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C (1:39)

This is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and today we're talking about the tech backlash. A revolution is brewing. If it were a pot of water, I'd say it's been on the stove for seven or eight minutes. It's not quite boiling and bubbling and bursting, but the water's hot, the pot is hissing, and the stainless steel is shimmering. It won't be too long before it boils over. Signs of this revolution are everywhere. On the front pages of the New York Times, in niche corners of the Internet, among my closest friends and family. It's a backlash, really, one that began quietly and tentatively, but is turning thunderous and unapologetic. It's happening in homes, schools, restaurants, the workplace, and at parties. It is a resistance and a genuine dread of just how much time we are all spending in front of our screens. Whatever the latest ubiquitous consumer technology is, and however it's designed to demand, we spend more time looking at our phones or computers. We loathe it. We resist our acquiescence to it. This is a new phenomenon. For the last few decades, the dominance of these screen based consumer technologies has been accelerating exponentially. For a long time, there was no predictable end in sight and very few signs of resistance. In the early 1990s, just 27% of Americans had computers in their homes. By the end of the decade, over 40% did. In 2007, Apple launched the Apple iPhone, Dropping a miniature computer into everyone's pocket. By 2011, about 1 in 3Americans had a smartphone, and the number was rapidly accelerating. Today, roughly 90% of Americans have a smartphone and about 95% own a computer. As these technologies boomed in popularity over the last 30 years, many people believe that we'd eventually look around and say, wow. The world these innovations created has transformed our lives in positive ways. I want more of this and will embrace the innovations to come. I think we're actually realizing the opposite. We're finally pausing to take stock of where this technology has taken us, and we don't much like where we've landed. We sense the severity of this new reality all around us. Toddlers are absorbed in iPads, at restaurants or the park. The Internet, once a luxury you may have had to trek to a cafe to access, is now like oxygen. Meta is building chatbots that can have sensual conversations with children. Teachers report their students disassociating with their phones at school and incre support phone bans. Black mirror episodes feel increasingly prophetic. We look around and wonder, why is everyone so anxious? What happened to all the parties? Where are all the kids playing outside? And I think we know the answers. It's just a hard thing to admit, given what it would demand of us to change our behavior accordingly, many Americans are primed to reject the next world changing technology. Well, the next world changing technology is already here. I'm speaking, of course, of artificial intelligence, AI. In a seemingly impossible turn, the rise in AI may be more meteoric than even the explosive growth of computers, the Internet, the smartphone, or social media. In just a few short years, ChatGPT has amassed 700 million weekly users. 70% of high school students say they used AI during the 2023-2024 school year. And and 90% of college students say they use ChatGPT for homework help. In the first two months after its launch, 28% of employed adults say they have used ChatGPT for work tasks, and over one in six report using it on a weekly basis. People fire up the platform for relationship advice, planning, travel, learning, new languages, meal planning, and even medical advice. This rapid adoption has created plenty of problems, and the backlash against AI has been nearly as swift as its rise. Like any movement, this anti AI backlash has its extremists, but the resistance is leveling more sophisticated critiques than hair pulling apocalyptica about unleashing genius killer robots that could eradicate humanity. Some students are now resisting AI, sensing that its functionality as a cheat code for schoolwork might be making them dumber and less capable. The increasing frequency of stories in which AI lies to people, blackmails them, encourages suicide, or causes psychosis has now garnered national attention, and the family and friends of the victims in these stories are increasingly incensed. The chatbots themselves are susceptible to delusional spirals, imagining events, threats, and people who never existed so often that these mistakes should degrade trust from users over time. Meanwhile, despite all of their notable flaws, the very same technologies might be stealing jobs from new entrants to the labor market and are quickly taking over our government. In a lot of ways, the AI industry's attempt to penetrate our everyday lives comes at an inopportune moment for its products. Nearly all of my friends share an increasing understanding that our personal devices, our screens are depleting us of richer, more authentic experiences. Rather than handing their kids iPhones, parents are turning the clock back and introducing them to the magic of landlines. Schools that emphasize outdoor and independent play are rapidly growing across the US More and more people are insisting that you put your phone away when you socialize, and restaurants, parties, and social events built around going phoneless are rising in popularity. 71% of parents worry that their children spend too much time on screens, and that was in 2020, before ChatGPT or artificial intelligence was even part of our lexicon. Four in 10 teens say they spend too much time on their phone, and 72% say they sometimes are often feel peaceful when they don't have their devices. Most teens still think the benefits of smartphones outweigh the harms, which is unsurprising given they've never experienced anything else. In my personal life, I've made a habit of hosting Shabbat dinners on Friday nights with friends and family, Jews and non Jews alike. Since the table often includes non observant attendees, I don't make any religious requirements, but I do make the bare minimum ask that attendees don't use their phones at any time during the evening. This seemingly small suggestion has never once been violated. Without exception, guests tell me that they come away from the night feeling like they just participated in a refreshing kind of social event, one both nostalgic and rare. While I'm heartened by these experiences, I'm also starting to get an odd and frightening feeling, one I can't quite grasp tangibly, but feels true and I sense is shared by many of my peers, that this is our last chance. This moment, these next few years, as we stare down the barrel of AI generated everything, it feels like our last opportunity to do something to detach ourselves. It seems to me genuinely that if we don't pull back from our over reliance on these technologies right now, we'll soon lose our ability to do so at all.