Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time
Interesting that these topics always focus on <i>smartphones</i> or <i>the Internet</i>. It&#x27;s as if we talked about smoking in terms of &quot;lighters are causing addiction&quot;, or &quot;holding cylindrical objects in your hands is addictive&quot;. Or, about alcohol, in terms of &quot;ingesting beverages is a social problem&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not the Internet itself that is the problem. It&#x27;s not the devices - even extremely convenient ones, like always-connected smartphones. There are particular types of services that are problematic, provided by concrete companies, who optimize their addictive and distracting potential <i>on purpose</i>, advertise them heavily, and make money off the problems they cause. These are well-thought <i>business decisions</i>, made by well-known people. And yet, as a society, we shrink away from talking about them, preferring instead to put blame on incidental topics: the Internet, the smartphones, the engineers building the hardware and software[0].<p>I wish for a day when we collectively wake up and focus on the actual root cause, when we come to the conclusion that some business models just shouldn&#x27;t exist. We&#x27;ve done it in the past, and because of that we[1] enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. But either we&#x27;ve lost our way in the last decades, defaulting to an asinine view that &quot;all is fine as long as there is demand&quot;, or the process of understanding and mitigating threats to society takes too damn long. Maybe it&#x27;s the latter - but that&#x27;s not good, because the kind of abuse we throw at each other is following the economic and technological growth curves.<p>--<p>[0] - Or, a related favorite of mine, &quot;the AI&quot;. As if wild machine learning algorithms frolicked in the forest, and occasionally came out of the woods on their own, to take over some business or governmental decision process. No human making a self-serving decision to involve an unsuitable ML model in a system it doesn&#x27;t belong in was ever involved.<p>[1] - People in wealthier countries, at least.