person?

00:06:15 Speaker_00
And that's in some sense particularly funny because irrespective of what the answer is, if you think it's very far away from being human, we're alarmed because it's full of misinformation and it's misleading and it's terrible.

00:06:29 Speaker_00
And then if it's pretty much like human, we freak out as well because it's like, oh my god, what is happening to my job? What will I do in the future? Because it's so human already.

00:06:39 Speaker_00
And it strikes me as maybe something that is first and foremost just fascinated by the capability of the technology, but not really thinking through the core uses of what it will be able to do.

00:06:54 Speaker_00
And we're all thinking of these fancy uses of it, but really the core of what it's really good at is doing dull work.

00:07:03 Speaker_00
that same customer letter, the response to some complaint, reminding someone that a bill is due, asking your students to sign up for a particular task, all of these not so interesting things, I will predict that that's actually the core use.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
And this is big because if we don't have to do dull things, we can do more interesting things.

00:07:27 Speaker_04
I confess this whole question has really flummoxed me of how to make sense of this. The first thing that's helped me is to understand a little bit more about what it really does.

00:07:36 Speaker_04
So I think what's important to understand is it's a little bit of what's called a large language model. What it is really good at is basically stringing together words and then figuring out what the best next word is.

00:07:48 Speaker_04
And it just combs through its universe that it's been trained on to figure out what the best next word is. And it effectively puts together sentences in that way. I think that's a useful way to understand what it does. It really is just doing that.

00:08:03 Speaker_04
And as a consequence of that, it won't necessarily be terribly creative. It will be somewhat derivative. But to Sarah's point, I think it drives the cost of a lot of content creation down to zero. And that is kind of profound.

00:08:21 Speaker_04
Now, I don't think it comes anywhere close to a Sarah Green Carmichael column, but the vast industry of PR, the vast industry of a lot of financial journalism, sports journalism, where you're just taking scores and putting them into sentences,

00:08:36 Speaker_01
Legal writing.

00:08:37 Speaker_04
Maybe some legal writing, maybe some interesting applications in teaching. And certainly there are interesting questions for the education industry generally. But beyond that, I'm not sure how transformational it is.

00:08:50 Speaker_04
So all of those things are important, but are they fundamental changes to productivity, for example, in large chunks of the economy? What are the real use cases? So I get driving content creation costs down to zero is powerful.

00:09:05 Speaker_04
But tell me how an industrial producer of widgets is going to change what they do and how it's going to change productivity in the writ large sense of the word. And that's where I get a little bit stuck.

00:09:18 Speaker_01
My fear is that by driving content creation costs to zero, it will spur the creation of vast new oceans of terrible content. Novels that are sort of wooden, PR pitches that are somehow even worse than the ones that we already wade through.

00:09:36 Speaker_01
emails that are longer than they need to be and more numerous. And so it's not like we have a shortage of content now. And now there's so many shows you can't keep up with them all. And there's so many emails you can't even read them all.

00:09:52 Speaker_01
And so we're going to need an AI that can actually also ingest for us, that will come through our whole email inbox and say, this is the one interesting pitch from a PR person that you should pay attention to today.

00:10:03 Speaker_01
So it'll be like robots talking to robots. Because as it is now, I feel really the limits of human comprehension on the amount of information to process every day.

00:10:12 Speaker_01
So the idea that there would be the creation of more information for my brain to handle is sort of intimidating.

00:10:18 Speaker_00
To me, it sounds mostly like a shift in the division of labor between machines and humans. So say, for instance, in your story, Sarah, if for some reason human humor is just really hard to replicate, then your task is just a different task.

00:10:36 Speaker_00
You get these dull columns written by JatGPT on something that you want to write a column about, and your skill that is really valuable and that is interesting is to make dull columns into engaging, funny columns that people will really like to read.

00:10:52 Speaker_00
One of the things that these models do is, as you interact with them, the most recent interaction has greater weight than sort of the corpus of knowledge that exists in the first place.

00:11:05 Speaker_00
So, for instance, this is, I think, the reason why we get all of these funny or not so funny accounts from journalists about, oh, it was really angry or it was really depressed or it fell in love with my wife.

00:11:17 Speaker_00
because it mirrors the use of language that you have in these conversations. And the Microsoft fix for now is just to not allow very long conversations. But that will always be a problem.

00:11:28 Speaker_00
So if you ask it to do something complicated, that it doesn't naturally get right. then the increased interaction will give you more of what you already know, who you already are, how you already speak.

00:11:42 Speaker_00
And so undoing that kind of a bias, that might actually be what humans will have to do. But we start from just a very different point.

00:11:51 Speaker_04
I think that's exactly right. I do think one area where I could see it driving really fundamental change is actually education.

00:11:58 Speaker_04
So content creation and journalism and all that stuff, I think a lot of journalists are interested in, but in terms of the economy is not necessarily that important, frankly.

00:12:06 Speaker_04
It's important to our society, but it's not necessarily important to the economy. You could imagine, I think, very easily a world where you have personalized tutors

00:12:15 Speaker_04
and you have a person who is basically interacting with an avatar and having a conversation based on something they need to learn more about, much like you would do with a tutor. And that to me strikes me as pretty transformational.

00:12:31 Speaker_04
So that whole class of activities and then education more broadly, where we really try to help people learn to think and learn to write, that all strikes me as completely transformational and interesting.

00:12:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think what you're saying to me here is right. And I see all these articles from educators freaking out about, you know, how are we going to clamp down on cheating if these essays could be written by chat GPT?

00:12:54 Speaker_01
And I actually think what we might see is more oral exams, for example. And I think in some ways our society is already pivoting away from writing and much more towards speaking. as like a way of influencing if you look at the importance of video now.

00:13:10 Speaker_01
And so I think that as writing becomes more and more of a commodity, something that machines can do, I actually think we might see a return to sort of hundreds of years ago, what maybe education looked like when it was much more about how well you did at speaking and orating and debating.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
Trying to limit the use of chat GPT in educational settings strikes me as completely wrong. That's like saying we're not allowing people to use calculators. We educate in an environment where we pretend calculators don't exist. That's insane.

00:13:41 Speaker_00
What we want is that people get really good at using these tools. And as a result, maybe the starting level of, say, a first grader will be very unlike what the starting level is right now, but that's okay.

00:13:55 Speaker_00
And then we can spend more time on be critical about the results. How would you recognize a mistake and all these kinds of things.

00:14:03 Speaker_04
Yeah, I totally agree with both of you. I would just disagree maybe on one thing, Sarah, which is, to me, writing is thinking and thinking is writing. They are inseparable in my mind. When you learn to write, you're learning to think.

00:14:17 Speaker_04
And so I hear you on the oral tradition and how important it is, but I think there's no denying that if we are no longer teaching children how to write, then it's hard to know if we're teaching them how to think.

00:14:30 Speaker_01
I am so glad you said that, because I completely agree. I don't even know what I think until I figure out how to write it.

00:14:37 Speaker_01
And then on the flip side, in terms of taking in information, it is much easier, I think, to be a critical reader and find the flaws in someone's argument if you are reading than just listening to some people talk.

00:14:48 Speaker_01
It's very difficult to detect BS when you have a really smooth person just chattering at you. But if you see it written down, I think it's much easier to detect. So I'm so glad you mentioned that point.

00:14:59 Speaker_04
Let's talk a little bit about search, because this has the possibility of really upending the search market, as we've already seen. So Bing, which you had probably forgotten about, is back. And Google, in its initial efforts, appears to have stumbled.

00:15:12 Speaker_04
And Nadella has made comments about really wanting the search market, which is, of course, 90 plus percent of Google's business.

00:15:21 Speaker_04
and really maybe taking that search market and devaluing it in a way, because chat GPT right now is not associated with advertising. So it would be interesting to think about how you would monetize search that's driven by chat GPT.

00:15:36 Speaker_04
Do you think of all of this as fundamentally transformational to Google and the search market?

00:15:43 Speaker_00
My sense is that these claims about the end of Google dominance are completely overdrawn. And I think that's true for two reasons. The first is, let's not forget that the core of OpenAI's technology is Google technology.

00:16:00 Speaker_00
It's built on advances that Google has made. And yes, so Bowerd wasn't a success right out of the gate. But will they get it as right as OpenAI can get it right? Yes, of course. So we will have similar functions.

00:16:15 Speaker_00
And frankly, even today, you remember when you search on Google, you often now have a little paragraph that gives you an answer, which is not interactive in a chat GPT sense, but it's also generated by AI, taken from web pages and so on and so on.

00:16:33 Speaker_00
What I completely don't understand is how this is supposed to revolutionize the ad market. Even when I look at the examples on Bing's website, you could for instance ask it, what's a fabulous three-star menu?

00:16:49 Speaker_00
Or what's a special trip that I could take for my anniversary? Well, guess what kinds of ads are going to be placed right along these suggestions of that trip?

00:16:59 Speaker_00
So in a way I think the sometimes lazy thinking is that the ads themselves are substitutes for search. But no, actually it's consecutive.

00:17:11 Speaker_00
Most of the time you search for something and then we serve you ads that invite you to take a particular second step, mostly having then to do with commercial intentions.

00:17:21 Speaker_00
And I don't really understand all these claims that it's going to undo or somehow transform the market for advertising.

00:17:29 Speaker_04
Well, let me try, Felix. What if Microsoft, which has remarkable revenue streams from Azure and from lots of other businesses, decides they don't want to make money in search? What if they don't care?

00:17:41 Speaker_04
Then doesn't that really damage Google search business? Because Microsoft won't sell ads against chat GPT output.

00:17:48 Speaker_00
So let's start by not forgetting Bing's global market share is 3%. So lots of things have to happen until the rest of humanity finds Bing in the first place. But even if they do, I think if their stances were not going to serve ads,

00:18:06 Speaker_00
which actually even now they don't do. So if you look at the model chat GPT conversation that they have on their website, it's about the food and then sure enough, you see links to all the sites where you can book restaurants and so on and so on.

00:18:20 Speaker_00
So already that's not really consistent how they're using it today. And then in the organic search, of course, you have all the usual links to more commercial websites as well. But I think the most dangerous thing is not if they don't sell ads.

00:18:36 Speaker_00
The most dangerous thing if they provide advertising opportunities and they give it away for free. Exactly. How likely is that? Microsoft right now is $11 billion in advertising revenue from Bing.

00:18:50 Speaker_00
If you could say, wow, now Bing is a little better than it used to be and it could be $100 billion, are you really going to say that's $80 billion that we're not going to touch? I don't know.

00:19:01 Speaker_04
Fair enough. Sarah, what do you make of all that?

00:19:03 Speaker_01
I guess I think that if it lights a fire under Google to make its products better, then that fundamentally is a good thing.

00:19:10 Speaker_01
I feel that there has been some drift at Google as they have this sort of cash cow in search, but actually I feel like their search is often not very good.

00:19:20 Speaker_01
So I think if the existence of a stronger Bing makes Google actually take this seriously, then hopefully consumers will benefit. Because I do think that there has not been that much competition in search for a while.

00:19:32 Speaker_01
And I think that actually consumers and end users are the ones who have suffered the most.

00:19:36 Speaker_00
What do you think, Mihir, do you buy the claim that this is about demonetizing search? I'm actually kind of open to it.

00:19:42 Speaker_04
I actually think the search market is going to get much more interesting than it was before. And it's not just Bing. These technologies can be deployed in all kinds of ways by all kinds of potentially quasi-search-like bots. So I won't go to Google.

00:19:58 Speaker_04
I will go to a specialized food AI bot, which is super terrific, and I will use it there. And so you could see this kind of lock on global search that Google has, not just get eaten away by Bing, but just get fragmented and splintered.

00:20:17 Speaker_04
There's going to be a lot of bots that are going to be very good at doing very specialized things. That, to me, I think is threatening to Google because they have effectively had one stop for global search.

00:20:30 Speaker_04
And maybe that gets fragmented and broken up because you're able to get a really good bot on particular domains and you go there instead. So that's not about competition from being in the global search market.

00:20:42 Speaker_04
It's about the fragmentation of global search. That to me is interesting and worth just understanding what'll happen to this. I'm curious maybe just to wrap this up. How do you compare these AI innovations with previous technological changes?

00:20:58 Speaker_04
So they're being compared to the advent of the internet. They're being compared to the launch of the iPhone. It's being compared to really massive technological changes. Is this something that transformational or is it relatively marginal?

00:21:14 Speaker_01
I think it's transformational. I think that it will reshape a lot of our behavior in ways that we simply can't predict now. I think when the iPhone came out in 2007, we didn't know that there would be like an Instagram and then a TikTok.

00:21:27 Speaker_01
We didn't know that there would be a mental health crisis among teenage girls who were spending too much time on those apps. There was so much we couldn't have predicted, but I do think it's transformational.

00:21:36 Speaker_00
Felix, what do you think? That sounds exactly right, Sarah, in the sense that many daily activities, the way we search for information, maybe the way we consume or produce information, I think it's going to change.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
Where I'm more skeptical is about its impact on productivity. Even for computers, it took us three decades to see the impact of PCs on the economy-wide productivity. And in part it has a little bit to do with the shift in the division of labor.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
If it just so happens that we do things a little differently and now my main job is to add humor to columns, For me as an individual, that's a very different experience. My job is very different, what I do is very different.

00:22:27 Speaker_00
Ultimately, is this going to be so much more productive in the sense that it takes far fewer inputs to produce something that people will love to read or that I can do 15 at a time and I wasn't able to do that before? I'm more skeptical.

00:22:45 Speaker_00
I think in particular in the early phases, there's almost no chance of this being really productivity enhancing because it's just so messy.

00:22:53 Speaker_00
But even longer term, I think we will do things differently, as you point out, but we won't be more productive.

00:23:00 Speaker_01
That sounds right to me.

00:23:01 Speaker_04
I think that's the key thing, Felix, to me. And by the way, that concern about the link between technology and productivity is much more widespread than just ChatGPT. So in the last 10 or 12 years, remarkably, despite our obsession with technology,

00:23:19 Speaker_04
productivity hasn't been manifesting that. And so unlike the revolution from the late 1990s and early 2000s where you really had massive productivity gains from technological changes, we just are not seeing it. And this feels like more of the same.

00:23:36 Speaker_04
And I think that's something we don't talk enough about, Felix, which is we don't talk enough about this broken link between technological change and productivity improvements. That's why it is both completely transformational and amazing.

00:23:51 Speaker_04
and yet somehow seems oddly marginal. Because in a way, it's impacting consumption more than it's impacting production. It's impacting our consumption habits.

00:24:02 Speaker_04
We're all getting so much better at consuming, but I'm not sure it's really manifest in ways of productivity measurements that are actually what drives wealth creation.

00:24:12 Speaker_04
So that's, I think, my way to kind of understand both pieces of it, at least after talking to you both about it. Okay, so this entire conversation, of course, was the output of a chat GPT. Yes, of course.

00:24:23 Speaker_00
How else would you explain all the terrible predictions, all the misinformation that was conveyed? That can only be an AI conversation. Exactly.

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00:26:00 Speaker_04
All right, I think we already need a digital detox, Sarah. What do you make of this trend towards digital detoxes?

00:26:06 Speaker_01
So as far as I can tell, the sort of recent upsurge in talking about this came after Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was reported to have taken a 10-day trip to Polynesia to digitally detox.

00:26:19 Speaker_01
And this, I think, has sparked a broader conversation about to what extent normal people who are not CEOs with assistants and billions of dollars can afford to step away from their devices.

00:26:30 Speaker_01
And I think it's also just come at a time when people are feeling overloaded by new technologies and thinking, Wouldn't it be nice if I could do that kind of thing?

00:26:39 Speaker_01
So I'm curious to know, just to start, have either of you ever tried to take a digital detox for any period of time and how did it go?

00:26:47 Speaker_00
I've never really taken a digital detox over, say, several weeks or anything like this. But what I have done is that I have a particular set of activities where I never take my phone.

00:27:00 Speaker_00
So I don't take my phone to restaurants, I don't take my phone to the gym, for leisure kinds of things. I exclusively read books in paper formats. And I'm trying in part to balance a little bit because I do find it has an effect on me.

00:27:17 Speaker_00
If we're a group of friends in a restaurant and none of us have the phone with us, it's a different conversation.

00:27:24 Speaker_00
No one feels compelled to look at, oh yeah, that ancient Greek god of something, what was he exactly called, and then all the phones come out. And of course it's completely useless and nonsensical because who cares what that particular god was called.

00:27:40 Speaker_00
So the quality of life is different without digital devices. It's interesting.

00:27:45 Speaker_01
Mihir, do you also take this mindful approach to leaving your phone behind?

00:27:49 Speaker_04
Felix, I think it was Aries you were thinking about. I just looked it up. I mean, my general view of this, similar a little bit to Felix's, is any chance anybody has in any way to find respite from their devices is to be applauded.

00:28:05 Speaker_04
I don't judge anybody on any of this stuff. Is it going to have long-term effects? Probably not. But I'm at this point where I'm very open to any mechanism anybody has to manage their devices in more helpful ways.

00:28:20 Speaker_04
And if a detox works for you, just a week without it, I say power to you. So I'm becoming very open-minded about this. And I think it is tempting to kind of ridicule people who take these things like either as being privileged or as being ineffective.

00:28:35 Speaker_04
But the reality is I'm open to anything at this point. What do you make of it all, Sarah?

00:28:40 Speaker_01
10 years ago-ish, there was a real mania over the idea of the tech Shabbat, that once a week you would take just a day away from your devices.

00:28:49 Speaker_01
And I feel like this allure for this more intense detox that lasts for a week is sort of a reflection of how much more unmeshed these devices have gotten into our lives.

00:29:00 Speaker_01
I can't imagine going away for 10 days without my phone to get me on the plane, the rental car, to find the trailhead that I'm hiking. I use it for all these things.

00:29:11 Speaker_01
So I am much more aligned with Felix's perspective of maybe there's certain times or places where the phone just doesn't go in the course of a normal day.

00:29:21 Speaker_01
I have set, for example, time limits on social media apps on my phone so that I don't spend more than 10 minutes a day on the social media apps, because that's sort of the amount that I'm comfortable with.

00:29:31 Speaker_01
I think some of those smaller moves are like a more realistic and sustainable way to approach it. Because you're right. I think there are studies of people who've tried to do this. It doesn't overall improve mood.

00:29:42 Speaker_01
With the exception of people who have depressive symptoms, sometimes do report that their symptoms are not as bad if they spend less time on their devices.

00:29:49 Speaker_01
But overall, the pressure's really on each of us now to try to manage our own technology use because no one's coming to do it for us. And these forces are out of our control.

00:29:59 Speaker_04
I think in a way, Sarah, what you said is making me think also about one of the problems with the detox formula. So one of the things that can happen to me mentally, or maybe other people is,

00:30:09 Speaker_04
Well, I'm going to be doing a detox and so that allows me to do certain things in steady state that I wouldn't normally do.

00:30:16 Speaker_04
So by creating these very extreme periods of our lives where we don't do something at all, it somehow can excuse the performance of daily life. And so that I think is why you're right. and Felix is right.

00:30:30 Speaker_04
And I just reversing myself a little bit from what I said earlier, which is there is this weird way in which if these longer detox periods give you license to misbehave more during the non-detox period, that's problematic.

00:30:42 Speaker_04
And it's got to dominate to do regularized patterns as opposed to binging of detox, non-detox kinds of behavior. So I think that is really true.

00:30:53 Speaker_00
And maybe building on this, Mihir, I think it's also important to think about the underlying issue that you want to solve. So often we say, oh, I'm spending so much time on TikTok, or I'm spending so much time on email.

00:31:09 Speaker_00
And I think if the underlying issue is digital distraction, then even the time that you spend on your phone or the time that you spend on email is not really indicative of the severity of the issue to begin with.

00:31:24 Speaker_00
I'm reminded a little bit of an experiment that they did a little while ago where students had to solve some set of mathematical problems, but nothing too sophisticated. and they had different groups.

00:31:36 Speaker_00
One group had their phone outside the classroom, one group had the phone in their bag but right next to them, one group had the phone right at the top of the desk. And so you literally see these conditions matter dramatically for performance.

00:31:52 Speaker_00
Even if the phone is in your bag, the idea that, oh, maybe I did get a text message or maybe I should look at my email.

00:32:00 Speaker_00
Then I think that also makes you rethink a little bit about the basic detox idea that it's a really severe cut from how you relate to your devices. What I think is right and good about that is that it takes complete separation.

00:32:17 Speaker_01
And I think part of the reason that I find that idea of a total separation interesting is because in my own personal life, I do sometimes feel that a hard reset of habits can produce a lasting change. It's like the dry January effect.

00:32:32 Speaker_01
People who do dry January do drink less throughout the year. And I feel like my own life, if I go on one of these spend nothing challenges, you do notice that you start thinking differently about, do I really need to buy this sweater or whatever.

00:32:46 Speaker_01
And I think that with digital devices, it's hard to have that total separation because they are so enmeshed in our lives. Like, how would people even call you?

00:32:55 Speaker_01
But when I am away, for example, in another country for vacation, if I can just put the thing in airplane mode and leave it in my bag more of the time, I do find that that produces some good effects in my brain.

00:33:06 Speaker_01
Unfortunately, they only last as long as I'm on the trip, and then it's right back into it when I get back home.

00:33:12 Speaker_00
The other element that is really interesting to me is the flip of I don't want to be digitally distracted. What am I hoping to achieve with the help of digital devices or not?

00:33:23 Speaker_00
We live at a time when many people feel lonely, they have difficulty connecting with others.

00:33:30 Speaker_00
And of course, technology plays a big role in enabling exactly that, so that I can call people, I can be on video calls where I feel more of a connection to the other person.

00:33:41 Speaker_00
And so I'm always thinking, if we complain about technology, it's sort of a surface-level conversation.

00:33:49 Speaker_00
So thinking about the kinds of things that you really want, the kinds of things that you would love to cut out from your life, and then sometimes technology is helpful and sometimes technology is useless or distracting.

00:34:02 Speaker_00
But I don't think it's very helpful to start with technology. Think about the underlying thing that you really want.

00:34:09 Speaker_04
I think that is so helpful, Felix. I had not really thought about this, but so many of our conversations about technology are really displaced feelings about other things in our lives.

00:34:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's a great way of saying it.

00:34:20 Speaker_04
And I think a lot of it has to do with loneliness and happiness. And we know so many of these metrics are in decline, especially for younger people. There's like this epiphenomena of like, oh, we're really spending too much time on technology.

00:34:31 Speaker_04
But the underlying phenomenon is just about our happiness and our loneliness and all the things that really, really matter.

00:34:38 Speaker_04
And I think that can be distracting because you end up talking a lot about technology and not thinking about connection, which is really what we should be thinking about.

00:34:46 Speaker_01
I do think that there is a way in which if we even agree that what we all want is connection, that's all that we're really here on earth to do.

00:34:53 Speaker_01
But I do think that the way that we've set up these devices means that we have to be much more intentional and expend a lot more energy to use them in the way that is good for us, as opposed to the way that is easiest.

00:35:06 Speaker_04
I have this great idea. How about if we get together on a weekly basis and bring a couple of ideas and talk to each other about it and kind of hang out?

00:35:14 Speaker_00
No, I think that's terrible.

00:35:16 Speaker_01
And then we could broadcast it.

00:35:17 Speaker_00
Oh my God, that's even worse. Who would want to listen to us? There you go.

00:35:31 Speaker_01
Okay, recommendations. Felix, what did you bring today?

00:35:35 Speaker_00
I have something that's related to our first conversation about AI. Of course, at this moment in time, it's all about generative AI. That's the big topic. But I think there's so many other interesting things that are happening.

00:35:48 Speaker_00
And part of what I have been paid a little bit of attention to is text-to-video conversion. So there are many services now.

00:35:56 Speaker_00
The one that I have the most experience with is a company called, I don't even really know how to say it, Synthesia, or something like this. And essentially what it is, is you type in a text, a message that you like.

00:36:10 Speaker_00
I recently tried something for After Hours, whereas I'm pretending to be an enthusiastic listeners who really love the conversation on After Hours.

00:36:17 Speaker_00
And then it takes them, I want to say maybe a minute or so, when they send back a video with a professional-looking actor that says your text in a completely natural way.

00:36:30 Speaker_00
And on top of everything, the background is also sort of a theme that you alluded to. For instance, for this optimistic listener call, all of a sudden Steve Carell popped up in the background and he had an Oscar trophy.

00:36:44 Speaker_00
If you have any sort of video message you would like to send to someone, just think someone's birthday, someone's promotion. The videos can be really long. They can be up to 30 minutes long.

00:36:55 Speaker_00
So if you have, say, a training manual that you need to put on video, it's really amazing. That's fantastic. All right, Sarah, what do you got?

00:37:04 Speaker_01
I have something totally different, which is a crime show, and I know you guys have recommended crime shows on the podcast before. This one's called The Investigation, and it is set in Copenhagen, and it is in Danish.

00:37:17 Speaker_01
What I really liked about the show was that even though it was a bit heavy at times, it You never meet the perpetrator. You never meet the killer. The focus is entirely on the investigators and the family that has been bereaved.

00:37:31 Speaker_01
And I thought that was just such an interesting choice by the director. And it really made me see some of the other cop shows that I like to watch in a totally different light. So it's called The Investigation. And it was really good.

00:37:42 Speaker_04
Fabulous. Wow. Any Nordic crime thriller, I'm all for that. What do you have for us? Me here. So I have one AI related and then one a little bit more of the detox related.

00:37:52 Speaker_04
So the AI related is the best article I've come across about all this is something by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker. I've recommended Ted Chiang as a writer before on the podcast. He's this kind of crazy sci-fi writer but also incredible technologist.

00:38:06 Speaker_04
And he really characterizes AI and chat GPT in the best way possible as kind of a blurry JPEG of the whole internet. And the way he talks about it is just brilliant. So I recommend that article.

00:38:17 Speaker_04
And then for your digital detox, I have previously recommended and would like to come back to Legos yet again. So we did the biggest one that we've ever done, which is the Titanic.

00:38:29 Speaker_04
And I got to tell you what a piece of engineering mastery that is so beautiful and completely consuming and makes you forget about your device for like hours on end. So if you're in the market for something that'll take you like a week to do,

00:38:45 Speaker_04
I recommend any of these large LEGO architectural projects, but in particular, the latest one, which is the Titanic, is spectacular. And you look inside it and you can see the engine rooms, you can see the turbines, you build the turbines.

00:38:59 Speaker_04
It's just spectacular. So that's my detox moment for you.

00:39:03 Speaker_00
And this is it for today. Thank you everyone for listening. This was After Hours from the TEDx Audio Collective.

00:39:35 Speaker_02
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