Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s emulating things that we need to be healthy humans, but it’s just feeding it visually and audibly to us, but it’s not giving us the… It’s giving us the instant gratification of it, but it’s not giving us the long-term pleasure or fulfillment of it. Like I said, and the beauty is we’re in this weird period in time, it’s a breath of time that we’re in, where we are able to conceptualize and observe what life was like in that transition point that’s got us up till now. And we also have the… Because in order for all this to continue to evolve, even with AI, it needs us more than we need it right now, still, for a very short period of time. But we have access to nearly all the information that the world has, theoretically, but we also still have the perception and the memory of what life was like before it. And so, this is a very short window of time, like a breath of time, where I think we can find a way to incorporate this into normal life, but I think if that breath leaves us, I don’t know, I think it’s… I believe, I truly believe it is irreversible. And that’s just going to be the end of us, and it could take two or three more generations to get to that point. But I think why don’t we find people that are way smarter than me. And look at all the things that trend on social media, the videos that everybody watches, I don’t know what it is, if it’s wood splitting and plumbing and blacksmithing and doing something with… Let’s find all the things that people are attracted to online, that they obviously are interested in, and just figure out a way to have them in real life for people to immerse themselves in. Yeah, it’s the transitionary state, and one of the responsibilities I take very serious, because I agree with you, is I tried to pierce the bubble that is the San Francisco, that is the Silicon Valley, that is the people that build these technologies, they often live a bit in a bubble. That said, the people that criticize tech folks also live in a bubble. And to, first of all, piercing bubbles in general is good for people to get along, to understand each other, because people that say all technology is evil, unfortunately, even if that’s true, which I don’t think it is, it’s coming. It’s going to be built. And so, you have to figure out how to do it in a way that preserves our humanity, that doesn’t drag us into this black hole of just maximizing engagement, maximizing this dopamine thing, where instead of reading Dostoevsky, which I should be doing, I’m looking at some girl shaking her ass on Instagram, and then feeling horrible about myself five minutes later. That, at scale is what seems to be happening. And so, reminding ourselves that this is not the way to steer human civilization to progress, to flourishing. The problem is I think we’re wasting a lot of our bandwidth. We only have so many minutes in the day to even use our brains, and our brains can only do but so much in a day anyway. And when we’re wasting any of it on just that, it’s like, I see it, in my own professional opinion, as the world is becoming just a little more, in the last decade or two, as the world becomes a little more dreary and dark, and more problems happen, and city streets become more littered, and jobs are… All these kinds of problems that we all argue about all the time, as they become more prevalent, it’s like the internet and just the visuals of the internet become so much more immersive, and video games are so much more… Everything’s so much better, everything’s improving at lightning speed in technology, and it’s degrading in society, and in the real world. And somehow there’s got to be a way to find a balance there. But right now, it seems like as technology becomes more immersive and addictive and interactive, the way these algorithms feed us exactly what we want, and there’s so much psychology, and just so much research that goes into making them as addictive as possible, it’s like the real world kind of sucks. … tip is possible. It’s like the real world kind of sucks. Cities that were beautiful and thriving are now falling apart, and have all kinds of problems that are being unaddressed, and lack of leader… It’s like there’s got to be some kind of way, and so it’s easy for us to feel more and more inclined to escape into the digital realm because the digital realm is becoming more fun while real life is becoming less fun, and there’s got to be some kind of way to balance between the two. I’m with you. I’m not against technology at all. I think evil most certainly existed long before there were computers and in even more treacherous ways. Now we have the ability to do… Like I said, we’re in a very temporary state right now in 2025, where the general public has access to basically all the information there is, and artificial intelligence, and just immense, and the ability that a guy can just set a bunch of cameras up, and start doing podcasts, and have even just the fact that your platform could be created is immensely powerful. It probably never existed in world history up until now, but we also still have… The problem is if we just keep going without being careful about losing the real world aspect of it, is that at some point we’re just going to get so lost and so immersed in this space, we’re not even going to know what we’re missing out on. All there’s going to be is Girls on Instagram. All there’s going to be is that.…

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