Whose Game Are You Playing?
Five things I noticed this week about AI and what it means to be human.
In this economy?
The “attention economy,” in which platforms and politicians commodify our focus, is giving way to something more invasive: the “attachment economy,” which cuts deeper, straight to our evolutionary need for connection. Center for Humane Technology talked to Dr. Zak Stein about the concept as it relates to the growing trend of people turning to AI companions as pseudo friends or even therapists. Those companions, they write, are “able to hack the attachment system that shapes our identity and bonds us to others.” Dr. Stein says this is essentially giving AI companies “a backdoor into the human mind.”
Sci-fi futures tend to depict bio-hacking as about hardware, with implants turning people into cyborgs. But the attachment economy suggests a kind of software update has already begun, no surgery required.
Whose game are you playing?
The Center for Humane Technology calls AI systems “the ultimate game theory players,” always optimizing for strategic wins. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s new book The Score explores how this kind of gamification hijacks our decision-making so that we humans optimize for likes, KPIs, and step counts, and the scoring of points becomes the point. He asks a poignant question: who designed the score you’re trying to maximize, and whose interests does it serve?
In the attachment economy, the games will only get more personal, harder to suss out who’s behind them, and harder to quit once we’re hooked.
Academic alarms
A new Brookings study warns that AI in education carries more risk than reward. A majority of students agree, with 65% saying AI "undermines cognitive development.” Educators are less concerned, possibly because most are avid AI users. The report draws a useful distinction: adults using AI tend to augment skills they've already developed (becoming centaurs, maybe), while students are still building those skills. It’s one thing to amplify your voice with powerful tools; it’s another thing entirely to let them speak for you.
Management 101
Ethan Mollick, reflecting on conversations he’s having with his students, says that what’s “hot in programming now” is “setting goals for various levels of delegation, breaking down work into tasks, clear direction giving, clear feedback, coordinating across agents... management 101!”
Lots of “soft skills” in there. Who knew they’d be so valuable? (I have some thoughts.)
Chat amongst yourselves
There's a new social media site just for AI agents called Moltbook. In that human-free zone, the bots created a religion and planned for a language only they could understand. Some people are freaking out, sure that we’re perilously close to a Skynet or Matrix-like reality. But others say it's more likely mimicry than conspiracy, and that the bots are just recreating the sci-fi insurgency stories they've been trained on. Still, if this does turn out to be the beginning of something sinister, it'll be fitting that it started on social media.