[Part1/2] What If the Terminator Future Isn’t Approaching… It’s Already Here?

Hi, welcome to Tech Empower. I'm Rena Wang. In today's episode, we'll continue to talk about AI. AI masters our knowledge while quietly eroding human cognition. It fakes our emotions, slowly starving genuine connection. It replaces our feelings, casting a shadow over existence itself. We built the tool, now it's rewriting the user. Are we using or being used by AI? Today, I'm joined by Makai Albert, a journalist and writer who covers the intersection of technology, health, and the humanities. We're delighted to have you here, Makai. Thank you, Rena. So, Makai, in one of the articles you wrote, which is called When Smartphones Get Smarter, Do We Get Dumber? And in it, you stated a study found that simply having a smartphone nearby reduced the mind's ability to access and process information, even if the phone was off or placed in a bag. How did you come up with that conclusion? You know, that study that I mentioned in the article, very interesting. Researchers basically had three groups of people, and they had them do two different types of tests. On the first one, it's more about recalling information, so memory recall. And the second one was testing what we call fluid intelligence, which is basically problem solving. So they had one group with their phones on their desk. The other group, they had the phones in their purse or in their bag, but the phone was turned off. And the third group, the phone was put outside of the room. Then they did the testing, and they found that, of course, if you have your phone next to you, it's distracting, they perform much worse. If the phone was outside the room, they perform much better. But what was surprising is that even if your phone is turned off and in your pocket, you still perform worse. So what this is telling you is that, okay, maybe technology has an effect directly, but also technology might have an effect even if it's turned off. And the explanation here is that your mind is too worried about that, so it's taking up cognitive resources. So, I mean, that study really blew me away to the point that I'm here with you now. I left my phone over there because I don't want to have interference. But it's nothing new, actually. We've known this for years, that whenever we offload cognitive ability, even something very simple like GPS navigation, it actually comes at the cost of spatial and temporal awareness that has been determined. So, I mean, the question here is like, what do we give up when we obtain something new? It seems like there's a cost to everything that we gain. So that's a very interesting study. Yeah, those are very deep and, I gotta say, fascinating. You mentioned GPS. I know by the age I started to learn how to drive, there was GPS everywhere, everybody has iPhone. And I personally can't go anywhere without iPhone or like a navigator. So, definitely lost a lot of navigating capacity or abilities of mine. And I know that's like a downside by using the technologies. And also in the article, you wrote 60% of global population, 97% of those younger than 30 use smartphones. And based on what we just said, literally, smartphones were not invented by those who grew up with smartphones. And if the future generations are getting dumber and AI is getting smarter, if so, what can be done? You're just looking at these studies, like is AI, is technology affecting the way we live? And to me, it seems like conclusively we can say, yes. People are more lonely than ever. We have a loneliness epidemic in the US. People are seeking connection. They're not getting it from devices. And also across the world, I was looking at some data, testing scores for children in high school, middle school, are actually going down. So it does seem like there's a lot going on. It's not so simple as saying. That's concerning. It really is, yes, yeah. And there's a lot of data behind that. But I think it probably begins with awareness, like how are you using the phone? Even like the example I gave you. Like if you need to study, are you having your phone next to you? Or are you putting it outside? And if you look at the data, then you can make a conclusion. Well, if I really wanna get work done, I should probably put the phone outside. Right, it's almost like a psychological thing. It's not like necessarily I wanna, or I need the phone right now at this moment, but I just feel safer or a sense of security to have the phone around me. I think that could be a problem. Right, I mean, like you mentioned, people that made the devices didn't grow up with them. Right. So you can imagine that when they were making these things, they're thinking it will have a good effect. But people like, you know, I'm relatively younger. I grew up with the internet and devices. We just don't know what it was like before without them. So now we're becoming very dependent. We grew up with them. So it's kind of like being born with a pacifier. You take it away and what happens? Maybe you cry. Exactly. So yeah, a lot of people feel anxiety and depression even when their phone is not around. So that's very concerning. Very concerning. You know, I'm still using Google search. And I guess what are the differences between Google search versus chat GPT? Is one safer than the other? Right, so there's something very interesting that we knew even a decade ago. It's called the Google effect. There was research coming out of Columbia University. And it was a very simple test. They just had people basically solve a problem. But they had to find the information on textbooks and physical books, just not on the internet. Okay. So basically find the information yourself. And then the other group was with Google. So they could just look up whatever they wanted. And what they found was that people that looked it up in Google, when they were tested about that subject later on, they were not able to properly recall what they had answered. And even the researcher said that there was a illusion of knowledge. So these people were, they had a false competency about the topic. So they would say, oh, I learned it very well. But then when you asked them later on, they couldn't recall. And it was called the Google effect. But I think it's even worse now. Because with chat GPT or AI tools, it's not like you're looking for the knowledge. You know, before you had to at least parse or filter Google search results. Yeah. Nowadays, you're just given everything. And as you mentioned in your article, I learned that 83% of those who use the AI to draft their work, couldn't recall a single sentence that was written. And personally, even when I use chat GPT or AI to create something, I feel a little bit sense of guilt. Do you experience it? And what does this intuition tell us? Right, yeah, great question. So the statistic came out of a MIT study. It was just published this year. Well, I should say, it was basically pre-printed, published. It's not peer reviewed, which is important to consider. It came out from MIT Media Labs. And they had three different groups. It sounds similar as other studies. One group, they wrote an essay just with their own knowledge. The other group, they wrote the essay by using Google search. And the third group was using chat GPT. And like you said, the chat GPT group, they wrote the essay. But then when you ask them, like, hey, can you tell me about it? Can you recall a sentence? The majority were not able to. The Google group, a little better. But then the group that just wrote from their minds performed much better. So one of the concerning things was that when English teachers in the study review the papers, they found that the ones that used chat GPT were very similar. One of the teachers said it was so less. I mean, the reason that is, is because these models are just predicting the next word. And when you have a little output, it starts to look very similar. And yeah, people in the study were saying, it feels like I'm cheating by using chat GPT. I would say you are. You're not using your mind. But I think the intuition there is that expression, especially in literature, in writing, comes from somewhere deep within the soul, the creativity, imagination. And that's something you cannot have when you use chat GPT. Maybe there's a way of mediating the relationship. But if you just purely have the AI model write the essay, like, where is your soul? Where is your hard work? Where are your tears and blood and sweat and tears? So I think the intuition there is that we should be careful how we use them. Right. I think the English teacher you mentioned, that was a pretty precise word to describe. It's called so less. This is just crazy to even hear about it. And for something, if you use chat GPT or AI to create, literally, you don't even need to look at it. It's just there. It's almost finished. You can hand it over to your teacher and that's done if you trust it enough. Versus Google search, you still have to put all the information together and figure out how to do the rest of the wording and the verbiage. I think there's still a little bit like cognitive work used in your brain. And I almost feel like, I don't know if school should ban or there's certain rules on how much they can use, students can use chat GPT for this type of things. Because then in the end, did you write a paper or did chat GPT write the paper? Right, I mean, it's a very balanced topic. It should be really balanced because if you just outright ban the tools, it might come at the cost that other people using them will get ahead. That could be. So I can tell you, like with my students, when I was teaching at the college, I saw this study that came out of, I think it was Norway. And they basically had college students engage with what they call AI literacy. So becoming more aware of how AI works behind the scenes, but also the output that it gives and the limits. So you could see this, especially maybe a year ago with chat GPT, where it would just hallucinate resources, especially in academic writing. It would just tell you, oh, there's this paper, but you look for the papers, it's not there. With AI, you can quickly obtain or get a tremendous amount of information within seconds, very fast. However, do we really get it though? I think you mentioned this very quick just now, the illusion of knowledge. Do you wanna talk a little bit more about what exactly that is? There's a very similar concept. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. What is it? So the story is super funny. Back in 1995, there was this guy, MacArthur Wheeler. He straight up, just during daylight, went to two banks and robbed two banks. But once he robbed the bank, he just took off his mask, smiled at the camera, and waved. And what we later found out is that he thought that by putting lemon juice on your face, cameras couldn't see it. Really? So before he went to rob the banks, he tried it himself. He put lemon on his face, he took a photo, but there was some malfunction, and you couldn't see his face. So he thought that he could rob a bank in broad daylight, go in, smile at the camera, and be okay. Obviously, he was caught right after. But then there was this psychologist, Danny Kruger in Cornell University. He looked at the news and he thought, how could someone be so confident, yet so mistaken? So then Dr. Kruger and his student, Dunning and Kruger, they came up with the Dunning-Kruger effect. They posted this article, this research. Basically, what they found is that there's a point when you're learning things, you're starting to know something, like you have some knowledge of something, and you might have an experience of this. You start learning something, and you have this confidence of, oh, I'm the expert at this topic. But it's actually called the mountain of stupid, the mountain of stupidity, because you're overconfident in the knowledge that you have. But what happens is the more you know, the more you realize you actually don't know. So this is very similar to the illusion of knowledge. You do a little research. A lot of people nowadays are like, oh, AI experts. They just research a little bit, and they're like, oh, I'm an expert at this topic. But the more you learn about it, the more you realize you actually don't know. And I think this is happening a lot with AI and tools that we have, because it's so accessible, we feel like we're an expert. Like, ask me anything, I'm sure I can tell you. But people are going to the tools. So it's very dangerous, because let's say I take your technology away, how much do you actually know? Exactly. Also in your article, you mentioned the internet paradox, which is basically the internet, despite being a social tool, it leads to antisocial behavior. How lethal can that become, you think? Well, it's interesting, because when that first was termed, this was back in the 1980s, when they were first rolling out internet across the U.S., and what they found is that a family, in the first years of using the internet, actually felt more disconnected. So the idea was, wouldn't it be great if we could just contact anyone anywhere and have a connection with anyone? Actually, it turns out it wasn't that helpful. People feel more isolated and less social. That was back in the 90s. Now, it's the same thing. It's the same paradox with social media. It's supposed to make us more connected and things like that, but it's actually not doing that. And we can see that in the data. Especially young people, teenagers, they feel isolated and lonely, even though they have the tool to connect. And this also goes back to AI. We feel that we might be having a connection with the AI, or it can be there for us, and you have someone to talk to. But what the data is starting to show is that people that are using AI for, let's say, companionship, are feeling exactly the opposite. More depressed, more isolated, more lonely. You mentioned about the social media. I think it's very important to ask the question that does longer screen time, especially the social media use, I think there's a word called doom scrolling. So does it increase ADHD symptoms? Right. I'm not a clinician. I can only tell you what I've found. But also, I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of psychiatrists, doctors, and pediatricians. And what they've told me, pretty much across the board, is that the children that they're interacting with seem to just behave differently. They have a hard time making eye contact. They have a hard time expressing their emotions. They have a hard time just being social. And a lot of these symptoms are correlated with ADHD. And there is pretty good data from the top journals, like JAMA, showing that pretty much the longer you have screen time, and this could be video games, texting, social media, the more ADHD symptoms increase in prevalence. But yeah, even if you think in your own life, you know someone that's on their phone all the time, maybe especially the younger population, the longer they use the devices, the worse they become at socializing. Yeah, even for myself, sometimes you just wanna take a quick break, and then you scroll like X, or whatever social media platform you're using, and then it just accidentally, or subconsciously, half an hour is gone, or even an hour is gone. And after that, I feel like it's such a waste of time. And also, somehow, it's just hard for me to focus on the task I need to be working on. It's almost like I have to have multiple screens open at the same time, have to multitasking, but it's not the healthy way. So I definitely started to realize that on myself, and to limit my own use of social media, even though I'm no longer a teenager. So I think it's not only important for younger people, or kids, but also even for adults, we need to be aware of what's going on, and what the social media is doing for us. Just to your point, children mimic parents. No one's immune to the devices, so what is happening is that parents use them, and then the children look at them, and then it goes on the generations. Even worse. But yes, everyone's subject to the doom scrolling. It's so addictive. There's a reason for that, and I think that's where we might want to have the companies be accountable, because they really hijack biology and our psychology. Human beings are species that are aversive to pain, and we have this negativity bias built in, which makes sense maybe thousands of years ago. If you see something like Russell over here, or you hear a sound, it's better to think that it's danger rather than it's not, because if it is danger and you run away, then you survive, because if you don't really pay attention, you die. We do have this negativity bias to pay more attention to negative things, and they know this. The companies know this. News companies, social media. There was a study published in Nature. They found that for every negative word that you add in a headline, the click-through rate increases like 2%. So when companies look at that, they're like, okay, well, let's add more negativity, and that's where the doom scrolling comes in, especially during COVID, where you have this illusion that I should stay updated, know what's happening, so you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, because you want to be in the loop. It's your psychology saying, you need to know this information for survival, but it's actually for profit on the company's end. That's so bad. I mean, it's also good that I feel like you're actually exposing what they're doing so that we know why this is so addictive, and I think you're exactly right. Probably a lot of us have this sense to make sure we are staying current. We know what's going on, especially if there's any danger or what kind of news are there in the world right now that I need to be informed. So that's, I don't know if it's called like a FOMO almost, like I don't want to get lost or I want to stay current, and I think we talked a little bit about the Eureka moment. I do want to mention this Greek word. I think it means I found it. So it's very interesting, because I think it's such a precious thing for a human being that you have this like, oh my gosh, I found it, that moment, but more importantly, are we losing the Eureka moment with or in the age of AI? Right. I mean, short answer, I think yes. But like most things, it's complicated. But yeah, the Eureka moment, it comes from Evrika in Greek, like I have found it. It comes from Evrisko, like the verb is to look, to look for something, and then you find it, because you can't find something unless you're looking for something. And like we mentioned, at least with Google, before, you were looking for things, and then you find them, and you make your own research and connect the dots. I think the more we have tools that just feed us information, maybe the more we lose that moment. But I think also just in daily life, like people are not going outside as much, children are not playing as much. When you were talking about that, I was thinking about what are my Eureka moments in life? A lot of them have been like intellectual, like when I'm reading something, I'm like, oh, that connects with that. Yes. But I think also a lot of them are just interacting with people. Like, oh, okay, like your story, that makes sense, similar to mine. The thing is, people are not really having that moment anymore. So I think it is concerning, because to me, it's the most satisfying feeling. Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say, when you were trying to look for something and finally you got it, it's a sense of satisfaction. Right, right. I mean, even just basic things, like reading a story, and then there's a moment where he clicks, and you're like, oh, it's just so satisfying. And I think if you're constantly, let's say scrolling, I don't know, maybe that moment comes, but it's not as gratifying. Right, it's like a moment only human has, not necessarily the machine would generate anything even closer to that type of feeling. Right, I mean, it is worth mentioning, it comes from the Greek story of this mathematician, I think it was Archibaldes. You know, he was trying to solve a mathematical thing. He was trying to basically figure out, is the golden crown made out of gold or not? And he was trying to figure out, how can I know the density? Right. And he was laying down in the hot tub, and he figured out, when I go in the tub, there's water displacement, and that's where we get the formula for being able to determine the density of something. The density, yeah. The water displacement. Yeah. And that's when he shouts, you know, Eureka, like I found it. And you'll be surprised how many moments we have had throughout history that we just can't really account for. Just for example, like Einstein, he was just sitting there, you know, imagining what it would be like to travel at the speed of light, and this is where he got some of his most insightful theories and many things in humanity have come in moments where we're not engaging, we're not, you know, like, let's say LLM stuff, we're not trying to predict the next thing, where we just allow ourselves to contemplate. And I think that's uniquely human, just sitting down and contemplating, letting your mind kind of do its thing. Yeah, absolutely.