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Into The Machine with Tobias Rose-Stockwell Podcast
Episode 1: Is AI Making Us Stupid? A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

Episode 1: Is AI Making Us Stupid? A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

Into The Machine with Tobias Rose-Stockwell vor 1 Jahr

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1:04:52

Today I’m launching Into The Machine.

My first episode is a conversation with my colleague, social
psychologist and #1 NYT bestselling author Jonathan
Haidt.

Jon and I wrote a piece in The Atlantic called The Dark
Psychology of Social Networks — hoping to add clarity to the
debate around social media. AI has changed the conversation. We
now find ourselves in a stranger moment with LLMs, asking deeper
questions about what these tools are doing to our ability to
think.

In this episode we discuss:

* Attention as civic infrastructure: the erosion
of sustained focus undermines shared reality, and with it the
preconditions for governance, compromise, and democratic
legitimacy.

* Engagement algorithms as centrifuges: rather
than reflecting consensus, they pull discourse toward the edges,
making fringe views appear as if they represent the center.

* Democracies as uniquely fragile: unlike
authoritarian systems that can integrate these technologies into
centralized control, liberal democracies are structurally more
vulnerable to their fragmenting effects.

* Childhood as the front line: the breakdown of
“serve-and-return” interactions, compounded by algorithmic feeds,
represents not just a developmental crisis but a possible
precursor to broader societal instability.

* Human agency atrophied by delegation: when
writing, thinking, and decision-making are outsourced to
machines, individuals lose the cognitive muscle required for
original judgment.

A small ask

The irony is not lost on us in trying to explain/critique
the algorithms while we’re dependent upon them to reach the right
audience.

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Our next guest is Tim Urban, creator of
Wait But Why.

Thank you, as always, for the gift of your attention.

-Tobias

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