Does AI Make Us Less Intelligent? Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Digital Responsibility

Okay, you've heard from me enough. I've asked too many questions. So we should open it up for you all to ask questions. So, I don't know, do we have a mic team at all, or do we wanna run, or use one of the wireless ones? We can run a mic in the audience, but as we're doing that, cool. So, put your hand up, we'll do it like we're in college. Cool. Okay, so I'm an educator. I've been an educator for 25 years, my whole adult life, and I think it was this summer, MIT came out with the first study. It was heralded as the first study. I don't know if it's been replicated since then, but a fairly voluminous study from MIT, stating unequivocally that AI makes us dumber. They had the imaging of the brain, and they had their trial study, and case studies, and everything, and it is making us dumber. And I'm old enough to remember the panic, or I'm old enough to remember a life without social media, and I think everybody is able to say that social media has not made us more social. Social media has made us antisocial. In the age of social media, we've had anxiety and depression go through the roof, and we don't have a handle on it. It's certainly not regulated. We don't know what's good or bad, and it seems to be spiraling with no end in sight. And in that space, where I'm working with children, largely high school students, I have seen a change in my 25 years of what social media has done. And if social media makes us antisocial, I'm afraid that artificial intelligence will make us unintelligent. And I'd like to hear what you say to that. Yeah, I have a 12-year-old, and I raised my 21-year-old niece, so I pay a lot of attention to the social media conversation, because I had to install Snapchat when I adopted my niece. And I still don't know how to use it. But I think with all of the negatives, we have to kind of look at the positive, because change isn't always bad. It can be perceived as bad. And with social media, there definitely have been negative consequences. But I think with AI replacing intelligence, you know, what value is it bringing? And even social media, what value is social media bringing? You know, it's making my elderly relatives more connected to the rest of the family when we used to have more cases of shut-ins, unable to really stay in touch with their families because they were isolated, they lived far away, or had some sort of immunocompromised, and things like that. So there's positives, and there's also negatives, and we have to find that balance. And in both cases, we haven't found the balance. AI, social media, and AR, equally, well, not equally, both rapidly changing. And what we know about social media today is going to be very different than tomorrow. Even just meta-acknowledging some of their algorithmic challenges, and I think talking about it, and being curious, and accepting that there have been negatives, and how do we bring the balance so that the negatives and the positives are more living in equality? And same with artificial intelligence. How do we right the scales where some of the lack of critical thinking, how do we replace that with other ways that we are improving? So this is actually an area that I'm very passionate about. So 25 years ago, I had a meeting. I'll leave his name out of it. But he sat me down, and a couple of my colleagues, and said, hey, I was running a digital media agency at the time. He said, hey, would it be of interest to you if you had the ability to be able to target custom advertising to people based on what they were looking at before they saw the ad? I said, yeah, of course, right? It's contextual. If somebody's interested in it, of course we want to show them an ad, right? For our clients, businesses, they're more likely going to convert, they're going to click on that ad, they're going to make a sale because they are further down the sales funnel, and more likely to convert. That was the beginning of what we call behavioral targeting. And that is what really set off all of the problem that we have today with social media. So essentially what happened in the 2000s, behavioral targeting continued to take off. Now, for 10 years, I remember, we had one of the representatives from the FCC used to come to all of our conferences and said, listen, all you're doing is targeting all of these advertising everywhere. Nothing's being regulated. You as an industry either need to self-regulate, or we're going to come in and regulate for you, okay? For 10 years, and I'll tell you what, our industry did not do any regulation. The only thing finally the industry stepped up and do, you ever see the little, in the advertisements, you'll see ad choices, right? That little icon, when you click that, it tells you how your data's going to be used. That was the biggest thing that came out of self-regulation for the entire industry. And honestly, that's nothing. And so there's a saying, right? Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. All of these social media companies are incented to drive engagement, right? To get people clicking, sharing, viewing all of these different ads, so that then it increases the value for the advertisers, right, because the more people engage with the ads, the more likely they are to convert. My main reason for leaving digital media in 2013 was because I started getting into areas of cognitive marketing, where you're really starting to understand people's cognitive biases, understanding how people form their, how people come up with how they perceive things, understanding what motivates their behavior, and all of the behavioral science that goes into this. And I realized very quickly, right now, we're convincing people to buy a bunch of crap that they don't need, but very quickly, you can use these same tools and technologies to sell through an ideology, okay? And now look where we are today. And now, algorithmic AI did all of that, okay? Now, this is where my fear comes from, is exactly what you're concerned about, is that if we do not get ahead of this, and we do not start regulating AI, and we allow anyone to use AI, we are gonna find ourselves in a lot of trouble. There's a saying, if everyone has access to AI, everyone dies, think about that. If anyone can use AI, everybody dies. I'm not, I know, I get it, it's hyperbolic, all right? I say all of this because there are real concerns, but nobody can predict the future, right? Everyone here today, embarking on this new AI journey, are also creators of the future. We need good agents out there, we need good people out there using AI to combat the way the bad actors are gonna use it, all right? So this is not about ignoring AI, this is about really leaning in, and think about how you can use AI for good, because if you don't use it for good, there are plenty of people out there that will use it for bad. Exactly, yeah, I share, first of all, I share with your concerns, and this is a knife, this is a gun, could, you know, use a knife, cut a vegetable, but also kill the people as well. So this is also highlight the importance, the moral standard, the person, you know, the moral standards who develop the tools bring the society for the good applications. If you think about it for other way around, they bring the more challenging to the society, for the human beings. I'm sure, you know, there are more and more ethnical perspective, legal perspectives to prevent this kind of thing happen, you know, then, you know, hopefully, not to make us not intelligent, right, make us still intelligent, develop more intelligent, and also through all this self-learning, self-adoptions, open a new era, Elon Musk go to the mall, all this, right? So there's a lot of things that maybe open a new opportunity, new area for us to explore. I have a friend that runs a company called Convertilation, and they deal with the aspect that I think about in this, in that we have personal responsibility. So where is the personal responsibility? My youngest is 30. So I remember when we wanted to go outside, there weren't cell phones, we didn't have this high-tech gaming systems. We could not wait to get out, see our friends, be outdoors, and so Convertilation puts it on the parents, the teachers, the education system, and the children in combination to say, when are you ready for a phone? When are you ready for technology to be put in your hands? Because now it's a supercomputer, you know, now it's a mini supercomputer I'm giving you, congratulations, here it all is. So I think there is some personal responsibility that we have to take as individuals and as parents to be, and as educators as well, to be like, hey, what do we do to make sure that we are protecting ourselves and our children from bad actors?