Nicholas Carr on How Technologies of Communication Tear Us Apart
47:50 Share

You know what's smart? Enjoying a fresh gourmet meal at home that you didn't have to cook. Meet Factor, your loophole in the laws of mealtime. Chef-crafted meals delivered with a tap, ready in just two minutes. You know what's even smarter? Treating yourself without cheating your goals. Factor is dietician-approved, chef-prepared, and you-plated. Pretty smart, huh? Refresh your routine and eat smart with Factor. Learn more at factormeals.com.

This episode is brought to you by Nerds Gummy Clusters, the sweet treat that always elevates the vibe. With a sweet gummy surrounded with tangy, crunchy Nerds, every bite of Nerds Gummy Clusters brings you a whole new world of flavor. Whether it's game night, on the way to a concert, or kicking back with your crew, unleash your senses with Nerds Gummy Clusters.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. In this episode, we dive deep into the hidden costs of digital connection with American journalist and writer Nicholas Carr.

Carr is best known for his groundbreaking 2008 essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" which warned us about the effects of the internet on our cognition and laid the foundations for his New York Times bestselling book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." Carr is back with a new book titled "Super Bloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart."

Joining him in conversation to discuss it is writer and researcher Adam McCauley. Listen on to hear how the very technologies that promise to bring us closer together are actually driving us further apart.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm your host, Adam McCauley. I'm so pleased to welcome Nicholas to Intelligence Squared. Thanks very much, Adam. So you broke into the public consciousness, I would argue, almost too early with The Shallows back in 2011. That book offered a prescient warning about the age of the internet and what it would mean for our lives.

And you've written a number of wonderful books in between. But I hope you might take us through the questions that have driven your work and sustained your interest from the shallows to the present with Superbloom.

I've been a technology writer since pretty much the start of the century, so for 25 years or so, and particularly focusing on computers and the internet. And like most technology writers, I got into the field because I was enthusiastic about the technology. I was a bit of a computer nerd and an internet nerd. But then, having spent a lot of time online, I began to sense...

that I was changing. And in particular, the way I was thinking and perceiving the world was changing. I was having a lot of difficulty concentrating, even when I wasn't looking at a computer screen. And it manifested itself in particular when I'd sit down and try to read a book or a long article, something that I'd done all my life and has been very important to me throughout my life. And I just...

I just found that I was having difficulty sustaining the necessary concentration. And as I thought about it more, I realized that what my mind seemed to want to do was to behave as it behaves when I'm in front of a screen, which is to have lots of different stimuli coming at me at once, being able to click on things, being able to Google things, being constantly

interrupted and distracted. And that led me to kind of explore a couple of different things. One is how in the past up to the present, how new technological systems have shaped human thinking, human perception, the way we express ourselves, the way we even sense what ourselves are. And second, kind of looking at the science of all this. Is this

true that a new technology can in some deep way influence the way we think. In Super Bloom, much like your other books, you pay such careful attention to, as you say, this history of technologies, broadly understood as well. This allows you to trace how modes, particularly around communication, have changed, from oral to written traditions, and now with the evolution of digital technologies.

And you've explored these changes kind of in lockstep with what we, as perhaps the recipients or the participants, feel when we engage in this space.

And not to throw you sort of like right into the heart, perhaps, of Super Bloom, but certainly to take us to one inflection point that I think is quite critical. I wonder if you could tell us the story of Claude Shannon's theory of communication. And the reason that I kind of want to start here is because it sets the stage, perhaps, for what has been a cascade from, let's call it the mid-20th century into our present.

What's that story, and what does it mean for how we understand information today? Claude Shannon, an engineer, an information theorist, worked for the Bell system in the United States, in Bell Labs. Shortly after the Second World War, as you can imagine, the phone company faced a really big practical challenge, which was,

As the use of telephones exploded, how can we compress and send all these phone messages, all these people talking through the wires that we have? And this was a pressing issue. One thing that phone companies didn't want to do is string up a whole new set of telephone wires. And so, Claude Shannon tackled that.

And he came up with a methodology of how to compress information as it flows through the network and also how to

how to use various techniques to correct errors in the messages. In other words, whenever you're transmitting voice calls or any information through a network, there's always going to be noise that gets in the way of the signal, which is the message itself. And so I also tried to figure out how do we reduce noise. In the late 40s, I think it was 1948, he published a very long, very important paper in the Bell System Journal that laid out

how to do this, the math of compressing human messages. And right at the outset, and this is kind of what is important to my book and also to my thinking, right at the outset of that article, he draws a very clear distinction between

between the mechanism of communication, in other words, the actual transmission of information and the content of that information itself. And he says, "What I'm interested in is simply the transmission, the transport function of getting messages from one place to another place as efficiently as possible and without distortion." And that exercise has nothing to do with the meaning of the information.

And in expressing that, he was expressing an idea that had up till then always kind of been an assumption about communication networks, going back to the mail system and certainly telegraphs and so forth, which is that there was a network through which the messages, human messages were transported. But that whole mechanism, whether it's a Pony Express rider carrying mail or a telegraph operator sending messages,

Those systems operate without regard to the content of the messages. So it's this fundamental distinction between mechanism and meaning when it comes to communication media that seemed very, very obvious then, but as I go on to argue in the book, began to break apart more recently when we entered the digital era of communication media.

I think that's so important. Specifying that grand evolutions on the technological side made it possible just to move any type of content in ways previously unimaginable. But there was this pending and obviously a present concern, as it were, around what exactly that content is. Once it's moved, what does it generate? What does it result in? I wanted to take us back to the shallows in the first place, where

you know, in that book you wrote, "When we go online, we too are following scripts written by others." Right? And today, our online experience, right, very much enabled by these technologies of movement, right, of this content around, are very strongly shaped by infrastructures not controlled by us or owned by us in meaningful ways. And the questions abound as to whether, let's call it big tech, or let's just say the architectures out there,

to what degree they have a responsibility to manage that information ecosystem. And in this context, I wonder if you could take us almost back to a similar period, but a set of conversations that had to deal with the content itself around the Federal Communications Commission, which once distinguished between public versus private communications with distinct rules and regulations. What's changed perhaps in the years since, and then what effect that's had on

on the way we experience information in the internet age? If you think about the last century, the 20th century,

Society was dealing with new communication technologies that were as radical and as disruptive as the ones we've been dealing with. You had the telegraph system, the telephone system, and then you also had broadcasting networks, radio and TV, which for the first time allowed a single central point to broadcast the same message to many, many people. Because of the nature of the technology, this was all analog.

technology that was long before digitization, of course. All these systems broke into two parts, very, very simply. One was telecommunications, which was one-to-one sending of messages, telegraph and telephone, which wasn't that different from the mail system. It just worked a lot, lot faster. And the kind of dominant belief

about one-to-one communication, whether it's the mail or telegraph or telephone, goes back to the distinction that Claude Shannon made, which is that

The companies managing this are what are called common carriers. They're just interested in moving information. They have no business looking at that message or thinking about the meaning of the message. And then you had broadcasting, which was very different. And there, what policymakers and other people who were thinking about it in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, which was radio and television, became popular. They're the kind of dominant

view was that this is something new in the world, where you have an enormous concentration of power, influential power, in these central stations that are broadcasting to many, many people, to the masses. And we should demand of them some sense of the common good. And so, in the U.S., at least, this became known as a kind of responsibility to the public

by broadcasters. It was built into the Communication Act. It was built into a government agency called the Federal Communications Commission. So, broadcasters, in broadcasting this message, they had to take in account of the public good, and they had a responsibility to do that. And this divide was reflected in everybody's house, because you used a telephone

to do the one-to-one messaging, and you used your radio or your TV to bring in broadcast messages. It was a neat, clean division. It made sense. It was by no means perfect. There was lots of debates about what is the public interest and how do we impose that. But nevertheless, that held sway

Until the arrival of the internet in digitization, when the technological differentiation between one-to-one communication and one-to-many communication kind of disappeared, you could do everything over the internet and through your computer and then through your phone.

And so, that's the big thing I think we've been struggling with, is this collapse of everything into a single network and even a single device in the form of the phone. It certainly appears, for those that do pay attention to the debates in this space, and emergent ever more so around social media, which is very much, I want to call it the

Maybe the driving force behind or certainly the trigger for your recent book. But I think what's at stake here is quite critical. You know, the idea that there was a common or a public good for which individuals who offered information out or broadcast information towards others had to adhere to or would certainly want to adhere to to ensure a healthy environment.

state of public discourse or debate or what have you, that's certainly on the table still today. But what's fascinating, I think, in your book, and again, what comes out of your critical attention to history, is that this isn't a new struggle either. You write with great clarity about the work of Walter Lippmann in particular,

and his loss of faith in the democratic process. And his concern was that the system just demanded too much of its citizen, right? To be suitably knowledgeable enough about the issues to exercise their political, and here we probably mean voting responsibility. And in his book, Public Opinion, Lippmann highlights that among other challenges, people, and I'll quote here, all live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.

And one of the reasons that we might have for, or at least one of the causes of this perhaps,

today, and maybe in different ways to his day, is just the sheer volume of information. And what I think is so critical about your book now, Super Bloom, is that you really rebuke the more equals better argument around information. And I think that's so critical to understand because it isn't necessarily what we've believed in the past. So maybe you could talk about how you see the marketplace of ideas concept here, because I think it critically informs how we understand the present.

So ever since at least the Enlightenment, there's been this view that you want to increase the velocity of information exchange. That's another way of saying you want to make it easier for people to talk to each other and quicker. And that seemed like an obvious good, right? Because...

You know, people think about communication. Society is formed out of acts of communication, people talking to each other. That's how we get to know one another. That's how we understand difficult issues and so forth. So, it seemed obvious that if communication is good, more communication must be better. That got embedded very early on, even during the Enlightenment, in this idea of a marketplace of ideas.

And so it uses a kind of industrial metaphor for the exchange of information, for communication. It says just as you want a manufacturer to get more efficient because it'll be able to produce goods at lower prices for everyone. So it's

So, you want the marketplace of ideas to get more efficient. You want a lot of competition between different ideas. You want as many people talking as possible, as quickly as possible. It was assumed that the same kind of dynamic that takes place in a competitive marketplace of goods would take place in a competitive marketplace of ideas, which is, the good ideas would rise to the top and would be consumed.

by the consumer of ideas, and all the other ones would be left on the wayside. That kind of philosophical view of information and communication backed up this sense, we need to do everything possible to make communication systems more efficient, to increase the volume of information that flows between people, to increase the speed of that information, to let everybody talk to everybody else.

As I say, that was just considered -- and you can see it in the rhetoric that has always surrounded new communication technologies -- this belief that faster is better, more is better, let's just keep amping it up. We'll get to the present state of digital technologies and the fight over attention and otherwise.

I wonder if we think about the idea of heightened efficiency, increased volume, increased speed, an environment where there's always more, perhaps too much, too fast. Part of your book sketches out how that changes the way that we talk and we write. How does it change the way that we think today?

In fact, perhaps we are suffering from the problem of plenty because we've been so effective at filling our information space with ever more information or content. But at least from your perspective and from your research on this, what does that do to us as consumers in this ecosystem? This is central to the argument I try to make in Superbloom, which is that we have this ideal

of more efficient information exchange is going to be all to the better. But we don't take into account human nature, the human psyche, human psychology, the human mind,

In this ideal, and what we've seen, I argue, is that actually at some point, when you increase the volume and the speed of information flow, and I think we're long past that point now, a reversal takes place. In the human mind, the human psyche simply can't keep up.

with the incredible intensity of all the messages we have to deal with, all the things we have to look at online, all the news that we get all the time, all the stimuli.

And what happens then is that we have to start acting very, very quickly. We have to respond quickly. We have to evaluate quickly. We have to communicate quickly. And we begin to sacrifice depth and subtlety, not only in how we say things, but how we think. And we begin, and some of this is stuff I talked about in the shadows, we begin to be superficial thinkers simply because we have to keep up.

And what I go on to argue in the new book is that this also has a very profound effect on social relationships, both at a personal level and at a societal level, that instead of

doing what we think we do when we get more information about other people, which is understand them better, have better trust in them. Actually, we're making all these snap judgments and we begin, and I talk about the psychology of this, we begin to place more emphasis on the differences or what psychologists call dissimilarities between ourselves and others.

And so rather than doing what we thought and hoped it would do, which is build bonds between people, it actually, the technology is more likely to build animosity and enmity and to divide us. And we begin to seek again, because we need to, we need some quick way to process all this. We begin to form these very strong groups, whether it's political groups or cultural groups or whatever. And we begin to see people in other groups as enemies. And so I think, I think,

Unfortunately, what we've seen is that our ideal for communication is in direct conflict with our own nature and our own psychology. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get ten answers. Inflations up or down, rates will rise or fall. Can someone please just invent a crystal ball? Well, until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one cloud ERP brings accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform.

With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data.

If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. NetSuite by Oracle is just a really smart tool for businesses looking to make proactive moves and make the best out of future opportunities. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities.

And speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com. This guide is free to you at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com.

This episode is brought to you by Atlassian. Atlassian makes the team collaboration software that powers enterprise businesses around the world, including over 80% of the Fortune 500. With Atlassian's AI-powered software like Jira, Confluence and Loom, you'll have more time to do the work that matters. In fact, Atlassian customers experience a 25% reduction in project duration per year. Unleash the potential of your team at Atlassian.com. Atlassian.

This episode is brought to you by Bank of America. What if your business could see beyond what is and into what can be? And what if you had a partner as visionary as you are? Bank of America gives customers access to trusted experts, real-time insights, and digital tools to make every move matter. What would you like the podcast to be like?

Bank of America is proud to be the official bank sponsor of FIFA World Cup 2026.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Since you're new to H&R Block, we'll look at your returns from the last three years for any money your last guy might have missed for free. I could get money back from last year? You could. We'll find any mistakes. Could have really used that two years ago when I dated that mistake for five months. Don't leave money on the table. Switch to H&R Block and get a free second look review. Second look is included at no additional cost with the purchase of tax preparation. Results vary. All tax situations are different. Fees apply if you have us file an amended return.

I want to stay on this topic just for a couple more minutes too, because I think it is so important and central. The title of your book really comes from, let's call it an event in social media. This as a medium, or at least as a suite of tools in the social media space, they're seen as connecting us with countless others, making the world both smaller and larger. But the consequence of this exposure, the social media exposure to one another,

He's both the site of popular but sometimes controversial research in this domain. What I find so fascinating about Superbloom is, you take us back to a 2007 study by Michael Norton.

And I'd love it if you could just maybe unpack it a little bit for us here, because despite the researchers' focus on individuals living physically amongst one another, you argue that their findings, or at least the researchers' findings, may offer real clear insights as to how we understand the social dynamics in this kind of virtual internet space. So what did they look for? What did they find? And what's surprisingly applicable today?

Yeah. So the researchers wanted to test the idea, and it was a very commonly held

idea in psychology and social psychology at the time, that the more we learn about another person, the greater will be our tendency to like that person. More communication builds understanding, builds empathy and all of this. And so what they did is they got a bunch of people, some were students and some were members of a dating website. And they had an experiment where they gave people these kind of

summaries of character traits or other traits, demographic traits or whatever, of another person. And they varied the number of traits they gave people. And then they kind of tested what the person's view of this other person was based on the traits. And what they found is something very interesting, that the more

information, the larger the number of traits that people saw, the more likely they were to dislike the person. They were more likely to dislike the person than they were to like the person. And what they realized was going on is there's this thing that they call dissimilarity cascades, which means when we're gathering information about somebody and we see some way that they're different from us, they

Then from there on, we place more emphasis on differences that we see than on similarities. And because we know that

similarity is fundamental to how we determine whether we like somebody. We tend to like people who are in some way similar to us and tend to dislike or at least be suspicious of those who are different from us. These dissimilarity cascades mean that the more information we gather about others, the more likely we are to dislike them rather than like them. I think this was done in 2007, same year that

the smartphone appeared early days of social media. But I think what they pointed out is that even though this way of gathering information about other people doesn't really fit

The physical environment where you meet somebody and you see them and you make eye contact and you talk, but you're also hyper aware of their gestures and everything. They pointed out that it actually does replicate how we're beginning to learn about other people online. We go out

And we gather little bits of information, what they've posted, the photos they've shown, who they like, who they don't like, who they retweet, who they repost. And so they kind of saw that the virtual social sphere that we were creating online, particularly through social media, was actually an ideal space.

environment for the propagation of dissimilarity cascades. And so that, in fact, we've created a technology that basically exaggerates our disliking of people at the expense of our instinct to like other people when we get to know more about them. Yeah. And I think what's interesting too is that one of the things you point out in reference to that study is that

Let's say in the physical world, once you come to understand perhaps you aren't like your neighbor or don't particularly like your neighbor, you will take great steps or maybe small but important steps to avoid them, to avoid finding out more things that may very well have tipped the scales back towards either a neutral position towards or perhaps even a friendship with such a person.

And that physical element, you know, the or let's call it the randomness of that physical world is lost even more, perhaps when we go to the online world where we absolutely do not have to ever run into those people if we so choose. Right. At least people that we presume with or without evidence are dissimilar to us and will ever will forever be.

But what I think is fascinating too is that this seeking process that we go through perhaps to find out information about others also has really significant implications for us. How we present in this space, it must be far more attentive to the ways in which we're going to be interpreted by or seen through the lenses of others. And in the book, you unpack the difference, or let's call it perhaps a transition

From, you know, what was called the looking glass self to the mirror ball self. And I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about how you see that transition, but what it also means for us as individuals trying to navigate presentation, as it were, in this nebulous virtual space.

So it's always been understood that the way we form a sense of self isn't just some inherent qualities within us that emerge, but we're constantly looking at other people, interacting with other people, and kind of, in a sense, reading other people's minds in order to figure out what those people are thinking about us. And that has a shaping effect on our own perceptions of ourselves.

And in the physical world, where there are boundaries of space and boundaries of time, you're with a certain group of people in a certain place at a certain time, that desire to judge ourselves by how others view us is actually very healthy, because it socializes us. And we can see ourselves through other people's eyes, we can adapt to society, we can become part of society.

What happens with the virtual world and how we socialize on social media, for instance, is all those boundaries disappear. So everybody is out there all the time. And we have to begin to think of ourselves. We know how people are judging us because they're judging us symbolically as we appear in photographs or in comments or in posts or in what we like. And so we begin to, I think, think of ourselves individually.

as media content. We begin to create a program like a TV show that is us. And it seems to me that that is a very dangerous way to conceive of the self. It makes the self very fragile and it also breaks self-definition because you're just thinking of yourself as content to be broadcast.

It removes it from the kind of intimate social sphere where you get to know other people, you make decisions about, you know, I'm going to hang out with this person, I'm not going to hang out with this other person. And so it gets rid, as it gets rid of all these boundaries, it also gets rid of opportunities to socialize ourselves and basically learn how to

navigate society in some healthful fashion rather than just kind of reacting to all these stimuli that we get in this very chaotic online social world. Yeah, I think what you do so well in the book is to tease out the research also through time that's gone into

Really either making sense of or unpicking the consequences of this exposure factor, right? You know, when you're constantly on display, what does that do to one's own mental well-being? But also in some important sense, and this is where I want to push you, if I can, slightly into the world of politics, as uncomfortable as that can be these days.

You quote kind of from the later 20th century, or maybe the mid-20th century, from the psychologist Erwin Altman, who, at least in their later work, implies that, and this is a quote here, that a decent society will safeguard personal privacy at least as vigorously as it promotes self-expression, which I love as a line. But it also got me thinking about work that you also quote later from Douglas Ruskoff on open-source democracy.

And your quote here, for a different reason, states through his words that the very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be dependent on our acceptance as individuals and our adult roles, mature roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. Now, I take the point that you challenge Rushkoff's claim about technology helping us mature and

But I do wonder if part of this declaration is right. Not that democracy in the abstract will save us, but that citizens, those adults, need to demand a thicker, maybe moral and ethical conception of what democracy is. One that would have worked to moderate technology's sort of interventionist effects and to keep our information environment a little cleaner.

But that's easy to say, but I just wonder to what extent, and if you could talk a little bit about where you see solutions to some of these enduring challenges and whether politics presents itself as a means to that kind of end.

I think Rushkoff was correct in saying that the challenge is to be adults. I think by that, he meant to have a willingness to listen to other people, including people whose points of view are very different from our own. I think his mistake was to think that opening the public square

to up on the internet where everybody can talk to everyone else all the time was going to help us become adults. I think it actually has had exactly the opposite effect. Because society now has reshaped itself around digital media, social media, but the internet in general,

changing things becomes very, very difficult. I do think because the fundamental problem is a conflict between the way the technology works and the way our own human psyches work, that is not amenable to simple regulatory fixes, as important as they may be, or legal changes.

It really means that we have to either fundamentally change the way the technology works and actually make it less efficient, which goes against the entire history of communication technology, in particular computer technology. So is itself a big challenge, or we have to fundamentally change the way the choices that we make. I think one of the

One of the tragedies here is that because our phones can do everything for us, particularly when it comes to communicating with others and gathering information, and because it does so fast and so efficiently, we've come to the assumption that let's just use it for everything. And the fundamental flaw there is that there are a lot of things about human relationships, human understanding, self-expression, that actually...

don't get better when they get more efficient. They get worse. It's actually good to slow down. It's good to have what some people call friction, having to work hard at things, having to take time to express yourself, having to take time to back away from the flow of information in order to build confidence.

a contextual idea of what's going on. That's what we've lost, I think, as we've become so enamored of the screen and everything going on all at once.

To me, the challenges we face if we really want to change things are extremely difficult. Either changing the technology, which would mean accepting a less efficient, slower, less capacious information and communication system, a very hard sell, or changing ourselves, which also requires a lot of sacrifices. But I think those are the only two ways to kind of

make the changes that would be necessary to temper the ill effects of the technology. As we draw to a close, I could ask you questions pretty much for the rest of the day, because I have so many that come out of your work. But I want to take us back to the shallows temporarily, only to fast forward to your recent book, Super Bloom, here. At the end of that book, now surprisingly 14 years old,

you offered a dire warning about artificial intelligence, a concern

that we might be approaching, or we could at one stage approach, kind of the Rubicon moment. That if humanity devolved responsibility for cognitive labor to machines, that would signal something distinct. And in this recent book and thinking, at least in context of the growing appeal of artificial intelligence, you note that once we take the counterfeits for granted, and here you're referring perhaps to AI agents performing a kind of factual certainty,

we may begin doubting the veracity of all information that's presented to us through media, or at least not being able to parse how we should interpret the factuality of information that we receive. And I wonder in moments like ours and knowing how much communications technologies have already shaped our lives, and to your last point, that our lives are truly enveloped, right, as some would say, by technologies in ways that make it difficult to exit,

How do you see the promise or peril of artificial intelligence in this context? And what do you worry about? Obviously, there's a whole lot we know. We don't know about how artificial intelligence is going to play out. But I think the big surprise to me, because I think about, you know, this happened while I was thinking about communication and media and stuff, is that not only does artificial intelligence play

Is it going to offer a way to relieve us of the pressure of thinking so it'll do our thinking for us? And whenever that happens, you see an atrophy of the underlying skills, which are thinking skills. But what's interesting and kind of particularly scary, I think, is that we've created an AI today, a generative AI, that can do our expression for ourselves. It can talk to

on our behalf. And we're seeing this already, despite the fact that, you know, there are lots of flaws and shortcomings in the current chatbots and everything else. But we're seeing immediately people, whether it's students writing papers, whether it's people writing speeches, whether it's couples writing wedding vows, whether it's

I've even heard now that a lot of ministers and pastors use ChatGPT and other tools to formulate their sermons. It seems we're very, very quick to, because it's so efficient and it relieves us of the pressure to figure out how do I want to express myself? How do I want to put my feelings and my thoughts into my own words, which is difficult. But I would argue that it's that process that's essential to

not only to saying interesting things, but to developing a sense, a rich sense of self, a rich personality that actually does have something interesting to say. So to me, it's this ability to simply offload not only thinking, but self-expression to machines who are very, very quick to pump out something that's reasonably good. In some cases, maybe better than you could do if you actually made an effort. It seems to me that's very dangerous to

in some kind of deep philosophical way, because it intrudes very much on the formation of the human self. If our ability to be interesting people with rich personalities is somehow related to our ability to express ourselves, and I would argue it is, then putting a machine in the middle of that process

does not bode well for our future as individuals, but also for the future of culture and the future of society. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up kind of the example, accurate or not, perhaps, and I don't know how widespread, of pastors potentially using these tools to write sermons. Because I thought a lot about your book's closing section, which you title "Excommunication."

And for me, as an individual, much like many of our readers who are trying to understand their place in this never-ending riptide of technological change,

you know, the immediate connotation of excommunication is with that of the church and those individuals who by choice or verdict had to exit that community and just sometimes start a following of their own. And you're right that our present crisis is in part due to our faith in the benefits of ever more efficient communication, even if they've overridden our concerns about the risks and unintended consequences. So,

So I just kept I kept thinking, do we are we at that time in history where we need a movement akin to a Martin Luther like reformation of the 16th century just to shake us from the static quo? Right. To urge us to reimagine what technology means and how it's positioned in our relationships.

both maybe between ourselves and others, but ourselves in the world. I just, I wonder if that had been on your mind too, when you were thinking through the closing stretches of the book. It was. And, you know, this goes back to my point that, you know, making changes to the system at this point

Seems very very hard and possibly impossible It might just be that this you know that social media and the internet and computer networks are working exactly as they are meant to operate and so You know, we can't fix them because they're not broken in but it also led me to this sense that you know when you see

some force, whatever it is, economic, political, technological, become dominant in society and culture, you often eventually get a countercultural movement that rejects that dominant force as being too constraining, being essentially bad for us. And so, it's very, very hard to predict the rise of a countercultural movement. No one knows quite where they come from, but they tend to come from the young. And I do think that

That really, if we're going to change the kind of technological regime that we all operate under, it's probably going to come through a countercultural movement, probably with a future generation of young people who simply reject it, who say, I'm not

I don't want to walk around with a phone on my person and spend all my time looking through it and communicating with people who aren't even around me. I want to, you know, and they'll think of it as kind of the establishment to rebel against an adult kind of oppressive adult superstructure on society, all this technology that takes us out of the world and out of the place where we actually are. So I do think, you know, that there is...

A reasonable chance that we will see this kind of countercultural movement arise that simply rejects it all.

I hope that happens. I would like to see how that plays out, but I hope it happens quickly. In some strange and fitting sense, this takes us right back to some of your closing words from The Shallows. I'll quote from you here that, "I hope we don't go gently into the future our computer engineers and software programmers are scripting for us." With that, Nicholas, I just wanted to thank you again for speaking with us here today.

Nicholas Carr's latest book is Super Bloom, How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. This book and as many others are available online or at a store near you. I'm Adam McCauley. And from all of us here at Intelligence Squared, thank you for joining us. Thanks a lot. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us. This episode is produced by me, Leila Ismail.