Tristan Harris begins his TED talk with this somber statement: “When we talk about technology, we tend to talk about it as this blue sky opportunity. It could go any direction. And I want to get serious for a moment and tell you why it’s going in a very specific direction. Because it’s not evolving randomly. There’s a hidden goal driving the direction of all of the technology we make, and that goal is the race for our attention.”
This TED talk ties in nicely to the other discussions we have been having revolving around safety, security and privacy and other problems around social media. Harris’ unique perspective as a “design ethicist” for Google allows us to see where some of these problems are originating from.
I knew vaguely that large companies such as Facebook and Google had teams that specialized in behavioral psychology. It seems like dystopian fiction (IE the Black Mirror “Nose Dive” or see Andrew Scott’s powerful monologue from another episode in the series — contains swearing). But the fact of the matter is that the same techniques that casino’s have been using for decades to get people to stay and spend money at the slots are the same that are being used in social media design.
I have worked as an educator for the past five years and I can’t tell you the amount of conversations I’ve had or heard around how teachers are competing with phones and losing badly. Harris’ quote “Maybe instead of getting excited about the most exciting new cool fancy education apps, we could fix the way kids’ minds are getting manipulated into sending empty messages back and forth…” gave me goosebumps.
It’s a conversation I’ve never heard before. And it wasn’t with some painful irony that I realized that I am currently in a program to go out and design some of those education applications.
I wholeheartedly agree with the major paradigm shifts that Harris is proposing. Realistically, I think we can start by teaching ourselves and students that our attention is easily directed by outside forces. Being able to reflect on the impact of that simple truth is a giant leap in the right direction for being more conscientious consumers of social media.
However, his final two suggestions are a bit more tricky. How can we convince companies to change a formula that generates them so much money? In a system where the cash talks and the consumers happily get their fix, will things change any time soon?
The accountability system is logical. As I mentioned in a previous post, I refer to this period of the internet as the “wild west” era. Rules are gray at best and we are just beginning to tap the potential of the web. We need sheriffs, true. But we also need to be wary about who sets up these rules.
Can we trust political leaders to set rules for these platforms when they benefit so much from these artificial intelligence systems? I’d have a hard time seeing politicians such as Trump or Obama raise an outcry over platforms like Facebook and Google that helped win their respective elections.
I’ll end my post with another great line from Harris that made me reflect on my life and how I spend my time. “Solving this problem is critical infrastructure for solving every other problem. There’s nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time. What will be time well spent for ours? “
Please feel free to contribute to my thoughts and continue this dialogue!