Snippet: AI Girlfriends, Loneliness, and Free Play

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract. (Okay, the next few snippet posts aren’t “brief,” except that they come from an hour-long interview. So brief is relative, right?)

Here’s one from Scott Galloway on the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast (Episode 646). I’d never heard of him, but I’m intrigued now. He’s a professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur. He has served on the board of directors for The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He’s also a podcaster and YouTuber. I’m looking forward to checking it out. And he’s another one of these atheists who keeps recommending religion.

“I've been having a dialogue with the Department of Homeland Security around AI, and they said go through the threats—super weapons, eco-sentient, misinformation. And I thought they were missing the biggest threat. I think the biggest threat of AI is loneliness. I think these tech firms want to convince you there's a reasonable facsimile of life that can be had on a screen with algorithms, AI girlfriends. The number of high school kids that see their friends every day has been cut in half in the last 10 years.

“So [to use] Jonathan Haidt’s [line,] we've over protected kids offline and under protected them online. More free play, get them out of the house, let them get into a little trouble. And also…I think we need more religious institutions, and I'm an atheist.

“My dad was married and divorced four times, so I went to Presbyterian, Unitarian, I went to Temple. I never bought into the lineage and that there was someone in the room with us or something, but I always enjoyed it. I made good friends.

“I went to the dances. I played on the softball and basketball teams of the Mormon Church of the Latter Day Saints in Westwood. And you know what?They were lovely people. They were really nice to me.

“And so I think institutions and third spaces where young people can get together in person, we got to get them off their screens.

“We’ve got to get them out of the house. We've got to be less protective of them, more free play, more rambunctious play.

“I used to leave my house at 10 a.m. on a Saturday with a Schwinn bike, 35 cents and an Abba-Zabba bar. And I wouldn't come home till 10 p.m.

“My mom had no idea where I was, none. And I think her biggest fear was that I was going to get into trouble. And my biggest fear is that my kids aren't going to get into enough trouble.

“They're just at home on these low risk, you know, low entry, low cost friend groups or things that are masking as socialization. So I think we need more places for people to meet up. I think we need more respect for institutions and more nonprofit participation, more after school programs, more athletics.

“But we’ve got to get kids bumping up against each other again.”

More to come from this interview soon.

Photo by Daniel Way on Unsplash

Snippet: An Agnostic Concerned About the Decline of Faith in America

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic:

“As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”

I wish more followers of Jesus shared the same concern.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash