Efficiency is the Enemy of Humanity.

Again with the clickbait headlines, eh K.C.? No: the headline is not clickbait, the problem is. Humans are not meant to live frictionless lives.

We have always had gambling issues. Humans are drawn to chance and the quick win, and some people become addicted to chasing those quick wins. Always have, likely always will. But in the past, you had to seek out the gambling. Even where gambling was legal, you still had to go to the place where the games of chance were held. Today, we all carry gambling dens in our pockets and participating can be done from anywhere. Many a people fall into addiction on their toilets.

Similarly, humans evolved in an information environment where information moved slowly. We had more time to process information, and we had far less of it swarming our lives all at once. Nor did we live lives that would entirely shelter us from opposite opinions. The kind of cult behavior — isolating yourself from all opposing views — generally lead to well, cult-like behavior. This is not to say that people in the past did not believe nonsense, or were not subject to believing comforting lies. Again, they were as human as we are today. But they did not have tech firms pumping information in overwhelming amounts and of dubious quality into their pockets and homes every minute of every day.

Chatbots have the same problem. They are, by design, obsequious little turds, flattering you outrageously even during boring, mechanical tasks like programming. They are even worse when they are used in pure conversational mode. We have all heard, by now, of the people who have been helped to kill themselves or others because of the flattery of chatbots, or folks who have gone down deep rabbit holes of delusions because a chatbot told them that their “new math” was a brilliant discovery instead of half-formed, amateur nonsense. In normal human conversations, you get some level of pushback (unless the power balance is too great. Which is one reasons CEOs become functionally stupid — too little pushback in their daily lives). Humans ned that pushback in order to remain socially and mentally stable. Without it, they fall into their own delusions.

Human beings are not equipped to lead unchallenged lives with easy access to every vice and bad for us mental pattern. We have created a world without friction, and it is killing us. If we want to stop this eating if the human brain from the inside, we need to ban things like gambling apps, algorithmic feeds, and chatbots that are based on engagement. Otherwise, we are going to very efficiently create a world where humans are warped and broken by the very things meant to help keep us connected and informed.