Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, Tyler, you’re talking as an intellectual who has probably the highest reading throughput rate of any human being I’ve ever heard of. For you, you’re looking at this like, “All this information coming in from screens, we could make it better.” I’m sure you’re right about that. I’m thinking about children, children who desperately need to spend hours and hours each day with other kids, unsupervised, planning games, enforcing rules, getting in fights, getting out. That’s what you need to do. Instead, what’s coming — it’s already the case for boys especially, that they can’t go over to each other’s houses after school because then they can’t play video games. When you and I were young, video games were coming in, and you’d go over to someone’s house, and you’d sit next to each other, and you’d play Pong or whatever. You’d play a game, and you’d joke with each other, and you’d eat food, and then you’d do something else. Video games used to be fairly healthy, but once they became multiplayer, you wear your headphones, you’ve got your controller, they’re incredibly immersive. Now, you have to be alone in your room in order to play them. Now, you bring in virtual AI girlfriends and boyfriends. Already, Gen Z — those born after 1995 — are completely starved of the kinds of social experiences that they need to grow up. In theory, I’m sure you’re going to say, “Well, why can’t we just train an AI friend to be like a real friend and get in fights with you sometimes?” Maybe in theory that’s possible, but that’s not what it’s going to be. It’s going to be market-driven. It’s going to be friends and lovers who are incredibly great for you. You never have to adjust to them. You never have to learn how to deal with difficult people, and it’s going to be a complete disaster for human development. Complete disaster strikes me as too strong a term for something that hasn’t happened yet. I think you’re much too confident about that. What do you mean it hasn’t happened yet?…

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