connected life
Do You Mind? Sam Harris discusses the importance of mindfulness in our relationships with artificial intelligence – and each other.
By Dylan Rodgers & Patricia Miller
Sam Harris, author of numerous bestselling books and host of the Waking Up podcast, is no stranger to deep or difficult topics. In fact, he built an advertiser-free podcasting model in order to discuss ideas openly, without fear of losing sponsors. Often focusing his energy on exploring consciousness, ethics, and artificial intelligence, he recently ventured into a new type of conversation with the launch of the Waking Up Course app, a series of guided meditations and lessons focused on mindfulness. Appropriately, our conversation about technology-enhanced dialogue, ethics, and artificial intelligence has an undercurrent of mindfulness. Innovation & Tech Today: You’ve built a career on having deep and difficult conversations, whether that be via your books or your podcast. Social media is another way to have a public conversation, but while it’s useful for getting your message
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out, it’s often a driver of hyperbole and outrage. What do you think a healthier social media would look like?
with how people engage these media, and it is somewhat analogous to road rage, which is this paradoxical fact about the human mind.
Sam Harris: Well, I think in virtually every case anonymity is a bad idea. I understand the need for it in certain cases, like with whistle blowers or dissidents who would have their lives threatened if it were known who they were, but generally speaking, I think anonymity is almost entirely a toxic influence on our public conversation. So the fact that on Twitter and YouTube you really don’t know who anyone is, I think largely accounts for how vile the comments can be.
In the case of road rage, if you put someone in a car and just have them interact with other people in cars, they are often plunged into states of mind and into patterns of reactivity that would never be available to them if they were walking around on the street.
And I’ve noticed, for instance, if you select in Twitter that you just want to hear from people who have verified email addresses, that cuts down immensely on the craziness that I see coming back at me. So that’s one very easy lever to pull and if all the platforms did it, I think it would improve the conversation immensely. Beyond that, we have a psychological problem
It’s like the level of outrage, the kinds of things they’ll say and even do while in the imaginary safety of their car, it becomes its own form of mental illness, and there’s something about being behind the keyboard on social media that selects for a similar level of overreaction where they lose sight of the fact that they’re dealing with other human beings who are actually going to read the products of their typing. So it allows the inner maniac to come out in a way that simply wouldn’t come out in conversation with other people, certainly not face-to-face conversations.
