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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey everyone, it's Aza Raskin and welcome to Your Undivided Attention. Today, we're going to be doing something a little different, a kind of looking back to look forward. And to do that, we've invited the co-founder for Center for Humane Technology, along with me and Tristan, Randy Fernando, for this special episode.
And what we're going to be talking about is really what we talk about when we talk about humane technology. We're going to be exploring seven principles of humane tech and the myths that they bust. So, hey, Randy, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. All right, Randy, so just really quickly, before we dive in, I think it's important that people hear just a little bit about your background.
Why should we be listening to you in this moment?
I started my career at NVIDIA, which was the best place for me given my background in computer science and computer graphics. I was a product manager for a bunch of different software products.
One of the interesting things I did was I also co-authored some books, and one of them was the first book on the first hardware shading language for the first programmable GPU, which was sort of like early days in this path that has taken us to where we are today. I was also on the founding board of directors of the NVIDIA Foundation. And then I kind of got interested in the nonprofit sector.
And so I ran a nonprofit called Mindful Schools that trained kids in how to pay attention, how to manage their emotions, how to cultivate kindness. And we trained nearly a million kids and 20,000 teachers while I was there. And since then, I've been doing this work at CHT with you and Tristan for almost 10 years.
And I just want everyone to know because... Many people, of course, know Tristan's name and my name, but they don't know, Randy, as much your name. But every major moment of our journey through social media into AI, like you've been there behind the scenes at Social Dilemma for the AI doc. You're always there, always supporting. And I just want everyone... listening to know that.
And Randy's been working on sort of like codifying a set of humane technology principles that we've been using since the very beginning. You know, the name humane comes, of course, from my father created the Macintosh project. He sort of called what it is to be humane, to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
And why this is so important and why now is that, you know, when we used to look at social media, people would talk about all these separate problems. They talk about there's addiction over here and polarization over here and misinformation in that corner, over sexualization over here, hyper partisanship over here.
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Chapter 2: What are the seven principles of humane technology?
It's like playing the world's hardest game of whack-a-mole. Instead, you need to get to the root of the problem and if you can name the root correctly, then you address that one thing and it addresses all the other things.
That's right. And the same patterns keep repeating. And the idea of this project was to say, wait, there's a way of thinking. There's a way of looking at the problem. There's a way of looking at the diagnosis behind the problem. And that same way of thinking guides you to the right answers. Like if you are building solutions,
inside the current system, but also if you are imagining, hey, what would a good system look like? Like if we really wanted to do things right, these same principles will help you do all of that. So that's what we want to walk you through today.
And so we're going to start by taking you to our very first episode all the way back in 2019 with our very first guest, Natasha Daushol, who is a cultural anthropologist who conducted years of research in Las Vegas casinos.
Really, when I started this project, it was Las Vegas and casinos everywhere were in this real shift in design logic. Some of us still think of Vegas as being loud, jangly, bright, neon, flashing. And it used to be designed that way, make it as loud as you can. People need to hear the coins clanking and put a strobe on their face.
No, you want people to sit down because your new profit logic is called time on device. And to increase time on device, this is a sort of ergonomic operation where you have to worry about fatigue. It's not worker fatigue. It's consumer fatigue.
Right. We can't have you fatigued there. We have to make sure that you're staying.
Right. So you are measuring that light doesn't bounce directly at people from interior surfaces, because that will bring them to awareness and tax their senses. You don't want...
sound to bounce off walls and come and again make you feel depleted so people will even spend time constructing these protective sound cones so they're invisible but they're there right where your ears and your eyes this audio visuals are directing you to your own little theater and trying to buffer anything from the outside that could interrupt you so
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Chapter 3: How does technology impact our understanding of addiction and misinformation?
Yeah. And so there's this image that we often use of a Jenga tower, where you're pulling blocks up from the bottom of the tower of things we all depend on to get some new cool feature at the top. So in AI, you get this new feature at the top, which is make amazing new AI videos and images But now you pull out the block of knowing what's true.
You get amazing new cancer drugs at the top, but you pull out the block of biological safety. Now everyone can make bioweapons. And so it's this form of like you pull out the block to build up that lets you see you get a more and more unstable society. And at some point you pull a block out and the whole thing falls.
Yeah.
And there's another way of thinking about it, which is saying, if you extract faster than something can regenerate, obviously that's a problem. And that simple idea is actually very good for diagnosing what's going on in many of these situations. So you say, when we extract, what is powering that? It's a combination of competition and technology.
Technology is a huge exponentiator of that extraction process. Okay, what's on the resilient side? Well, it's the natural ability of us, like let's say our minds, our children, our ecosystems to regenerate, right? To grow, to recover. And it's the rules that we place around competition to say, hey, don't do that too fast because then you might damage something.
okay, when we make new inventions, where is most of our energy concentrated? It's on the extraction side. And this is why these things get completely out of whack. And a good example is actually car safety. When cars began, the companies that were making cars were not that excited about spending energy on safety, spending resources and time on doing that.
But what happens is you're able to eventually build common ground, build public pressure and say, look, traffic deaths aren't acceptable. And there was this cultural shift. And then you combine that with getting the power players at the table. So the automakers, the insurers, the regulators, etc. you create incentives and penalties. So you say, when you do the right thing, you get rewarded.
When you do the wrong thing, you get penalized. And then you figure out things like DMVs and traffic codes, and you update those as the tech changes. So this is kind of inspiration for what we need to do. A harder version of this, but it's something like this for AI.
So that gets us to principle number three. Design for genuine thriving. In some sense, this is the simplest to explain because it's also the most personal. You just have to ask yourself, do you actually feel like you're thriving when you're using a piece of technology? When you put your phone down, after an hour of spending time on it that you didn't mean to, do you feel better or worse?
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Chapter 4: What are the consequences of designing technology without considering human psychology?
It's not one of those things at the detriment of all the others.
Just one example is that the obvious thing you'd want your apps to do and your phone to do would be to optimize for what you did when you put it down. That is, it's not what you do on your phone. It's all the incredible things with your friends in the world that you get to do when you're not using your phone. And the app should be optimizing for what you do in real life.
But how could they possibly measure what you're doing in real life? And so the only thing they can optimize for is something which actually isn't good for you, good for your community, good for your neighborhood. It's a different product. It's a different way of thinking about building. But we do have examples of what it can look like. even just at the sort of like the information sharing layer.
So a few years ago, we talked with Tina Rosenberg, who is one of the founders of Solution Journalism, which is intended to focus on examples of what's working to create bright spots in people's minds instead of just always focusing on what's broken. So I know that you guys have a database of solutions and solutions articles. I would love to hear you talk about that.
And a question that I have when I first heard like, oh, you have this giant solutions database is what families of solutions are most effective or transplantable?
Yeah, so the story tracker. At SJN, we don't do solutions journalism. We teach others to do it, and then we collect it. And we have a team of people whose job it is to find these stories, to read them, to vet them, make sure they're good solutions journalism, to summarize them and tag them. And then we have them in this database where you can search stories
for them in many, many, many different ways. We have, I think, about 12,000 stories right now, and we're adding more every day. If you're interested in mental health access for Spanish-speaking people in Colorado, and you want to see videos that are more than five minutes long, you could put all those parameters in and find solution stories.
You can search for exactly the kind of story that you need. It's really a great tool.
So imagine that when you're scrolling, instead of being given an infinite feed of things are worse than you think and there's nothing you could do, you're given tangible examples from around the world against every newsfeed item of there's something you can do. And here are the people that are already doing it. And click this button to go join them in the real world.
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