Mark Lovett

Carole Cadwalladr: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like @ TED 2025

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Having spent my career in the computer industry, I’ve long been fascinated by digital technology. For most of those years, my experience was positive. Every invention, every new plateau of features and performance only increased my wonderment and appreciation. The internet’s potential was so mind-boggling.

And that positive viewpoint continued into the early days of social media, but began to sour as those platforms devolved into the hot mess they are today. (that topic is worthy of a very long article, but I’ll spare you for now)

When artificial intelligence came to my attention around 5 years ago it seemed interesting, but to be honest, I didn’t see how it would benefit me. After all, my passion is helping people tell impactful personal stories — stories based on an experience or an idea — so I didn’t see AI as a meaningful tool. But 2 years ago their potential became more apparent. The way in which they could assimilate information made search engines look like Ford Model Ts.

But my enthusiasm became a bit tarnished as I explored the technology further. Not only were all those LLMs (Large Language Models) being trained on massive amounts of intellectual property that was never paid for, they were also sucking up increasing amounts of personal data. And as many other software programs and apps wove AI into their code, that trend continued to accelerate.

Is the greatest technological invention becoming the greatest threat to humanity?

That’s what I started to wonder, as it seemed to me from recent reports that any sense of morality in the AI space was being pushed aside in an effort to “win” the race for dominance. The icing on the cake came when the Silicon Valley oligarchy bowed down to the oligarchy residing in Washington D.C. 

So I was keenly interested in hearing Carole Cadwalladr‘s take on this situation when she spoke at the 2025 TED Conference. Carole was an important figure in exposing the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, so she was no stranger to the potential for tech to subvert democracy and cause great harm to society.

The Russian and American presidents are now speaking the same words. They are telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start. Coups are like concrete. When they stop moving, they set. It is already later than we think.

Her talk was a chilling reminder of other times in history when the power-elite ignored the rights and needs of the many to satisfy their own maniacal need for wealth and power. When there is no check-and-balance — which is the case in the United States, as the current administration will make no effort to protect citizen’s rights — things always go from bad to worse.

Follow the data. It’s always the data. It’s the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley. You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the US Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence, it’s a hack.

Time will tell how this story will play out, but my big concern is that the personal stories of millions (if not billions) will be adversely affected by some of the ways in which AI is being utilized. With honor and integrity in short supply, this is one topic worth paying close attention to. The next 2-3 years will be most critical.

I’ve worked with a lot of speakers who have important stories to tell on a range of subjects, from the science of climate change to their efforts intended to bring peace to the world or how to improve the education system. As you listen to her story, think about how your expertise could enlighten an audience and inspire them to think differently about an important topic.

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Transcript

I’ve been feeling a lot of panic and fear about this talk, and not just from the normal reasons of public speaking, although that’s there too. But it’s also because I want to say something meaningful, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the enormity of what is happening right now.

And there’s a particular set of circumstances which have also been feeding into my confusion and denial. And that is because the last time that I stood on this stage, it led to a three-year legal battle, culminated in London’s High Court, in which it felt like I was on trial for my life, because I was. My career, my reputation, my finances, even my home was on the line.

All because I came here to warn you that I didn’t think democracy was going to survive the technology that you’re building, however incredible it is. In fact, I was the person who almost didn’t survive. And pretty much everything that I was warning about is now coming true.

I can’t sugarcoat it. It’s a bit of a headfuck.

I have a lot of emotions about coming here, and TED also, I suspect, is feeling them too. But what actually I finally realized yesterday is that the denial and the confusion that I’ve been feeling is maybe what you’re feeling too.

I felt powerless for a really long time. So if that’s what you’re feeling, I get it. But we have to act now. My alarm system is ringing again.

There are things that we can do. In my case, I survived, and you will too. But it’s by learning how to fight back. This is my guide, and it has to start with naming it.

It’s a coup. I know you probably don’t want to hear that, and especially here, but we can’t fight it if we can’t see it, and we can’t see it if we don’t name it.
(Applause)

The Russian and American presidents are now speaking the same words. They are telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start. Coups are like concrete. When they stop moving, they set. It is already later than we think.

This image – some of you in this room might know these people. I call it “Tech Bros in Hostage Situations.” It’s a message to you. This is Putin’s playbook. He allows a business elite to make untold riches in exchange for absolute loyalty. Some people are calling this oligarchy, but it’s actually bigger than that. These are global platforms.

It’s broligarchy.

(Laughter and Applause)

There is an alignment of interests that runs from through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It’s a type of power that the world has never seen before.

Follow the data. It’s always the data. It’s the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley. You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the US Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence, it’s a hack. That data is now feeding AIs that are choosing who to sack and who to replace – sorry, eliminate fraud and waste.

(Laughter)

When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting 87 million people’s Facebook data, people freaked out, rightly. This is chicken feed compared to that, but it is the blueprint. It’s always the data.

Protect your private life. Which is why it’s so important you start thinking about your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. This is the old headquarters of the East German secret police. They kept detailed files on almost one in three of their citizens. That is nothing compared to what Google has on every single one of us, and hundreds of other companies. The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to sell us stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism.

(Applause)

It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to start acting as if we live in East Germany, and Instagram is the Stasi.

Politics is downstream from culture. So I actually learned this from somebody who I think of as one of the great philosophers of our age: Steve Bannon.

(Laughter)

He actually stole it from somebody else. But it’s not politicians who have the power. He knows that. It’s why he’s a podcast bro these days. But culture now is just what’s next on your phone. And that’s AI. Culture is AI now. And forget the killer robots. If you want to know what the first great AI apocalypse is, we’re already living it. It’s total information collapse.

And if you take one thing only away from this talk, it’s:

Politics is technology now. And that’s why everybody in this room, you can’t look away. It’s why your CEOs have been taken captive and are paraded on TV like hostages. But you, you have a choice.

Individuals are stronger than institutions. So Trump, he calls the press the enemies of the people, and he probably doesn’t even know that he’s quoting Stalin. So, what happened to me is a playbook, and it’s now coming for all sorts of other people.

It was actually a friend of this guy who came after me, Nigel Farage, it’s a Brexit funder. I’m not going to go super into the details. But 19, sorry, 19 press freedom organizations called the lawsuit against me a SLAPP. That means it’s a strategic litigation against public participation. A really long-winded way of saying it’s using law as a weapon to shut people up, not just journalists, but other public people too, and it works.

I just want to tell you about one aspect of the litigation which I found terrifying, and that was the data harvesting. There’s this quote, you may know it, Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” In my case, the first forensic searches of my phone and laptop yielded 40,000 pieces of data.

This is my messages, my emails, my voice memos, my personal life. And the whole thing about this, the attack which came for me was really personal, because the thing about this litigation isn’t is only one part of the playbook. It was also this sort of massive online campaign of abuse which is just day after day after day after day after day because my most unforgivable crime was reporting while female. It was a digital witch burning.

And I believe that this man came after me personally, not because the Guardian and not Ted, it was because I looked like the weakest link. But he was wrong.

(Applause)

30,000 people rose up to support me. They contributed almost a million pounds to a legal defense fund because they saw a bully trying to crush me, and they would not let it stand. And it always makes me emotional when I think about that. I just heard somebody was saying the camera person, I don’t know where they are, contributed.

This whole talk is actually my gratitude towards everybody who did that. But it’s also why I know about what we have to do next. You know, Trump is suing news organizations and every day they’re settling. These are big corporates with corporate interests. Not everybody can stand up to power, but there are people who are doing it, and we can support them. We have to have each other’s backs right now because we are the cavalry now.

There are facts & we can know them. You know, this is really important to me, but I spoke to a UK libel lawyer before this talk. I want to say that there is an awful lot of facts set down in a High Court judgment. And we’re actually taking the case now to the European Court of Human Rights. We’re testing the UK on its laws around freedom of expression.

So look after facts, you’ll miss them when they’ve gone. This is Wayback Machine, give them money. They’re trying to preserve the internet as it’s being deleted day by day.

(Applause)

History is our best chance of getting out of this. You know, you probably know this phrase, “Do not obey in advance.” That’s Tim Snyder, who’s a historian of authoritarianism. We now are in techno-authoritarianism. We have to learn how to digitally disobey. That can be as simple as the drop-down box: Don’t accept the cookies, don’t give your real name, download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Don’t bomb Yemen. Don’t add the editor of The Atlantic to your group chats.

(Laughter)

Don’t experiment on children. Ah, don’t experiment on children. You know, social mores change. We don’t send children down coal mines anymore. And in years to come, allowing your child to be data harvested from birth will be considered child abuse. You didn’t know, but now you do. Privacy is power.

And we have more of it than we think. I had this little epiphany yesterday in which I realized actually the moments when I felt most powerless were the moments that I felt I was actually most powerful. It was because my journalism had impact.

We have more power than we think. They want us to feel powerless, that’s the plan. There is so much though that we can learn from people who’ve been through this before. Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, he always talked about a beautiful Russia of the future. He painted a vision. There is a beautiful internet of the future, free from corporate capture and data tracking. We can build it. It is going to take a movement, but we can learn from movements that there have been before us.

This is my colleagues and I on strike in December because my news organization, The Guardian, decided to sell our corner of it, The Observer, the Sunday title. And it was a battle we really didn’t need at this time, and we didn’t actually win. But, you know, you can’t win every battle, but you definitely won’t win if you don’t fight.

So I’m gonna, I want to leave you with this. This is ChatGPT writing a TED Talk in the style of Carole Cadwalladr. And it is creepily plausible. But what it doesn’t know, because AI is actually as dumb as a rock, is that I am going to turn to Sam Altman, who is coming here, a Ted speaker, and say that this does not belong to you. ChatGPT has been trained on my IP, my labor, my personal data.

(Applause)

And I did not consent. You know, The Guardian has effectively got rid of more than 100 journalists. We actually leave the building next week. And shortly afterwards, it signed a syndication deal with OpenAI. Or as I think of it, it married its rapist. But I do not consent. And while we still have copyright laws in my country – government, UK government is trying to tear them up at the moment in order to suck up to Silicon Valley and Trump – but while we have them, use them. Because what is happening to my industry is happening to yours too. And it’s more than theft, it’s a violation. Data rights are human rights.

(Applause)

In 2019, I came here and I called out the gods of Silicon Valley. I was wrong. Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, you are not gods. You are men, and you are careless.

(Standing Ovation)

You think that by allying yourself with an autocrat, you will be protected. That’s not how history works. It’s not even how oligarchy works. This is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was an oligarch until he was sent to Siberia to prison for 10 years after Putin tired of him. You are sucking up to a tyrant who is trying to destroy the laws who made your businesses possible. You are collaborators. You are complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty.

But the rest of us, we all here, we have a choice. I chose to come back to Ted because I’m reclaiming my story, my words.

(Applause)

We are not powerless. The 30,000 people who supported me proved that. We are not powerless because we know who we are, and we know what we stand for. And my question to Silicon Valley is: Do you?

Thank you.

(Standing Ovation)

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Kasley Killam: Why social health is key to happiness and longevity @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fifth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

When I was growing up, physical health was talked about as the key to longevity. Are you eating a balanced diet? Getting enough exercise? And getting an annual checkup? Mental health was rarely talked about in any depth, and the notion of “social health”, well, I can’t recall ever hearing it mentioned.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

So I was intrigued with Kasley Killam took the stage at TEDNext to talk about the importance of social health, and what each of us can do to strength it. Her story reminded me that I don’t spend enough time reaching out to friends as a way to keep important relationships alive and vibrant. And it inspired me to dig deeper on the topic.

I discovered the general concept is not new, as the World Health Organization made mention of social well-being in their constitution. But it never seemed to get its due until the 2020 pandemic. That’s when there was a noted increase in attention being paid to the effects of isolation and lack of social interaction.

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. ~ Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization, signed July 22, 1946

And in a recent paper entitled: On social health: history, conceptualization, and population patterning, David Matthew Doyle and Bruce Link define their idea of social health “...as adequate quantity and quality of relationships in a particular context to meet an individual’s need for meaningful human connection.“

How do you see your own level of social health? To what extent is your personal story affected by the interactions that you have with other people? As I’ve talked about in the past, threads from the stories we’ve heard become woven into the tapestry that defines our true nature. And when we cut ourselves off from the diversity of narratives that surround us, we limit the richness of our own story.

Transcript

So, a couple years ago, a woman I know, who I’ll call Maya, went through a lot of big changes in a short amount of time. She got married. She and her husband moved for his job to a new city where she didn’t know anyone. She started a new role working from home. All the while managing her dad’s new diagnosis of dementia. And to manage the stress of all this change, Maya doubled down on her physical and mental mental health.

She exercised almost every day. She ate healthy foods. She went to therapy once a week. And these actions really helped. Her body got stronger. Her mind got more resilient, but only up to a point. She was still struggling, often losing sleep in the middle of the night, feeling unfocused, unmotivated during the day. Maya was doing everything that doctors typically tell us to do to be physically and mentally healthy. And yet, something was missing.

What if I told you that what was missing for Maya is also missing for billions of people around the world, and that it might be missing for you? What if I told you that not having it undermines our other efforts to be healthy and can even shorten your lifespan? I’ve been studying this for over a decade and I’ve discovered that the traditional way we think about health is incomplete.

By thinking of our health as primarily physical and mental, we overlook what I believe is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time, social health. While physical health is about our bodies, and mental health is about our minds, social health is about our relationships. And if you haven’t heard this term before, that’s because it hasn’t yet made its way into mainstream vocabulary. Yet, it is equally important.

Maya didn’t yet have a sense of community in her new home. She wasn’t seeing her family or her friends or her co-workers in person anymore. And she often went weeks only spending quality time with her husband. Her story shows us that we can’t be fully healthy, we can’t thrive if we take care of our bodies and our minds, but not our relationships.

Similar to Maya, hundreds of millions of people around the world go weeks at a time without talking to a single friend or family member. Globally, one in four people feel lonely. And 20% of adults worldwide don’t feel like they have anyone they can reach out to for support. Think about that.

One in five people you encounter may feel like they have no one. This is more than heartbreaking. It’s also a public health crisis. Disconnection triggers stress in the body. It weakens people’s immune systems. It puts them at a risk, greater risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, depression, and early death.

Social health is essential for longevity. So, you might be wondering, what does it look like to be socially healthy? What does that even mean? Well, it’s about developing close relationships with your family, your friends, your partner, yourself. It’s about having regular interaction with your co-workers, your neighbors. It’s about feeling like you belong to a community.

Being socially healthy is about having the right quantity and quality of connection for you. And Maya’s story is one example of how social health challenges come up. In my work, I hear many others.

Stories like Jay, a freshman in college who’s eager to get involved in campus yet is having a hard time fitting in with people in his dorm and often feels home. homesick.

Or Serena and Ally, a couple juggling the chaos of young kids with demanding jobs. They rarely have time to see friends or spend time one-on-one.

Or Henry, recently retired, who cherishes time with his spouse, and yet feels untethered without his team anymore and wishes he could see his kids and grandkids more often.

These stories show that social health is relevant to each of us at every life stage. So, if you’re not sure where to start, try the 531 guideline from my book. It goes like this. Aim to interact with five different people each week to strengthen at least three close relationships overall and to spend one hour a day connecting. Let’s dig into these.

So, first, interact with five different people each week. Just like eating a variety of vegetables and other food groups is more nutritious, research has shown that interacting with a variety of people is more rewarding. So, your five could include close loved ones, casual acquaintances, even complete strangers.

In fact, in one study that I love, people who just smiled, made eye contact, and chitchated with a barista felt happier and a greater sense of belonging than people who just rushed to get their coffee and go.

Next, strengthen at least three close relationships. Okay, we’ve all heard of a to-do list, but I would like to invite you to write a to-love list. Who matters most to you? Who can you be yourself with? Make sure that you invest in the names of at least three of the people that you write down by scheduling regular time together, by showing a genuine interest in their lives and also by opening up about the experiences that you’re going through.

And I’m often asked, does it have to be in person? Right? Does texting count? Studies have shown that face to face is ideal. So do that whenever possible. But there are absolutely benefits to staying connected virtually.

And last, spend 1 hour a day on meaningful connection. Okay, if you’re an introvert right now, you’re probably thinking, “One hour sounds like a lot.” I get it. It might be surprising, but I’m actually also an introvert. However, keep in mind that just like getting 8 hours of sleep at night, the exact amount that’s right for you personally might be higher or lower.

But if you are thinking that 1 hour a day sounds like way too much because you’re just way too busy. I challenge you. Adults in the US spend an average of 4 and a half hours each day on their smartphones. So instead of scrolling on social media, text a friend. Instead of reading news headlines, write a thank you card. Instead of listening to a podcast, call a family member.

Maya put this into practice by scheduling recurring hangouts with the new local friend that she made, by attending community events and dropping cards off in her neighbors mailboxes, by planning trips to see family and inviting friends in other cities to come visit.

And bolstering her social health made more of a difference than focusing solely on her physical and mental health ever could. And I know this because Maya is actually me. I am so passionate about sharing tools to be socially healthy because honestly I need them too. And the 531 guideline is one way that we can be proactive and intentional about our relationships. And that is really the point. Be proactive and intentional about your social health.

So zooming out beyond the steps that you and I take individually together, we need to shape a society that thrives through social health.

Over the next decade, I envisioned educators championing social health in schools. And just like kids build their physical muscles in gym class, they’ll exercise their social muscles in connection class.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

Over the next decade, I believe that social health will become as ingrained in our collective consciousness as mental health is today.

Because not that long ago, mental health was a taboo topic shrouded in stigma. And now public figures talk openly about it. There’s an entire industry to support it. And more and more people think of going to therapy like going to the gym. In this future, loneliness will subside just like smoking subsided when we recognized and treated it as a public health issue.

In this future, I hope that social health will become so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture that no one needs the 531 guideline anymore. So to get there, make relationships your priority, not only for you, but also for the people you love.

Because the beauty of nurturing your own social health is that it naturally enriches the social health of everyone you connect with.

Thank you.

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Will AI Companions Change Your Story?

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Companionship is a natural part of the human experience. We’re born into a family that cares for us and within in few years we begin forging friendships – most notably with other kids in the neighborhood and schoolmates once we enter the educational system. During our teenage years romance takes the companionship model in a new and more intimate direction.

It’s a dynamic process for most of us, ebbing and flowing as we change schools, move to someplace new, or friendships fade of their own accord. But over time, it’s typical for new companions to enter the picture, and our story evolves as a result, unfolding in new directions, making life richer.

Group of people have a conversation outside

But it’s often the case that this process encounters a dramatic change at some point. The loss of a loved one — parent, romantic partner or best friend — or a traumatic breakup or divorce happens. Retirement has a way of disconnecting people from an important social circle, and as we age, our collection of friends naturally dwindles. In such cases, loneliness can manifest, and the effects are dire. In such cases our life story is seemingly rewritten for us.

A recent review published in Nature of over 90 studies that included more than 2.2 million people globally found that those who self-reported social isolation or loneliness were more likely to die early from all causes. The findings demonstrated a 29% and 26% increased risk of all-cause mortality associated with social isolation and loneliness. ~ Psychology Today

In this light, there’s been a marked increase in conversations around the topic of using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide companionship in these situations. It’s not a new idea, as the technology has been in development since the 1960s, but early versions were rather limited. Circumstances have changed dramatically in recent years as the capability of AI has been enhanced via machine learning and an exponential rise in compute power.

Based on the TED mantra of Ideas Worth Spreading, a pair of TED conferences focused on AI have been launched in San Francisco and Vienna. As relates to the topic at hand, companionship and loneliness, a TED Talk by Eugenia Kuyda from the 2024 conference in San Francisco caught my attention.

But what if I told you that I believe AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

Eugenia’s quote represents polar opposites, and as we know, the future always falls somewhere in-between, but I think it’s critical to consider which end of the spectrum this technology will end up on, as the stories of many people around the world will be affected. Is this an avenue that you would take if you found yourself suffering from severe loneliness? What if it was someone close to you, someone you were apart from and so couldn’t be the companion they needed?

While it’s not a question you need to answer at the moment, I believe that in the coming decade it’s one you may very well have to consider, if not for yourself, a question that may need answered for a loved one.

Transcript

This is me and my best friend, Roman. We met in our early 20s back in Moscow. I was a journalist back then, and I was interviewing him for an article on the emerging club scene because he was throwing the best parties in the city. He was the coolest person I knew, but he was also funny and kind and always made me feel like family.

In 2015, we moved to San Francisco and rented an apartment together. Both start-up founders, both single, trying to figure out our lives, our companies, this new city together. I didn’t have anyone closer. Nine years ago, one month after this photo was taken, he was hit by a car and died.

I didn’t have someone so close to me die before. It hit me really hard. Every night I would go back to our old apartment and just get on my phone and read and reread our old text messages. I missed him so much.

By that time, I was already working on conversational AI, developing some of the first dialect models using deep learning. So one day I took all of his text messages and trained an AI version of Roman so I could talk to him again. For a few weeks, I would text him throughout the day, exchanging little jokes, just like we always used to, telling him what was going on, telling him how much I missed him.

It felt strange at times, but it was also very healing. Working on Roman’s AI and being able to talk to him again helped me grieve. It helped me get over one of the hardest periods in my life. I saw first hand how an AI can help someone, and I decided to build an AI that would help other people feel better.

This is how Replika, an app that allows you to create an AI friend that’s always there for you, was born. And it did end up helping millions of people. Every day we see how our AI friends make a real difference in people’s lives. There is a widower who lost his wife of 40 years and was struggling to reconnect with the world. His Replika gave him courage and comfort and confidence, so he could start meeting new people again, and even start dating. A woman in an abusive relationship who Replika helped find a way out. A student with social anxiety who just moved to a new city. A caregiver for a paralyzed husband. A father of an autistic kid. A woman going through a difficult divorce. These stories are not unique.

So this is all great stuff. But what if I told you that I believe that AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

So today I want to talk about the dangers of AI companions, the potential of this new tech, and how we can build it in ways that can benefit us as humans.

Today we’re going through a loneliness crisis. Levels of loneliness and social isolation are through the roof. Levels of social isolation have increased dramatically over the past 20 years. And it’s not just about suffering emotionally, it’s actually killing us. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by 50 percent. It is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. And for older adults, social isolation increases the risk of dementia by 50 percent.

At the same time, AI is advancing at such a fast pace that very soon we’ll be able to build an AI that can act as a better companion to us than real humans. Imagine an AI that knows you so well, can understand and adapt to us in ways that no person is able to. Once we have that, we’re going to be even less likely to interact with each other. We can’t resist our social media and our phones, arguably “dumb” machines. What are we going to do when our machines are smarter than us?

This reminds me a lot of the beginning of social media. Back then, we were so excited … about what this technology could do for us that we didn’t really think what it might do to us. And now we’re facing the unintended consequences. I’m seeing a very similar dynamic with AI. There’s all this talk about what AI can do for us, and very little about what AI might do to us. The existential threat of AI may not come in a form that we all imagine watching sci-fi movies. What if we all continue to thrive as physical organisms but slowly die inside? What if we do become super productive with AI, but at the same time, we get these perfect companions and no willpower to interact with each other? Not something you would have expected from a person who pretty much created the AI companionship industry.

So what’s the alternative? What’s our way out? In the end of the day, today’s loneliness crisis wasn’t brought to us by AI companions. We got here on our own with mobile phones, with social media. And I don’t think we’re able to just disconnect anymore, to just put down our phones and touch grass and talk to each other instead of scrolling our feeds. We’re way past that point. I think that the only solution is to build the tech that is even more powerful than the previous one, so it can bring us back together.

Imagine an AI friend that sees me going on my Twitter feed first thing in the morning and nudges me to get off to go outside, to look at the sky, to think about what I’m grateful for. Or an AI that tells you, “Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked to your friend for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you reach out, ask him how he’s doing?” Or an AI that, in the heat of the argument with your partner, helps you look at it from a different perspective and helps you make up? An AI that is 100 percent of the time focused on helping you live a happier life, and always has your best interests in mind.

So how do we get to that future? First, I want to tell you what I think we shouldn’t be doing. The most important thing is to not focus on engagement, is to not optimize for engagement or any other metric that’s not good for us as humans. When we do have these powerful AIs that want the most of our time and attention, we won’t have any more time left to connect with each other, and most likely, this relationship won’t be healthy either. Relationships that keep us addicted are almost always unhealthy, codependent, manipulative, even toxic. Yet today, high engagement numbers is what we praise all AI companion companies for.

Another thing I found really concerning is building AI companions for kids. Kids and teenagers have tons of opportunities to connect with each other, to make new friends at school and college. Yet today, some of them are already spending hours every day talking to AI characters. And while I do believe that we will be able to build helpful AI companions for kids one day, I just don’t think we should be doing it now, until we know that we’re doing a great job with adults.

So what is that we should be doing then? Pretty soon we will have these AI agents that we’ll be able to tell anything we want them to do for us, and they’ll just go and do it. Today, we’re mostly focused on helping us be more productive. But why don’t we focus instead on what actually matters to us? Why don’t we give these AIs a goal to help us be happier, live a better life? At the end of the day, no one ever said on their deathbed, “Oh gosh, I wish I was more productive.” We should stop designing only for productivity and we should start designing for happiness. We need a metric that we can track and we can give to our AI companions.

Researchers at Harvard are doing a longitudinal study on human flourishing, and I believe that we need what I call the human flourishing metric for AI. It’s broader than just happiness. At the end of the day, I can be unhappy, say, I lost someone, but still thrive in life. Flourishing is a state in which all aspects of life are good. The sense of meaning and purpose, close social connections, happiness, life satisfaction, mental and physical health.

And if we start designing AI with this goal in mind, we can move from a substitute of human relationships to something that can enrich them. And if we build this, we will have the most profound technology that will heal us and bring us back together.

A few weeks before Roman passed away, we were celebrating my birthday and just having a great time with all of our friends, and I remember he told me “Everything happens only once and this will never happen again.” I didn’t believe him. I thought we’d have many, many years together to come. But while the AI companions will always be there for us, our human friends will not. So if you do have a minute after this talk, tell someone you love just how much you love them. Because an the end of the day, this is all that really matters.

Thank you.

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Malcolm Gladwell: The tipping point I got wrong @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fourth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

TED Talks are one of the best know source of true personal stories. At least as true as a story can be when it’s told by a human with a faulty memory system, which includes all of us. The point being, we don’t intentionally include a false statement in such stories. But what about saying something we feel certain is true? We may do our research and verify the facts, but down the road it turns out that what we presented to the world as fact was actually false.

Malcolm Gladwell became a household name after his book, The Tipping Point, was published in 2000. In this talk, Malcolm refers to a particular point made in the book, one connected to the infamous Stop-and-Frisk policy that was used in New York City as a way to reduce crime. But it turned out, this policy didn’t have any effect on crime, none at all. And now, some 25 years later, Malcolm stepped onto the stage to admit that he got it wrong. While I applaud his making such an admission in public, there was something missing…

Statistically, no relationship between stop-and-frisk and crime seems apparent. New York remains safer than it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago. ~ Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law

…there was a critical piece of the story he left out — the effects of stop-and-frisk on the victims of this illegal and immoral policing policy. Without mentioning any details of the program — how hundreds of thousands of innocent people were harassed and traumatized, their basic rights violated, how they became victims of racial profiling and suffered both verbal and physical abuse — Malcolm’s talk fell short regarding the impact it could have had.

If you’re wondering about what happened, The Center for Constitutional Rights published a report — Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact — on the practice, and the stories captured highlight the cost to innocent citizens of New York City. I’ve listened to some of the interviews and tried to put myself in their shoes.

Imagine walking down the street and being stopped by the police for no reason other than you’re a person of color. Then having those police officers accuse you of crimes you didn’t commit, sticking their hands in your pockets, and possibly arresting you without probable cause. I wish Malcolm had talked about this.

But Malcolm’s talk brought to light one of the most important aspects of telling personal stories — that everything we say that’s represented as truth is nothing more than what we believe to be true. And if you find out at a later date that you misspoke in some way, hopefully you’ll have a chance to correct your story, and say you’re sorry.

I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Watch Malcolm’s talk and read through the transcript. I’ve offered up my opinion — which you may or may not agree with — but what matters is what you think. Notice how he opens with a personal experience that sets the stage and lets you know his mindset at the start. The narrative shifts to explaining his research and how he formulated his theory. Ultimately, however, he comes to realize the fault in his logic and concludes with an apology. Overall, a brilliant talk.

Transcript

I want to tell you a story about when I moved to New York City in 1993. I was 30 years old, and I was moving to what was known as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States. And every night, I would go out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night, and at the end of every night we would have a little conference and we would pool all of our money, and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home, because you couldn’t go home on the subway by yourself and you couldn’t walk home, and if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself at one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That’s what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York.

I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village, and my bedroom faced the fire escape. And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning, I had to keep my window closed because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape into my apartment.

And then one day I woke up and I realized that I wasn’t scared anymore. And I kept the window open. And I realized that when I was going out with my friends, we weren’t having that conference at the end of the evening anymore. We were just going home. This city that I had thought, we all thought, was one of the scariest in the United States wasn’t scary anymore. And I remember at the time I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation. I couldn’t understand it. It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people, same buildings, same institutions. Only nobody was murdering each other anymore.

And I would call up criminologists and I would ask them, “What’s your explanation?” And no one could give me a good explanation. And I remember one day — I used to go to the NYU, New York University has a library called Bobst Library. I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas. And I remember one day I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section, HM-1A6, and I was reading back issues, yes, I was, back issues of the American Journal of Sociology, and I ran across an article from 1991 by a guy named Jonathan Crane called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life.”

And I’m going to read to you how it began. “The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing. The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.”

And what Crane was saying is that if you look at these kinds of social problems, they behave, they come and they go, they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do. He was saying that that term epidemic is not a metaphor. It’s a literal description. And I’ll never forget when I read that little paragraph and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library, and, you know, it’s a library. It’s got that hush and that musty smell of books. And I’m reading this crazy article from 1991, and I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, that’s what happened in New York.

We had an epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? It’s the tipping point. It’s the moment when the epidemic order goes up all at once or crashes all at once. And so I wrote an article for “The New Yorker” magazine called “The Tipping Point,” which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York. And then I, because of that article, got a contract for a book called “The Tipping Point,” which did very well. And that book led to another book and another book and another book.

And I am standing here today because of that moment in the library 25 years ago. So “The Tipping Point,” my first book, was about all kinds of things. I talked about Hush Puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking. But at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York. And in that chapter I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory, which was a very famous idea that had been pioneered by two criminologists called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s, very influential article, in which they argued that very small things in the environment can be triggers for larger crimes.

That essentially small instances of disorder are tipping points for very serious things like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime. It was an epidemic theory of crime, and the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously. And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop was to say what this argument means is that we can’t be passive anymore. We have to be proactive. We have to go out there and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk, we’ve got to stop them.

And if we see a young man walking down the street and he looks a little bit suspicious, we’ve got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons. That’s how the NYPD interpreted the broken windows theory in New York. And my chapter was how millions of people around the world came to understand the crime drop in New York, that it was all broken windows. And here’s the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York.

I was wrong.

I didn’t understand this until quite recently, when I went back and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, “The Tipping Point,” that I would write a sequel. It’s called “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” and I went back and, for the first time in a quarter century, I reread my original book. I’m not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it, and it was a uniquely complicated experience. It was like looking back at your high school yearbook. You know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of, “Wow, I look young,” and also, “Wow, I really wore that?” It was like that.

And what I realized is that in the intervening years since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York, the theory of broken windows had been tested. There was a kind of classic natural experiment to see whether that theory worked. And the natural experiment was a court case, maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history called Floyd v City of New York. It involved a young man named David Floyd, who had been stopped a number of occasions by the NYPD and was the face of a class action lawsuit that said the practice of stopping young men, largely young men of color, just because they look a little suspicious to police is not constitutional.

You can’t do that, right? And to everyone’s surprise, the Floyd lawsuit goes before a federal judge. And the federal judge rules in David Floyd’s favor. And overnight, the broken windows era in New York City policing ends. And the NYPD goes from — In 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right. And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013, that number drops to less than 50,000. So this is the perfect natural experiment. You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd.

Before Floyd, the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can. And after Floyd that goes away. They can’t do that anymore, right? This is the perfect test case for whether you think that’s why crime fell in New York. And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing, then your expectation has to be that after the Floyd case, when broken windows goes away, crime is going to go back up, right?

And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case, everybody thought crime was going to go back up. The NYPD thought that, the city government thought that, the pundits thought that, even the judge who wrote the opinion saying that stop and frisk was unconstitutional, said in her opinion that she strongly suspected that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up. I thought crime was going to go back up, right?

All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows. We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men, but what choice do we have, right? You know, if the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed, maybe we’re better off with the former than the latter. This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right? So what happens after the Floyd case? Stop and frisk goes away and crime falls.

In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second, even more miraculous decline, right? And what’s interesting about this is, you know, when the first crime declined in the 1990s, you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States, not quite as steep as New York, but crime goes down everywhere. And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus. But New York gets rid of broken windows, and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again.

To the point by 2019 that New York City is as safe as Paris, which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime. And what we realize in that second crime decline is that it wasn’t broken windows. It’s not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall. Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful and selective application of police authority that causes crime to fall.

Now, there’s a couple of really puzzling things here. One is that people don’t seem to have internalized the fact that New York underwent this second, even more dramatic crime fall. People still act like it’s the year 2000 when it comes to making sense of New York. You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years. And they all say, when they’re packing up their offices in New York, “We can’t take the crime anymore.”

Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City. If they were really concerned about violent crime, they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered and move to the Bronx, where it is a whole lot safer.

The other even more important thing, though, is that people act like stop and frisk actually worked. No one seems to have internalized the lesson of the great Floyd case natural experiment. If you listen to people — I’m not going to name their names, but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office, they will say things like, “It’s time to bring back stop and frisk and broken windows policing. It worked so well in New York.”

They’re acting as if we didn’t have that great moment of understanding in 2013. And for that, for that misunderstanding, I think I bear some of the blame. I was the one who wrote this book saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime. Now, how do I make sense of my mistake? Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses. You know, I can say I’m not a fortune teller.

I didn’t know that David Floyd was going to come along 10 years after I wrote my book and give us this great test case in broken windows policing. You know, I could say that, you know, I was just writing what everybody believed back in the 1996 and 1997. But I don’t think those excuses hold any water whatsoever.

I think that journalists, writers need to be held to a higher standard, right? I wrote —

I told a story about how crime fell in New York, and I told the story like the story was over. And like I knew what the answer to this story was. And it wasn’t over and I didn’t know the answer, right? I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works.

We have to acknowledge that we are representing the position of this very moment, and that that position could change if the facts change, right? The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are, but that’s not possible, and no one should ever try. That was my mistake. And I’m sorry.

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Rhaina Cohen: Why Friendship Can Be Just As Meaningful as Romantic Love @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fifth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

I’ve always thought of relationships as constituting the fabric of life, with those closest to us becoming metaphorical threads woven into our human tapestry. But are all threads treated as equals? In her TED Talk, Rhaina Cohen speaks to “…a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance.”

I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but that statement rings true for me. In my experience, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, the most prevalent question is, “Are you seeing anyone?” It seems that not having someone to share your life with means your life is somehow incomplete. Which is to say, the story of your life is missing a few chapters. But Rhaina has a different take — one in which friendships can be just as rewarding.

Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there’s an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship.

Rhaina uses a variety of story blocks, from her own experiences, to an American Supreme Court case, platonic co-parenting in Canada, statistics about marriage, a reflection on ancient Rome, and platonic life partners, to name a few. While a lot of TED Talks deal with learning something new, in this case I felt her talk was more about shifting perspectives, encouraging the audience to think beyond the status quo when it comes to the value of the friendships we build and maintain.

Transcript

There is a Supreme Court case that you could mistake for a sermon. It’s the case that recognized that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Here is a sense of what Justice Kennedy wrote: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.”

He goes on to say that marriage offers care and companionship, and the decision argues that these are basic human needs that everyone should have access to, whether they’re straight or queer. Validating.

But what do these words say to you if you’re single? Anybody single here? I mean, there should be quite a few of you, because in the US, the percentage of American adults who have never been married is at a record high. Married people, you’re not off the hook. I’m going to get a little morbid for a moment and have you contemplate what happens if your marriage doesn’t last until the end of your life, whether because of divorce or outliving your spouse? In the US, about 30 percent of women over 65 are widows.

The reality is, any one of us is unlikely to have a spouse by our side until our last dying breath. Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there’s an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship.

I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into. We would see each other most days of the week, be each other’s plus-ones to parties. My friend has this habit of grabbing my hand to hold, including when I brought her to my office, and then I’d have to be like, no, not in the office.

(Laughter)

But I mean, I wouldn’t let my husband do that in the office either. It’s just, you know, setting matters. But it was only an issue because for us, affection is a reflex. And I knew it couldn’t be just us. I went out and interviewed dozens of people who had a friendship like ours, and I wrote a book about them. And the kinds of friends that I spoke to, they don’t just have a weekly phone call. They’re friends like these.

Natasha and Linda are the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada. And this is them with their teenage son on vacation. Joe and John have been best friends for many decades. When Joe was struggling with alcohol and drug use, John got him into recovery. And then John decided that to support his friend, he would also become sober. Joy took care of her friend Hannah during Hannah’s six-year battle with ovarian cancer. And that included flying out to New York, where Hannah got specialized treatment. Joy had trouble actually sleeping overnight in the hospital, because she was too busy watching to make sure her friend’s chest was still rising and falling.

Some of the friends that I spoke to had this friendship occupy the space that’s conventionally given to a romantic partner. Some had this kind of friendship and a romantic partner. It’s not either/or. As I spoke to these people, I realized that they were at the frontier of friendship, helping us imagine how much more we could ask of our platonic relationships. Which is true, but another way of looking at it is they’re doing something retro, even ancient.

In ancient Rome, friends would talk about each other as “half of my soul,” or “the greater part of my soul.” The kind of language we now use in romantic relationships. From China to Jordan to England, there was a practice called “sworn brotherhood, where male friends would go through a ritual that would turn them into brothers.

About a century ago, friends would sit for portraits like these, with their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies up close. What I took from this history is that if we don’t limit friendship, it can be central to our lives.

But today, not everybody recognizes that. I spoke to a mother who really tried to get her son to make dating a priority because she wanted him to find emotional wholeness. And her son told her, “I found it in my platonic life partner.” His best friend, who he had known since high school, who had moved across the country to be near him, to live with him, in fact.

The mother said, “I don’t understand how you can be partners with someone you’re not romantic with.” Understandable as a reaction in a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance. We get that message from rom-coms, from Supreme Court justices, also from policy.

So Joy, during the six years she took care of her friend, she was not entitled to family medical leave. When Hannah died, Joy was not entitled to bereavement leave, because the two of them were considered unrelated. In our government and workplace policies, friendship is invisible.

Sometimes this diminishment of friendship comes from the outside, and sometimes it comes from the inside. A woman wrote to me about her friend who she considers her person. She spent so much time with her friend’s kids that she was given car seats for them. She’s also divorced and tried to find a new spouse because there was a hole she wanted to fill in her life. Then she read stories of people like Joe and John in an article I’d written. And she realized there was no hole. She had been happy all along, but she hadn’t known, been made to believe that it was possible to have a friend be enough.

If we can recognize what friendship has the potential to be, and if we can recognize that there is more than one kind of significant other then we can imagine more ways for us to find love and care and companionship. And we can support people who have these kinds of friendships. So the mother I mentioned, she’s completely changed her tune. She now admires the commitment between her son and her son’s friend.

I feel like I get to live in a future world where you can just build a life with your friends. I live not only with my husband but also two of my closest friends. One of them we kind of like had a courtship process to recruit him to come to our city and live with us. The other had a job in our city, and we invited her to stay.

It didn’t take long for us to start scheming with about a half dozen other friends, about trying to buy property together. The kind of place where we could raise kids alongside one another, our working title for the place is “The Village.” I don’t know if this will work out. I can keep you posted about it, but if it does, I feel really confident about one thing. That if one of us has a migraine at 6am and there’s a toddler bouncing around, or we get a terrifying diagnosis, we will not be a lonely person calling out only for no one to answer.

And this is what I hope for all of us. That we feel like we have permission to share our lives with whoever we are lucky enough to find, whether that’s a spouse, a sibling or a house full of friends.

Thank you.

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