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No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.

we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.

These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile

The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.

they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.

Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.

Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave

One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan

It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.

The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.

the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers

these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman

To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.

for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear

The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.

adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.

It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.

And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics

The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25

developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now

You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.

And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear

For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.

This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.

so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,

In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,

what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.

This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin

No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.

No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.

But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us

To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.

The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?

this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.

I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.

whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.

But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.

most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.

I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.

The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.

The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.

Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism.

In the case of digital platforms, the purpose is usually “engagement,” a concept that is hard to distinguish from addiction. People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback — getting followed or liked, or being ignored or even humiliated.

Before social media, that kind of tight feedback loop had rarely been present in human communications outside of laboratories or marriages. (This is part of why marriage can be hard, I suspect.)  

was around when Google and other companies that operate on the personalized advertising model were created, and I can say that at least in the early days, operant conditioning was not part of the plan.

What happened was that the algorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons.

There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.

What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning?

o be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either

When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground

When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.

Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions.

Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.

the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities

The degree of narcissism becomes almost absolute. Everything is about what someone else thinks of you.

These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.

uide society. Whether that idea appeals or not, when technology degrades the minds of those same engineers, then the result can only be dysfunction.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose books include “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He is Microsoft’s “prime unifying scientist” but does not speak for the company.

The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.

The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking

mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?

Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”

In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another

Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”

The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.

In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?

Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”

In 1972, using duct tape and spare parts in the basement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Clauser and a graduate student, Stuart Freedman, who died in 2012, endeavored to perform Bell’s experiment to measure quantum entanglement. In a series of experiments, he fired thousands of light particles, or photons, in opposite directions to measure a property known as polarization, which could have only two values — up or down. The result for each detector was always a series of seemingly random ups and downs. But when the two detectors’ results were compared, the ups and downs matched in ways that neither “classical physics” nor Einstein’s laws could explain. Something weird was afoot in the universe. Entanglement seemed to be real.

in 2002, Dr. Clauser admitted that he himself had expected quantum mechanics to be wrong and Einstein to be right. “Obviously, we got the ‘wrong’ result. I had no choice but to report what we saw, you know, ‘Here’s the result.’ But it contradicts what I believed in my gut has to be true.” He added, “I hoped we would overthrow quantum mechanics. Everyone else thought, ‘John, you’re totally nuts.’”

the correlations only showed up after the measurements of the individual particles, when the physicists compared their results after the fact. Entanglement seemed real, but it could not be used to communicate information faster than the speed of light.

In 1982, Dr. Aspect and his team at the University of Paris tried to outfox Dr. Clauser’s loophole by switching the direction along which the photons’ polarizations were measured every 10 nanoseconds, while the photons were already in the air and too fast for them to communicate with each other. He too, was expecting Einstein to be right.

Quantum predictions held true, but there were still more possible loopholes in the Bell experiment that Dr. Clauser had identified

For example, the polarization directions in Dr. Aspect’s experiment had been changed in a regular and thus theoretically predictable fashion that could be sensed by the photons or detectors.

Anton Zeilinger

added even more randomness to the Bell experiment, using random number generators to change the direction of the polarization measurements while the entangled particles were in flight.

Once again, quantum mechanics beat Einstein by an overwhelming margin, closing the “locality” loophole.

as scientists have done more experiments with entangled particles, entanglement is accepted as one of main features of quantum mechanics and is being put to work in cryptology, quantum computing and an upcoming “quantum internet

One of its first successes in cryptology is messages sent using entangled pairs, which can send cryptographic keys in a secure manner — any eavesdropping will destroy the entanglement, alerting the receiver that something is wrong.

, with quantum mechanics, just because we can use it, doesn’t mean our ape brains understand it. The pioneering quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said that anyone who didn’t think quantum mechanics was outrageous hadn’t understood what was being said.

In his interview with A.I.P., Dr. Clauser said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics, and I’m not even sure I really know how to use it all that well. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that I still don’t understand it.”

Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.

After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.

Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.

Dr. Hinton, often called “the Godfather of A.I.,” did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google or other companies until he had quit his job

Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.

Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.

In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.

Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.

Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others.

“Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”

As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their ow

And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.

But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said.

Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore.

we’re networked organisms who move around in shifting surroundings, environments that have the power to transform our thinking

Annie Murphy Paul’s new book, “The Extended Mind,” which exhorts us to use our entire bodies, our surroundings and our relationships to “think outside the brain.”

In 2011, she published “Origins,” which focused on all the ways we are shaped by the environment, before birth and minute to minute thereafter.

“In the nature-nurture dynamic, nurture begins at the time of conception. The food the mother eats, the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the stress or trauma she experiences — all may affect her child for better or worse, over the decades to come.”

a down-to-earth take on the science of epigenetics — how environmental signals become catalysts for gene expression

the parallel to this latest book is that the boundaries we commonly assume to be fixed are actually squishy. The moment of a child’s birth, her I.Q. scores or fMRI snapshots of what’s going on inside her brain — all are encroached upon and influenced by outside forces.

awareness of our internal signals, such as exactly when our hearts beat, or how cold and clammy our hands are, can boost our performance at the poker table or in the financial markets, and even improve our pillow talk

“Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. One psychologist has called this guide our ‘somatic rudder,’

The “body scan” aspect of mindfulness meditation that has been deployed by the behavioral medicine pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn may help people lower their heart rates and blood pressure,

techniques that help us pinpoint their signals can foster well-being

Tania Singer has shown how the neural circuitry underlying compassion is strengthened by meditation practice

our thoughts “are powerfully shaped by the way we move our bodies.” Gestures help us understand spatial concepts; indeed, “without gesture as an aid, students may fail to understand spatial ideas at all,”

looking out on grassy expanses near loose clumps of trees and a source of water helps us solve problems. “Passive attention,” she writes, is “effortless: diffuse and unfocused, it floats from object to object, topic to topic. This is the kind of attention evoked by nature, with its murmuring sounds and fluid motions; psychologists working in the tradition of James call this state of mind ‘soft fascination.’”

The chapters on the ways natural and built spaces reflect universal preferences and enhance the thinking process felt like a respite

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

Hellscape

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.

both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.

Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”

More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.

The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els

on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.

the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.

. Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.

Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”

MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”

If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.

“Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”

the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom

That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.

“Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well.

Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous”

If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment,

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.

The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”

The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.

a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality.

Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.

a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.

when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side

The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).

The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.

Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country

The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further.

young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.

he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. I

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.

Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

Politics After Babel

“Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.

The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.

So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.

What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet

from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

“devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.

the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.

First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.

a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.

Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums,

Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.

The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors.

Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds

The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.

they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.

likely a result of thought-policing on social media:

political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.

Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.

Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide

we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

Since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs

search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.

In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals

English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.

Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking.

Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.

Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history

But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted

it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight

Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.

The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors.

they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”

Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives

The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.

The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win.

The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled:

Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding.

It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders.

Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.

The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.

This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations

The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.

In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry.

artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.

Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.

In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together.

In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.

What changes are needed?

I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.

We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

Harden Democratic Institutions

we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.

Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.

One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting

A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections

These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way.

Reform Social Media

Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.

it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”

the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.

One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

Prepare the Next Generation

Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people

Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.

The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

et them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision

while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.

What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.

In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.

when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,

Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.

Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.

The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.

Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.

The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot

A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.

Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.

Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.

“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”