Common Sense Media recently partnered with the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit which supports the development of ethical technological tools, to lay out a fierce call for regulation and awareness about the health issues surrounding tech addiction….
“I see this as game over unless we change course,” says Tristan Harris, a former ethicist at Google who founded the Center for Humane Technology. “Supercomputers play chess against your mind to extract the attention out of you. The stock price has to keep going up, so they point it at your kid and start extracting the attention out of them. You don’t want an extraction-based economy powered by AI, playing chess against people’s minds. We cannot win in that world.”…
“Is Facebook designed to maximize your concentration and focus on the goals that you care about? No,” says Harris. “How frequent and interruptive the [notifications are], the better it is for them because their business model is attention. The false sense of urgency, all of those dynamics inside this one environment, make it unhealthy and incompatible with concentration and focus on your goals.”
Harris says teachers who use technology platforms because students are on them are “racing to the bottom.”
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