YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicholas Carr

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-02-21
most recent: 2025-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Countercultural movement probably with a future generation of young people who simply reject it, who say, I'm not, I don't want to walk around with a phone on my person and spend all my time looking through it and communicating with people who aren't even around me. I want to, you know, and they'll think of it as kind of the establishment to rebel against in adult kind of oppressive adult superstructure on society, all this technology that gets takes us out of the world and out of the place where we actually are. So I do think that there is a reasonable chance that we will see this kind of countercultural movement arise that simply rejects it, rejects it all. And I kind of hope that happens. I would like to see how that plays out. But I hope it happens quickly.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, and this goes back to my point that making changes to the system at this point. Seems very, very hard and possibly impossible. It might just be that this social media and the internet and computer networks are working exactly as they are meant to operate. And so we can't fix them because they're not broken. But it also led me to this sense that when you see some force, whatever it is, economic, political, technological, become dominant in society and culture, you often eventually get a countercultural movement that rejects that dominant force as being too constraining, being essentially bad for us. And so it's very, very hard to predict the rise of a countercultural movement. No one knows quite where they come from, but they tend to come from the young. And I do think that really if we're going to change the kind of technological regime that we all operate under, it's probably going to come through a”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the human self in our ability to, if our ability to be interesting people with rich personalities is somehow related to our ability to express ourselves. And I would argue it is, then putting a machine in the middle of that process does not bode well for our future as individuals, but also for the future of culture and the future of society.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seems we're very, very quick to, because it's so efficient and it relieves us of the pressure to figure out how do I want to express myself? How do I want to put my feelings in my thoughts into my own words, which is difficult. But I would argue that it's that process that's essential not only to saying interesting things, but to developing a sense, a rich sense of self, a rich personality that actually does have something interesting to say. So to me, it's this ability to simply offload not only thinking, but self-expression to machines who are very, very quick to pump out something that's reasonably good, in some cases maybe better than you could do if you actually made an effort. It seems to me that's very dangerous in some kind of deep philosophical way because it intrudes very much on the formation.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing papers, whether it's people writing speeches, whether it's couples writing wedding vows, whether it's, I've even heard now that a lot of ministers and pastors use ChatGPT and other tools to formulate their sermons.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, there's a whole lot we know. We don't know about how artificial intelligence is going to play out. But I think the big surprise to me, because I think about this happened while I was thinking about communication and media and stuff, is that not only does artificial intelligence, is it going to offer a way to relieve us of the pressure of thinking so it'll do our thinking for us? Whenever that happens, you see an atrophy of the underlying skills, which are think skills. But what's interesting and kind of particularly scary, I think, is that we've created an AI today in generative AI that can do our expression for ourselves. It can talk on our behalf. And we're seeing this already, despite the fact that, you know, there are lots of flaws and shortcomings in the current chat bots and everything else. But we're seeing immediately people, whether it's students,”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding, self expression, that actually Don't get better when they get more efficient. They get worse. It's actually good to slow down. It's good to have what some people call friction, having to work hard at things, having to take time to express yourself, having to take time to back away from the flow of information in order to kind of build a contextual idea of what's going on. And that's what we've lost, I think, as we've become so enamored of the screen and everything going on all at once. So to me, the challenges we face, if we really want to change things, are extremely difficult, either changing the technology, which would mean accepting a less efficient, slower, less capacious information and communication system, a very hard sell, or changing ourselves, which also requires a lot of sacrifices. But I think those.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is not amenable to simple kind of regulatory fixes as important as they may be or legal changes. It really means that we have to either fundamentally change the way the technology works and actually make it less efficient, which goes against the entire history of communication technology, in particular computer technology, so is itself a big challenge. Or we have to fundamentally change the way the choices that we make. I think one of the tragedies here is that because our phones can do everything for us, particularly when it comes to communicating with others and gathering information, and because it does so fast and so efficiently, we've come to the assumption that let's just use it for everything. And the fundamental flaw there is that there are a lot of things about human relationships.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think Rushkoff was correct in saying that the challenge is to be adults. And I think by that he meant to have a willingness to listen to other people, including people whose points of view were very different from our own. I think his mistake was to think that opening the public square up on the internet where everybody can talk to everyone else all the time was going to help us become adults. I think it actually has had exactly the opposite effect. Because society now has reshaped itself around digital media, social media, but the internet in general, changing things becomes very, very difficult. I do think because the fundamental problem is a conflict between the way the technology works and the way our own human psyches work.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out with this person. I'm not going to hang out with this other person. And so it gets rid, as it gets rid of all these boundaries, it also gets rid of opportunities to socialize ourselves and basically learn how to navigate society in some healthful fashion rather than just kind of reacting to all these stimuli that we get in this very chaotic online social world.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instance, is all those boundaries disappear so everybody is out there all the time? And we have to begin to think of ourselves. We know how people are judging us because they're judging us by symbolically as we appear in photographs or in comments or in posts or in what we like. And so we begin to, I think, think of ourselves as media content. We begin to create a program as a like a TV show that is us. And it seems to me that that is a very dangerous way to conceive of the self. It makes the self very fragile and it also breaks self-definition because you're just thinking of yourself as content to be broadcast. It removes it from the kind of intimate social sphere where you get to know other people, you make decisions about, you know, I'm going to hang.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's always been understood that the way we form a sense of self isn't just some inherent qualities within us that emerge, but we're constantly looking at other people, interacting with other people, and kind of, in a sense, reading other people's minds in order to figure out what those people are thinking about us. And that has a shaping effect on our own perceptions of ourselves. And in the physical world where there are boundaries of space and boundaries of time, you're with a certain group of people at a certain, in a certain place at a certain time, you can kind of that desire to judge ourselves by how others view us is actually very healthy because it socializes us and we can kind of see ourselves through other people's eyes. We can adapt to society, we can become part of society. What happens with the virtual world and how we socialize on social media, for instance?”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aware of their gestures and everything. They pointed out that it actually does replicate how we're beginning to learn about other people online. We go out and we gather little bits of information, what they've posted, the photos they've shown, who they like, who they don't like, who they retweet, who they repost. And so they kind of saw that the social, the virtual social sphere that we were creating online, particularly through social media, was actually an ideal environment for the propagation of dissimilarity cascades. And so that, in fact, we've created a technology that basically exaggerates our disliking of people at the expense of our instinct to like other people when we get to know more about them.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because we know that similarity is fundamental to how we determine whether we like somebody, we tend to like people who are in some way similar to us, intend to dislike or at least be suspicious of those who are different from us, that these dissimilarity cascades mean that the more information we gather about others, the more likely we are to dislike them rather than like them. And I think, you know, this was done in 2007, same year that the smartphone appeared, early days of social media. But I think what they pointed out is that even though this way of gathering information about other people doesn't really fit the physical environment where you meet somebody and you see them and you kind of make eye contact and you talk, but you're also hyper.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Summaries of character traits or other traits, demographic traits or whatever, of another person. And they varied the number of traits they gave people. And then they kind of tested what the person's view of this other person was based on the traits. And what they found is something very interesting, that the more information, the larger the number of traits that people saw, the more likely they were to dislike the person. They were more likely to dislike the person than they were to like the person. And what they realized was going on is there's this thing that they call dissimilarity cascades, which means when we're gathering information about somebody and we see some way that they're different from us, then from there on we place more emphasis on differences that we see than on similarities.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the researchers wanted to test the idea, and it was a very commonly held idea in psychology and social psychology at the time, that the more we learn about another person, the greater will be our tendency to like that person. More communication builds understanding, builds empathy, and all of this. And so what they did is they got a bunch of people. Some were students and some were members of a dating web.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rather than doing what we thought and hoped it would do, which is build bonds between people, it actually, the technology is more likely to build animosity and enmity and to divide us and we begin to seek, again, because we need some quick way to process all this, we begin to form these very strong groups, whether it's political groups or cultural groups or whatever. And we begin to see people in other groups as enemies. And so I think Unfortunately what we've seen is that the ideal for communication is in direct conflict with our own nature and our own psychology.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To evaluate quickly. We have to communicate quickly. And we begin to sacrifice depth and subtlety, not only in how we say things, but how we think. And we begin, and some of this is stuff I talked about in the shows, we begin to be superficial thinkers simply because we have to keep up. And what I go on to argue in the new book is that this also has a very profound effect on social relationships, both at a personal level and at a societal level, that instead of doing what we think we do when we get more information about other people, which is understand them better, have better trust in them, actually we're making all these snap judgments and we begin, and I talk about the psychology of this, we begin to place more emphasis on the differences or what psychologists call dissimilarities between ourselves and others.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, and this is central to kind of the argument I try to make in Superbloom, which is that we have this ideal of more efficient information exchange is going to be all to the better, but we don't take into account human nature, the human psyche, human psychology, the human mind in this ideal, in what we've seen, I argue, is that actually at some point when you increase the volume and the speed of information flow, and I think we're long past that point now, a reversal takes place in the human mind, the human psyche simply can't keep up with the incredible intensity of all the messages we have to deal with, all the things we have to look at online, all the news that we get all the time, all the stimuli. And what happens then is that we have to start acting very, very quickly. We have to respond quickly.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Information and communication kind of backed up this sense we need to do everything possible to make communication systems more efficient, to increase the volume of information that flows between people, to increase the speed of that information, to let everybody talk to everybody else. And that was, as I say, that was just considered, and you can see it in the rhetoric that has always surrounded new communication technologies, this belief that faster is better, more is better. Let's just keep amping it up.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it uses a kind of industrial metaphor for the exchange of information, for communication. It says just as a manufacturer, just as you want a manufacturer to get more efficient because it'll be able to produce goods at lower prices for everyone. So you want the marketplace of ideas to get more efficient. You want a lot of competition between different ideas. So you want as many people talking as possible, as quickly as possible. And in kind of this, it was assumed that the same kind of dynamic that takes place in a competitive marketplace of goods would take place in a competitive marketplace of ideas, which is the good ideas would rise to the top and would be consumed by the consumer of ideas and all the other ones would be left on the wayside. And so that kind of philosophical view of”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ever since at least the Enlightenment, there's been this view that you want to increase the velocity of information exchange. That's another way of saying you want to make it easier for people to talk to each other in quicker. And that seemed like an obvious good, right? Because, you know, people think about communication. Society is formed out of acts of communication. People talking to each other. That's how we get to know one another. That's how we understand difficult issues and so forth. So it seemed obvious that if communication is good, more communication must be better. That got embedded very early on, even during the Enlightenment.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the internet and through your computer and then through your phone. And so that's the big thing I think we've been struggling with is this collapse of everything into a single network and even a single device in the form of the phone”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broadcasters and it was built into the Communication Act, it was built into a government agency called the Federal Communications Commission. So broadcasters in broadcasting this message, they had to take in account of the public good and they had a responsibility to do that. And this divide was reflected in everybody's house because you used a telephone to do the one-to-one messaging and you used your radio or your TV to bring in broadcast messages. So it was kind of a neat, clean division. It made sense. It was by no means perfect. There was lots of debates about, you know, what is the public interest and how do we impose that. But nevertheless, that kind of held sway until the arrival of the internet in digitization when the technological differentiation between one-to-one communication, one-to-many communication kind of disappeared. You could do everything.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“View was that this is something new in the world where you have an enormous concentration of power, influential power, in the central stations that are broadcasting to many, many people, to the masses. And we should demand of them some sense of the common good. And so in the US, at least this became known as a kind of responsibility to the public.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the mail or telegraph or telephone goes back to the distinction that Claude Shannon made, which is that the companies managing this are what are called common carriers. They're just interested in moving information. They have no business looking at that message or thinking about the meaning of the message. And then you had broadcasting, which was very different. And there what policymakers and other people who were thinking about it in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, which was radio and television, became popular, they're the kind of dominant”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you think about the last century, the 20th century, society was dealing with new communication technologies that were as kind of radical and as disruptive as the ones we've been dealing with. You had the telegraph system, the telephone system, and then you also had broadcasting networks, radio and TV, which for the first time allowed a single central point to broadcast the same message to many, many people. And because of the nature of the technology, this was all analog technology that was long before digitization, of course. It kind of, all these systems broke into two parts very, very simply. One was telecommunications, which is one-to-one sending of messages, telegraph and telephone, which wasn't that different from the mail system. It just worked a lot, lot faster. And the kind of dominant belief about one-to-one communication, whether”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That seemed very, very obvious then. But as I go on to argue in the book, began to break apart more recently when we entered the digital era of communication.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transmission, the transport function of getting messages from one place to another place as efficiently as possible and without distortion. And that exercise has nothing to do with the meaning of the information. And in expressing that, he was expressing an idea that had up till then always kind of been an assumption about communication networks going back to the mail system in certainly telegraphs and so forth, which is that there was a network through which the messages, human messages were transported, but that whole mechanism, whether it's a Pony Express rider carrying mail or a telegraph operator sending messages, those systems operate without regard to the content of the messages. So it's this fundamental distinction between mechanism and meaning when it comes to”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the messages. In other words, whenever you're transmitting voice calls or any information through a network, there's always going to be noise that gets in the way of the signal, which is the message itself. And so also tried to figure out how do we reduce noise. In the late 40s, I think it was 1948, he published a very long, very important paper in the Bell System Journal that laid out how to do this, the math of compressing human messages. And right at the outset, and this is kind of what is important to my book and also to my thinking, right at the outset of that article, he draws a very clear distinction between the mechanism of communication, in other words, the actual transmission of information and the content of that information itself. And he makes, he says, you know, what I'm interested in is simply the trend.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Claude Shannon, an engineer, an information theorist worked for the Bell system in the United States in Bell Labs. And shortly after the Second World War, as you can imagine, the phone company faced a really big practical challenge, which was as the use of telephones exploded, how can we compress and send all these phone messages, all these people talking through the wires that we have. And this was a pressing issue. One thing that phone companies did want to do is string up a whole new set of telephone wires. And so Claude Shannon tackled that and he came up with a methodology of how to compress information as it flows through the network and also how to use various techniques to correct errors.”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The science of all this is this true that a new technology can in some deep way influence the way we think. So in Super Bloom”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd sit down and try to read a book or a long article, something that I'd done all my life and has been very important to me throughout my life. And I just found that I was having difficulty sustaining the necessary concentration. And as I thought about it more, I realized that what my mind seemed to want to do was to behave as it behaves when I'm in front of a screen, which is to have lots of different stimuli coming at me at once, being able to click on things, being able to Google things, being constantly interrupted and distracted. And that led me to kind of explore a couple of different things. One is how in the past, up to the present, how new technological systems have shaped human thinking, human perception, the way we express ourselves, the way we even sense what ourselves are. And second, kind of looking at”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In between, but I hope you might take us through the questions that have driven your work and sustained your interest from the shallows to the present with Superbloom. I've been a technology writer for since pretty much the start of the century, so for 25 years or so, and particularly focusing on computers and the internet. And like most technology writers, I got into the field because I was enthusiastic about the technology. I was a bit of a computer nerd and an internet nerd. But then having spent a lot of time online, I began to sense that I was changing, and in particular the way I was thinking and perceiving the world was changing, I was having a lot of difficulty concentrating even when I wasn't looking at a computer screen. And it manifested itself in particular when”
2025-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT