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Showing posts from December, 2025

How Our Technology Changes Us

The pace of technological change continues unabated, and many conversations turn to concerns about how our use of technology might be changing us humans in return. I wrote earlier this year about Jonathan Haidt's analysis of the ways in which two specific technologies -- smartphone and social media apps -- can have negative school or mental health consequences for adolescents. At a recent meeting of scholars on a journal's editorial board, my colleagues and I debated what uses of AI might be allowable versus not during the writing of a scientific article. And I wrote about risks that can occur when people use AI models as a companion or a counselor, tasks that it isn't always good at. In a recent book titled Jung vs. Borg (in which "Jung" is Carl the analytical psychiatrist, and "Borg" is the resistance-is-futile cyborg collective from  Star Trek ), Glen Slater argues that technology can have negative effects on us in four areas:  Loss of connection to ...