AI is about to create an epidemic of addiction in this country and around the world, according to Zachary Gidwitz, founder of OpenRecovery. Could it also be our best shot at fighting back? In this episode of The Rip Current, I discuss the growing issue of addiction in America and the potential for AI tools to combat it with Gidwitz. Together we get into the rise of various forms of addiction, from fentanyl and gambling to social media and pornography. Gidwitz shares his vision of using AI not to replace human therapists but to guide individuals towards real human connection and effective recovery programs. He stresses the importance of tailoring interventions to individual needs and avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches. The conversation also explores the ethical considerations and challenges in using AI for such sensitive applications, emphasizing the need for transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Addiction is coming, team. Here’s hoping conversations like this can help get us out in front of it.
My recent trip to Brazil happened to coincide with the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and ever since I’ve been looking for the right person to explain how it is that a former military dictatorship is now the kind of democracy that actually brings a former leader to account. In this episode, Cristina Tardaguila, founder of the fact-checking organization Lupa, describes the rise and conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro, the impact of misinformation, and the growing (and now perhaps unstoppable) influence of China and Russia in Brazil. Cristina shares insights into the creation and evolution of Lupa, the complexities of Brazilian democracy, and the economic and political dynamics shaping the nation’s complicated future.
00:00 US Diplomacy and Brazil’s Geopolitical Landscape
02:17 Introduction to Lupa and Cristina Tardaguila
02:48 The Rise of Fact-Checking in Brazil
05:09 Global Populism and Bolsonaro’s Influence
07:02 The Hate Cabinet and Techno-Populism
10:56 Lupa’s Evolution and Business Model
12:58 COVID-19 and the Fight Against Misinformation
16:46 The Why of Disinformation
27:12 Bolsonaro’s Political Journey and Impact
33:52 The Aftermath of January 8th, 2023
34:40 Reflecting on the Insurrection
41:25 The Trial and Conviction of Bolsonaro
47:56 Brazil’s Political Future
51:49 China’s Influence in Brazil
59:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethicist and the head of Humane Intelligence, is sick of all this complaining. Not because there isn’t plenty to complain about — in this episode we unpack a host of horrors that AI and the companies who make it are foisting on all of us — but because she believes that the fatalism of AI criticism inadvertently empowers powerful corporations. Dr. Chowdhury, who has worked at Accenture, Twitter, and served as a science envoy for the Biden administration, has an unusual background for an AI builder — political science and quantitative social sciences — and her work on the inherent biases within algorithms has led her to believe that the solutions are far more complicated than just switching the whole thing off. Enjoy!
When I first came on his show, Andrew Keen took a dim view of my ideas about how we might fight back against the psychological effects of AI in my 2022 book The Loop, and to be honest: he was kinda right. The “how to fight back” section of the book was thin, largely because I was hanging (and still hang) so much of my hopes on the idea that the courts will save us. So I asked him if he’d like to revisit our conversation on his show, and he graciously agreed. Here’s how it went!
AI is having a profound effect on love, work, and democracy...but do the people making it understand that?
AI ethics consultant Olivia Gambelin has been fighting to make her clients in Silicon Valley understand that good ethics are good business, and to make regulators in Europe see that good business can also have good ethics. It's a tough gig.
Gambelin, who advises both AI companies in Silicon Valley and regulators in Brussels, talks techno-solutionism, the challenges of implementing ethical AI practices when there's always that one evangelist in the room trying to go too far too fast, and her worries about what she considers the top truly unacceptable category of AI product out there today.
00:00 Introduction to Techno Solutionism
00:44 Meet Olivia Gambelin: AI Ethics Consultant
01:56 Olivia's Journey: From Bay Area to Brussels
08:19 The Role of Ethical Intelligence
14:38 Challenges in AI Implementation
21:50 The Future of AI in the Workplace
32:51 Introduction to AI Regulation in Brussels
34:05 Cultural Differences in AI Regulation
36:29 Challenges in European AI Literacy
38:32 Behavioral Science and AI Manipulation
44:22 Ethics in AI: Business vs. Regulation
51:17 The Need for AI Regulation in the US
56:00 Ethical Boundaries in AI Applications
01:00:53 Positive Applications of AI
01:05:18 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
A new California law, SB 53, was just signed by Governor Gavin Newsom today, Monday September 29th. It has the AI makers undoubtedly throwing their mushroom coffee across the room this afternoon, because now they’re hemmed in by the EU’s AI Act on one side, and the Golden State’s new law on the other. Here’s why it matters!
TikTok is no different than any other social media company (it wants to serve you irresistible content by predicting your tastes algorithmically), and its processes aren't either (it threw spaghetti and money against the wall until it stuck). But its status as a Chinese company, the first globally successful Chinese media export, and a deeply powerful geopolitical tool means it's the center of a battle over the future of the Internet. In her new book Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over Tiktok, Emily Baker-White describes her years covering the company. (She did it so well executives there even attempted to spy on her phone to find out who she was speaking to inside TikTok.) She tells the story of the most effective attention-grabbing algorithm ever devised — its strange beginnings, and the “messy” people who operate the levers behind its curtain — and explains the legal limbo in which it and its billions of users are now caught.
AI is making people crazy.
And I don’t mean in the sense that it’s driving tech observers like me crazy, with its reckless adoption path and dishonest marketing and screwy incentives. I mean it’s literally making otherwise reasonable people believe that their AI chatbots are lovers, or prisoners, or prophets of hidden wisdom.
In this hourlong conversation with tech educator Morten Rand-Hendricksen (his TikTok and his YouTube are worth a follow), we try to surround the topic from two sides. Mine is the psychological and ideological side, which I used to frame the thesis of my book The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. Morten’s is the bits and bytes that have been assembled to give the impression that this language-mirroring system has somehow developed reasoning, and a personality, and special insight into who you are. He does a tremendous job here explaining why this simulation of companionship is so thin, and so powerful, and so dangerous. And he has some real tactics to share for all of us in fighting back.
Are you ready to get in a tube built by billionaires and stay there for nine months? Ready to live in caves on the other side? And who is in charge of this dreary outpost anyway? In this episode of The Rip Current, David Ariosto, author of Open Space: From Earth to Eternity, the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos and host of the Space Minds podcast, joins Jake to explore the motivations behind private and state-funded space travel, the potential for settlements on the Moon and Mars, and the ethical implications of billionaire-led space enterprises. We talk about the fragility of the human body in space, the viability of actually governing space settlements, and the technological advancements driving the space industry. Who really holds the power in the final frontier?
00:00 Introduction to Space Exploration
00:30 The Rip Current: Big Invisible Forces
00:32 The Leap of Faith in Space
01:20 Guest Introduction: David Sto
03:22 The Commercialization of Space
05:57 Technological Advances and Market Potential
13:41 Geopolitical Implications of Space Exploration
21:50 Human vs. Robotic Space Missions
34:24 Facing Death: The Mindset of Test Pilots
35:52 Astronaut's Dream: Franklin Chang Diaz's Story
37:56 Psychological Impact of Space Travel
39:55 Billionaires in Space: Elon Musk and Beyond
41:48 NASA's Changing Role in Space Exploration
51:17 The Future of Space Colonization
59:44 The Vastness of Space and Human Survival
01:05:40 Conclusion: The Drive to Explore the Cosmos
Molly White, renowned crypto skeptic and creator of 'Web3 is Going Just Great' has spent the last few years documenting the intricate web of scams, hacks, and enormous losses that pervade the cryptocurrency industry. Molly considers crypto a solution in search of a problem, and of course now it's creating new problems, not least direct digital bribery of the President. In this episode we get into the difference between the technology and the business of crypto, the outrageous corruption it’s making possible, and the unsettling parallels between the current AI hype and past crypto promises.
For more of Molly White's work, subscribe to her newsletter Citation Needed!
Also, as you’ll hear in this episode, I’m considering renaming this whole enterprise — the newsletter and the show — so I’m not hiding what I do behind a needlessly esoteric brand name. The new name I’m considering is the name of a book I’m working on, Great Ideas We Should Not Pursue. So fair warning you may see me roll out a whole new thing in the coming weeks, don’t panic when you see a new name in your feed!
Back in 2006, a young interface designer came up with the idea that rather than making people click to another page to continue reading, they should just get an endlessly reloading single page that goes on forever. That "infinite scroll" wound up being a centerpiece of the attention economy — it's how you can scroll mindlessly for hours without taking a break — and that young designer, Aza Raskin, became an activist fighting back against the industry he came up in.
Today Raskin is the cofounder, with Tristan Harris, of The Center for Humane Technology, and he and Harris helped create the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which articulated the dangers of social media to the world. Now he's trying to do the same with A.I., and in this hourlong conversation he reveals the cultish enthusiasm, misplaced incentives, and truly catastrophic risks that the technology has brought into the world. He's a gifted communicator on the subject, and has made a new career inventing brilliant ways of bringing it across to the rest of us — you'll hear that here. (He and Harris also host Your Undivided Attention, a podcast on all of this.) We talk about the cult of endless growth that is Silicon Valley, why A.I. is different from anything that's come before it, and his hopes for creating some restraint in a world that he feels is accelerating out of control without it.
We’ve all experienced loneliness, but could you really describe what it is, and what it does to you, beyond the physical experience of isolation? Before this conversation, I couldn’t. But David Jay has taken the invisible, unnameable effects of loneliness and turned them into an actionable recipe for evaluating and improving friendship and community in our lives. (He explains it all in his 2024 book Relationality.) It sounds hokey — and he’s the first to admit that we’re doing a terrible job in society of quantifying the value of this stuff — but his work on the subject is quite rigorous, and the stakes are enormous: cultural disconnection, political authoritarianism, a mental and physical health crisis, and a deepening inability to fight our way out of all of it.
The good news is he has real advice, and shares it with me here. Please enjoy, and if you like the episode I beg you: share it with someone else!
Adam Rogers is a science journalist and the author of two amazing books about how we experience the world. His second, Full Spectrum, is about color. But we're here to discuss his first, Proof: The Science of Booze. Not just booze, though — what it symbolizes about magic and alchemy and history and chaos, and why our relationship to it is so fraught and fun and terrible. Basically what I learned is that it would improve the world enormously if everyone had to learn to handle themselves at a bar, but that we somehow need to do it without actually drinking. Also he's a great friend of mine, and it's my show, and I can have my friends on sometimes, okay?
If you like this show, do me a favor and share it with someone else! It helps enormously in bringing me to a new audience.
Trump's sudden, strange appeal took most political observers by surprise (it broke their necks, frankly), but not Bart Bonikowski. The NYU professor of politics and sociology has been looking at the global rise of populism for over a decade, along with the ideologies and forms of nationalism that help to explain why it's got us all in its grasp at the moment. We talk about the common causes of this weird kind of politics, the most dangerous outcomes it might lead us to, and what the antidotes might be.
Readings:
“Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment” (British Journal of Sociology, 2017)
Clarifies distinctions among populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism and shows that spikes in radical‑right support come from framing strategies resonating with folks experiencing national status threats pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+1cifar.ca+1sociology.berkeley.edu.
“Varieties of American Popular Nationalism” (with Paul DiMaggio, AJS, 2016)
Identified four distinct nationalist mindsets—disengaged, civic, ardent, restrictive—and mapped their prevalence russellsage.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4.
“The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’” (with Feinstein & Bock, AJS, 2021)
Shows how Republicans and Democrats increasingly diverge in their definitions of America—Republicans leaning exclusionary, Democrats inclusive journals.uchicago.edu+2en.wikipedia.org+2cifar.ca+2.
“Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020)” (2022)
Uses neural language modeling to track ideological trends across historic campaigns cifar.ca+1journals.sagepub.com+1en.wikipedia.org+6pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+6papers.ssrn.com+6.
“Trump’s Populism…” (2019 chapter in When Democracy Trumps Populism)
Dissects the nationalist rhetoric in Trump’s campaigns and situates it within broader democratic patterns nyuscholars.nyu.edu.
When I was writing my book The Loop, I was looking for experts in the degree to which we misunderstand one another, and several people pointed me at this week’s guest. He and I had an hourlong phone conversation, and while he undoubtedly doesn’t remember it (but is too polite to say so), for me it was a deeply formative experience.
Lord John Alderdice grew up the son of an Irish presbyterian minister in and out of Belfast, and has been a psychiatrist, a politician, and a researcher into violence and peace. His work on the Good Friday Accords helped to end the troubles in Northern Ireland, and he’s been a trusted source of insight and scholarship for those seeking an end to violence in dozens of conflicts around the world ever since.
In this week’s episode, he discusses the deeply misunderstood power of really and truly listening, over long periods of time, in correcting disturbed historic relationships and setting them back on a path toward peace, and our conversation is a very interesting accompaniment to my interview with John Patty and Elizabeth Penn about the frailty of democracy from a few weeks back.
Here are three recent pieces of research from Lord Alderdice about the "how" of negotiation and why we're in such global disorder, as he puts it.
Alderdice, John, Lord (2021) "Conflict, Complexity, and Cooperation," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 33 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol33/iss1/9
Alderdice, John, Lord, (2023) New insights into the psychology of individuals and large groups in a world of changing conflicts (2023) International Political Science Review, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231177444
Alderdice, John, Lord (2010) “Off the couch and round the conference table”. Chapter 1 in Off the Couch – Contemporary Psychoanalytic Applications, Eds Alessandra Lemma and Matthew Patrick, Routledge.
Lord Alderdice is refreshing not just for his optimism that we can find a way to peace, but because that optimism is based in decades of hard experience pursuing it. I hope you enjoy it.
Here's what it's like on the ground when you're covering a protest, why it's so hard to give an accurate picture of what's happening, and why it can be misleading. Also: police targeting journalists is very much a thing.
Duke Professor of Law Nita Farahany has documented the growing industry of companies and devices that try to read your intentions, analyze your mind state, and generally get inside your brain. No, really: in her 2023 book The Battle for Your Brain she documents hundreds of instances in which everyone from employers to authoritarian regimes are hoping to use this stuff on us. And now she's looking ahead in a new book to how technology is changing our ability to think at all.
The Trump administration is describing its Palantir project as an effort to do away with waste and fraud by eliminating silos. But as other nations have learned, the silos are what make the difference between an efficient digital government and chilling, oppressive surveillance.
Read this piece and more at TheRipCurrent.com.
It used to be that being a tech journalist was about boosterism and gadgetry. Now it’s like reporting inside the Pentagon, if the Pentagon were staffed by incredibly motivated and secretive experts who are regularly reassured they’re doing holy work, threatened with exile if they ever speak to a reporter, and paid more than any journalist can imagine. And yet investigative tech reporter Paris Martineau has single-handedly conducted investigations that led to the exposure and resignation of multiple CEOs — no small feat in an industry that is famously difficult to pierce as a journalist. In this hourlong interview we talk about how hard it is to find good sources inside Big Tech, and how critically important it is to do that now, when those companies and their leaders are truly learning to run the world.
Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!
Under its fourth president, Toomas Ilves, Estonia went from a struggling newly liberated democracy to one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world. In this hourlong conversation, Ilves describes what Estonia can teach us about how to fight corruption through technology, truly root out waste and fraud, and empower everyday citizens — and what it looks like when things go the wrong way. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!
