Today, a handful of people working at a handful of tech companies, steer the thoughts of billions of people every day. We have seen this worked in the favor of sleazy politicians and greedy corporations already.
AI and greed will make this worse than it is already. Just look around you next time you’re on a bus or in an airport…
In this video Tristan Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want.
Right now, we're seeing the earliest of augmented reality and virtual reality — tech that overlays the digital world onto our human senses. It means information, projected into your eyes and ears, as you need it. Why carry a phone when Netflix and WhatsApp are floating in front of you?
Soon we're not even leaving our home anymore, like 20% of the youth in Japan! The phenomenon, called “hikikomori”, is defined by the Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry as people who have stayed in their home for six months or more without going to school, work or venturing out to socialise.
To some, the Hikikomori is an extension of the Otaku culture: somebody self-consumed in his interests, a compulsive collector of anime and manga memorabilia, lacking basic social skills and with a skeleton in the closet: the Akihabara Massacre. In 2008 a man killed seven people and stabbed ten more in the heart of Akihabara, a neighborhood in Tokyo entirely devoted to anime and manga, ground zero of Otaku culture.
Meanwhile the smartphone is going to die and the same tech companies are leading the race to kill it.