Arthur Brooks: observation

Transcript context

…How will artificial intelligence influence politics and the political spectrum? Easy question, right? It’s a good question. I agree. One of the questions I get mostly, as you can imagine, because of my work, is how is it going to affect happiness? I’ve been thinking about it an awful lot. We discussed a minute ago the hemispheric lateralization theory of Iain McGilchrist, that the right side of the brain is the mystery and meaning and why questions of life, and the left hemisphere of the brain largely adjudicates the what and how to and engineering and technological questions of life. The problem is that in modern society, we’ve been kicking everybody into the left hemisphere of the brain and walling off the right hemisphere because people spend all day on their screens, and the hustle and grind-engineered Silicon Valley culture that we live in has actually eliminated a lot of the mystery and meaning from life and the incentive to actually ask those questions. That’s a lot of what my new book is about, is how to get back to the right side of your brain, as a matter of fact. Now, AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It’s a how-to and what engine, but it’s not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can’t put into ChatGPT and get something meaningful to you to say, “Why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life?” You put that into ChatGPT, it’ll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is, and then it’ll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you’re left completely unsatisfied as a result of that. The answer to the basic happiness question, which is an adjunct, which is next to the political questions, I think, is that if you use it for left brain things to free up your time and then go over to the right brain side of your life with your love and your faith and your relationships and beauty and suffering, then your life’s going to get better. It’s a very real possibility, Tyler, that this is what’s going to happen in economics and politics today. If we went back 150 years or a little bit more, people would say, “Oh, the Industrial Revolution is going to permanently ruin society because it’s urbanizing and people don’t know each other and the traditional folkways are going away.” It had some rough transitions, to be sure, by bringing in market economics and division of labor and specialization, et cetera. The end of the day was a middle class and the weekend. That’s not the fruit of labor unions. That’s the fruit of the Industrial Revolution and the amazing largesse that it created through capitalism. That took a long time, right? This may be 70 years at the interim. What’s our interim going to look like? Will it be more nostalgia and more small-C conservatism?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.