Charan Ranganath: preference

Transcript context

…And I mean, social media has a lot of opportunity for this because it enables this distributed one-on-one interaction that you’re talking about, where everybody has a voice, but still our natural inclination, you see this on social media, as there’s a natural clustering of people and opinions and you just form these kind of bubbles. To me personally, I think that’s a technology problem that could be solved if there’s a little bit of interaction, kind, respectful, compassionate interaction with people that have a very different memory, that respectful interaction will start to intermix the memories and ways of thinking to where you’re slowly moving towards truth. But that’s a technology problem because naturally, left our own devices, we want to cluster up in a tribe. Yeah, and that’s the human problem. I think a lot of the problems that come up with technology aren’t the technology itself, as much as the fact that people adapt to the technology in maladaptive ways. I mean, one of my fears about AI is not what AI will do, but what people will do. I mean, take text messaging. It’s a pain in the to text people, at least for me. And so what happens is the communication becomes very Spartan and devoid of meaning. It’s this very telegraphic. And that’s people adapting to the medium. I mean, look at you. You’ve got this keyboard that’s got these dome shaped things, and you’ve adapted to that to communicate. That’s not the technology adapting to you, that’s you adapting to the technology. And I think one of the things I learned when Google started to introduce autocomplete in emails, I started to use it. And about a third of the time I was like, “This isn’t what I want to say.” A third of the time, I’d be like, “This is exactly what I wanted to say.” And a third of the time I was saying, “Well, this is good enough. I’ll just go with it.” And so what happens is it’s not that the technology necessarily is doing anything so bad, as much as it’s just going to constrain my language because I’m just doing suggested to me. And so this is why I say, kind of like my mantra for some of what I’ve learned about everything in memory, is to diversify your training data, basically, because otherwise you’re going to… So, humans have this capability to be so much more creative than anything generative AI will put together, at least right now, who knows where this goes? But it can also go the opposite direction where people could become much, much less creative, if they just become more and more resistant to discomfort and resistant to exposing themselves to novelty, to cognitive dissonance, and so forth. I think there is a dance between natural human adaptation of technology and the people that design the engineering of that technology. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to create, like this keyboard, things that on net are a positive for human behavior. So, we adapt and all this kind of stuff. But when you look at the long arc of history across the years and decades, has humanity been flourishing? Are humans creating more awesome stuff, are humans happier? All that kind of stuff. And so there, I think technology, on net, has been, and I think, maybe hope, will always be, on net, a positive thing.…

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