“We sort of think of social media as a kind of baby AI. All it could do is rearrange human posts and human content, decide what we see, and a tiny little misalignment, where it wasn't optimizing for our well-being or our health or for truth or for knowledge, but optimizing for getting our attention, that was enough to have destroyed much of the world we love the most and the highest rates of teen suicide, things like that. And the question to ask is, Charlie Munger famously said, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. Have we changed the incentive as we move from baby AI to mammoth AI? And the answer is, of course, no, we haven't. So why would we expect any different outcome?”

…the race to the bottom of the brainstem where you have supercomputers that are at that point, like the largest supercomputers in the world were pointed and trained at your brain trying to make sure it knew every part of your social psychology and vulnerability to keep you engaged and attended to.

Wow. Okay. So a lot of good that did.

Is this social media, the sort of birth of social media, the birth of the attention economy? And this has been the total focus of the creators of social media and AI?

Yeah, I mean, obviously there's always been advertising and things like that, but there is nothing that sat in your pocket. So this sort of extends the work of like Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan. But when an AI knows you, and this is why whenever we're talking with parents, we say, you know, you…

Like you said, it really isn't the beginning. It's kind of, I'll say, the perfection of the making of the attention or the manipulation of the attention economy. Because ever since right after World War I, when propaganda was discovered to have very beneficial effects in bringing people as a…