Tristan has briefed Heads of State, technology company CEOs, and members of U.S. Congress about the attention economy. “Tristan Harris is probably the strongest voice in technology pointing where the industry needs to go. This is a call to arms and everyone needs to hear him now.' –– Marc Benioff, CEO of. Tristan Harris: Well every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, “What did I get?” This is one way to hijack people’s minds and create a habit, to form a habit. What you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever, sometimes they get a reward, an exciting reward. As Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, says, we’re all walking around with slot machines in our pockets. We don’t let our children into casinos; we should be just as wary of letting these casinos into our children’s hands.

60 Minutes

Scrolling, bursts of likes, and incentives like Snapchat streaks may seem like innocuous features within your favorite apps, but they’re actually designed to make you completely addicted to your smartphone.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Tristan Harris says, gesturing to his iPhone during a 60 Minutes segment that aired Sunday.

As a former Google product manager, Harris would know. He started out as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and then spent three years at Google, during which time his anxiety about the way that apps eat up our attention grew and grew. He feels that tech companies have gained an inordinate amount of power through apps to affect our quality of life.

“Inadvertently, whether they want to or not, they are shaping the thoughts and feelings and actions of people,” Harris says. “They are programming people. There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”

Slots of vegas welcome bonus. After attempting to get Google on board with finding ways to avoid cheaply manipulating our attention — what he calls the “race to the bottom of the brainstem” — he left the company to travel around the country and give talks on how apps need to be better designed to actually improve our lives instead of just using up our time.

Some of the ways that apps captivate our attention are truly stunning. Ramsay Brown founded a company called Dopamine Labs that writes code for apps with the aim of provoking neurological responses from users. He told 60 Minutes how Instagram, for example, doles out bursts of likes in sudden rushes to elicit positive reactions from its users.

“There’s some algorithm somewhere that predicted, ‘Hey, for this user right now who is experimental subject 79B3 in experiment 231, we think we can see an improvement in his behavior if you give it to him in this burst instead of that burst,’” Brown says.

Brown also mentioned how the continuous scroll function of Facebook has been proven to keep users plugged into the site for longer, scrolling endlessly for something they’ll like.

In fact researchers have found that we’re now so addicted and dependent on our phones for dopamine that most of us have actually developed anxiety that can only be quelled by reengaging with our apps. When we put down the phone, our brain signals the adrenal gland to produce a burst of the hormone cortisol, which is synonymous with stress. From that point, we can only relieve our anxiety by picking up the phone again.

To learn more about how how apps are manipulating our brains and the tech insiders that are trying to change that, watch the entire 60 Minutes segment here.

You’ll see a lot of things in Silicon Valley that you won’t see in the rest of the country. But there’s one thing you won’t see there that’s become commonplace everywhere else—children on smartphones. The creators of the technologies and social media apps that are dominating an ever-enlarging portion of our children’s lives are often the ones who are most wary of giving their children access to them.

That’s all you really need to know.

As Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, says, we’re all walking around with slot machines in our pockets. We don’t let our children into casinos; we should be just as wary of letting these casinos into our children’s hands.

As a father of two young boys, I constantly worry about the negative impact of these technologies on our children. When I think back to my childhood, I remember riding my bike to a friend’s house and then exploring the woods. My kids spend their time staring at a screen. And they’re not alone—more than half of all children age 8 to 12 have their own tablet, and a quarter of them have their own smartphone.

Instead of meeting with their friends in person (and developing social skills), teenagers obsessively refresh their posts to see how many likes they received. And current research shows worrying effects: Overuse has been found to contribute to obesity, sleep deprivation, posture issues, stunted social skills, and blurred lines between real and virtual relationships. There has been an unprecedented surge in depression, anxiety, and suicide as well as a marked decrease in sociability, particularly in teenage girls. All this at a time when the pandemic has forced our children online even more for school and to see their friends and family. Magic vegas slots.

Video games and screen time are what’s known in economic terms as an inferior good— the poorer you are, the more of it you consume.

Right now, the interests of parents are directly at odds with the interests of the technology companies. They’re monetizing our attention and profiting off of our time. As they say, the addictive nature of smartphones is a feature, not a bug. We parents are outgunned and at a total loss.

Unfortunately, our government is completely unequipped to be a part of the solution. The Office of Technology Assessment, which was responsible for ensuring Congress was informed on these issues, was dissolved in 1995. Recent hearings with tech CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg, showed that our leaders don’t understand even the basics of how social media works. Many of our leaders refuse to use Zoom and have never read their own emails. The private sector salaries for experts in this area dwarf what the government offers, ensuring that the information and expertise will lie far from Washington.

This is a fundamental problem of our time and one that we won’t have full insight into until well after the worst effects are felt. We need an informed government with relevant expertise to combat the excesses of tech companies and, when needed, keep them in check so these new technologies are developed in a way that maximizes children’s health and education, not company profits. I’m optimistic that we can quickly build consensus on these issues as many parents in Silicon Valley are realizing their importance.

We need to “upgrade” the operating system of our government. Let’s bring back the Office of Technology Assessment to ensure that Congress gets information on these issues from experts who are not being paid by the tech companies. And let’s bring real thought and resources to how the “attention economy” can be properly regulated with human interests in mind, including an agency dedicated to this continually evolving set of issues.

Let’s pour money into the CDC and NIH to fund research on the health effects of these devices and apps on our children. We need to develop guidelines (and regulations, if needed) on design features. For example, we can remove autoplay features for young children and endless scrolling on social media apps and cap the number of notifications or recommendations per day.

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We managed to incentivize the production of high-quality educational content on TV, and we should do the same on YouTube and other platforms. Why are children forced to watch ads before their latest Fortnite video instead of a brief history lesson?

We should change our curricula in public schools to include mindfulness, responsible use of technology, and critic

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