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's as if we talked about smoking in terms of "lighters are causing addiction", or "holding cylindrical objects in your hands is addictive". Or, about alcohol, in terms of "ingesting beverages is a social problem".<p>It's not the Internet itself that is the problem. It'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't exist. We've done it in the past, and because of that we[1] enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. But either we've lost our way in the last decades, defaulting to an asinine view that "all is fine as long as there is demand", or the process of understanding and mitigating threats to society takes too damn long. Maybe it's the latter - but that'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, "the AI". 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't belong in was ever involved.<p>[1] - People in wealthier countries, at least.