Sandra Matz

Yeah, so this is a really tragic story of a woman who got into an accident, got severely injured, lost the bakery that she was running. She was self-employed, which also meant that she couldn't afford a car anymore, couldn't really provide for her family. And you can imagine that all of this takes a pretty big toll on someone's mental health.

now with no car no money there's no way that you can either find a therapist let alone drive to a therapist for like your weekly session so what she did is she started using um an app that's called wiser which is really trying to interact with you give you advice ask questions about how you're feeling um gives these little prompts and little challenges maybe you go out to nature and maybe you try and meditate for a little bit and i think the way that she tells the story

is that it was very weird in the beginning talking to a bot about your mental health struggles, but at some point you adjust and you get used to it. And from using it once in a while, I think she started using it multiple times a day.

So in her case, I think it significantly improved her mental health. It certainly didn't fix all of the problems, right? And there's still a lot of effort that you have to put in as a human being. But it felt like there was a support system that she otherwise couldn't have afforded.

Yeah, so I think if you have access to a human being, blood and flesh, who can be your therapist, that's probably preferable. However, there's this huge gap in terms of how many therapists there are and how many people are seeking therapy. So then there is a really huge need for people to get at least some support in cases where they can't get hold of a human being.

Oh, yeah, that's it's one of my favorite applications. But the idea here is that it actually offers this what I think of as like a magical echo chamber swap machine. And because it's really difficult for me to figure out, well, what is the reality of, let's say, a 50 year old guy in the middle of Ohio? I just don't have direct access, right?

It's really difficult for me to step into their shoes and see what does their day-to-day look like. Same for, let's say, a single mom in the suburbs of Chicago. But Google knows, right? Google knows exactly what those people see every day when they search for something specific. Facebook knows exactly what their newsfeed looks like every day.

So instead of keeping me in my own echo chamber and just feeding more of the stuff that I already know, they could actually allow me to hop into the echo chambers of other people.

Yeah, so it could be an explorer mode, right? And the explorer mode at the very basic level could be, well, just do an echo chamber swap with someone. So maybe someone is happy to let you access their Facebook feed and you give them access to yours. At a more sophisticated level, they could build an engine that allows you to specify exactly which echo chamber you want to hop into, right?

I can say, here's the demographics of the person, here's the preferences, here's the age, gender, whatever you want to see, and then you can hop into the echo chamber. Now, I don't think we're going to use it all too often, right? The argument by Google is nobody would use it because it's so comfortable in our own echo chamber. And I think that is largely true.

Most of the time, we probably love to not have to go to page two of Google because we find what we want to see on page one. But I at least want to have the option. See, well, what is the search result for like immigration that someone with a totally different political ideology than me and a totally different part of the country sees that I would never otherwise get to see?

I think that's absolutely true. And in all fairness, some of it is human nature. So the reason for why these algorithms work and the reason for why companies craft them in their effort to make profits is because we love to see stuff that we believe in anyway. It's very comforting. It's very reassuring to see stuff that is aligned with our worldview.

So that's why I feel like this explorer mode is just one option that allows us to at least get some collective oversight. So even if we're not using it as much, it still means that we have an option to see what's happening on the other side.

it feels much more of a burden and a responsibility that we're not really equipped to take on.

Thank you so much.