So much of our daily activities now are supported or enveloped by the use of technologies that we designed in order to make our lives easier. I am reminded of something discussed in the In the Age of AI documentary viewed in class: For centuries advancements in technology have brought with them so much shared benefit, improving our quality of life with inventions like the telephone to allow us to better and more quickly communicate with one another or dishwashers and washing machines that helped in women’s liberation. Technological advancements became so trusted based on historical patterns of forward progress that no one realized once we rounded what we can see now to have been a peculiar bend in the ways in which technology impacts us individually and societally.

the same phone I had and reviled!

My personal relationship with technology does not resemble that of most of my peers due to my upbringing and personal values. My parents limited screen time when I was a kid and I was only allowed to watch things that were prescreened by them. I was not allowed to play violent video games, nor watch popular kids shows like SpongeBob or iCarly. I got my first phone, a flip phone of which I was so embarrassed that I continued to tell my friends that I did not have a phone at all, when I was thirteen for the sole purpose of my parents’ convenience so that they didn’t have to wait in parking lots at myextracurricular events and I could just call them to pick me up. I got an iPhone at fifteen, years after my peers, and I wasn’t allowed any type of social media nor unsupervised internet usage until I was eighteen. Suffice to say I was not exposed to many things for a long time, for better or worse. One positive outcome of my parents’ choices is that I am far less dependent on my personal devices than many of my peers are. While “healthy” seems a stretch when describing my relationship with technology, I hesitate to call it unhealthy when put in perspective of others my age. What I can say definitively is that I am in a constant state of anxious self-questioning, and my technology habits are not exempt from scrutiny.

I often worry about what technology, the internet, and the unfathomable amount of information available to us is doing to society. I strongly suspect that people are getting dumber on average as a result. Not only that, but I think that the world is a safer, more comforting place for low-intellect people than it ever has been. Occasionally I will come across someone who makes me wonder how easy life would be without critical reasoning skills. The internet creates havens for all kinds of thought—good, bad; smart, stupid—and these havens have consequences. We create for ourselves a like-minded virtual community where ideas can be expressed and, by exposing ourselves to some (even like-minded people are gonna disagree sometimes) but very minimized challengers (I don’t even want to engage with people unlike myself), we give ourselves the illusion of contributing to the marketplace of ideas. Similarly to watching horror movies in order to feel the fear and adrenaline we no longer experience regularly as prey, we are all a little egotistical and want to feel smart, so we simulate scenarios in which we can. These stacked-deck sounding boards we find for ourselves allow us to feel smart and be opinionated without facing any real counterarguments or having to do any critical self-evaluation. These echo chambers feed individualism, which is already a problem for Americans, and narcissism.

A very common example of this phenomenon occurs on social media platforms that allow users to post video content such as Instagram Reels and TikTok. Content viewers are so used to the algorithm catering to their specific interests that when something that does not pertain to them comes across their feed they often react childishly. For instance, in a video where a woman is doing her makeup or getting dressed for her day, there will be hordes of men, and some women, commenting that they don’t like the outfit (too slutty, too expensive) and that they wish women didn’t act like that (attention-seeking, pretentious). And I, reading these in horror, wonder why they didn’t just keep scrolling if they didn’t like it. I watched one video, which I can’t find now due to the large amount of media I consume, where an Asian woman shares

her favorite way to prepare eggs with chili oil, a suggestion I took, loved, and will now use forever. I checked the comment section upon finishing her video, hoping to find some credible reviews before I tried it or other cool things people do to their eggs. Instead, the comment section was absolutely brimming with these self-centered comments, one user telling the woman that they wished Asians weren’t always making things spicy because they personally don’t like spicy food, another saying that they don’t like the taste of chili oil and requesting a new video using a substitute, and yet another saying that they are vegan and don’t eat eggs.

The answer to my question about why these people didn’t just keep scrolling is that they were so offended that they were shown something that they didn’t want, likely not even realizing that commenting on something, no matter the sentiments expressed in the comment, boosts the algorithm, both helping the video they didn’t like to reach more people and increasing the likelihood that similar videos will be shown to them later (another instance of those missing reasoning skills). People have become so dependent on AI adapting the world to them that they’ve lost the ability to ignore or interact respectfully with content that does not interest or pertain to them. This AI-bred narcissism can be found in just about any comment section in some form and it’s sickening. There are things to be learned and gained from having poor experiences and having to put up with things you don’t like, and by removing everything from view that contradicts any aspect of a person’s belief or interest profile, you effectively lock them in that echo chamber and they become worse for it, which is a phenomenon I see becoming a huge issue in the very near future.

Let’s talk about Halle’s news deserts. A news desert is a community or region that does not receive new coverage from any local news agency, usually occurring in lower-income areas and disproportionately affecting ethnic minority communities. Just since the 1990s, jobs in journalism have decreased by 50%, putting most of this reduced journalistic workforce in cities or working for larger networks or journals, effectively killing the smaller, local news agencies.

From the years 2004 to 2018, the country saw the loss of nearly two thousand local newspapers and continues to lose an average of two more papers with every passing week; the ones that are still in print are now “ghosts of their former selves, both in terms of the quality and quantity of their editorial content and the reach of their readership.” Additionally, in those areas where local papers are still struggling along, that paper is usually the only one covering that area. Approximately 50% of counties have a singular local newspaper for the entire county and two hundred counties don’t have one at all. This death of small local agencies creates holes in coverage across the nation which may start small but will only continue to grow larger as this trend continues.

News deserts come from both a supply and demand side, with urban papers cutting rural circulation and rural papers closing their doors and consumers opting for other news sources. This cord cutting occurring on the consumer side brings in the issue that Kenny spoke to us about, which is the phenomenon where people are increasingly leaving their cable subscriptions for financial reasons and watching less television in favor of streaming and internet-based media. Print media has been on the decline for years and newspapers are feeling the financial strain of the faltering industry, forcing smaller papers out due to the cost. Some of the effects of these news deserts are, obviously, less jobs in journalism, along with an ill-informed public and greatly reduced voter turnout. Aside from lessened voter turnout, polling results become more uniform because fewer opinions are being made available at the proverbial marketplace, which is dangerous for democracy. An under-informed public is detrimental not only to voting practices but also to community activism, creating apathetic citizens that don’t know what’s going on in their own town and therefore cannot and will not be active in the community.

As for solutions to the issue of news deserts, sources vary in levels of optimism but there are some definitive signs of hope. Business have been experimenting with non-profit models and now we have a slowly growing number of non-profit digital newspapers, as well as digital news and emailed newsletters from established local news leaders, and continued research may prove useful in helping these sources to adapt further to the changing landscape of modern journalism. In fact, research has already given us some real insights and the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media published a list of their recommendations to local news agencies, which are summarized as follows:

1.     Invest in human capital. Take time to build a good staff of journalists and salespeople and maintain those relationships. Human capital will make a local agency strong and keep them relevant.

2.     Optimize your business model and tailor it to the needs of your community. Although a single business model used to work for most, if not all, new organizations, this is no longer the case and some research and experimenting should be done in order to find the right fit.

3.     Diversify sources of revenue to become less reliant on print advertising. Even though the majority of revenue will probably come from advertisers for most small- and medium-sized agencies, having multiple sources of income is key. Since advertisers will follow audiences, you have to stay current with your audience in order to retain reader- or viewership, so diversification of services and products will be necessary in order to keep advertising funding flowing.

4.     Know when to work alone and when to work together. It’s commonly said that we’re stronger together, which is often true for local news organizations who are struggling, but finding the right partnerships is a difficult line to walk, especially when each is trying to serve one community and boost their own revenues.

5.     Plan ahead and be ready to transform at least a third of your business model every five years. Five-year financial goals should drive change within your organization and you should be constantly looking forward. Even if a decision means less profit in the short term, if it is the best option in the long term leaders must act accordingly.

The PBS Frontline documentary In the Age of AI describes the moment when deep learning AI became truly and irrevocably noteworthy: Google built AlphaGo, a deep learning AI trained on millions of Go games, and pitted it against the world’s best Go player, Lee Sedol, beating him with a critical, unthinkable move. It was when Sedol conceded the game to the bot that everything seemed to start moving faster for AI. With this new win under their collective belt, AI engineers were spurred on to work towards bigger, better things for AI to achieve, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, however, it seems that AI may prove to be more of a curse than a blessing, and large-scale AI incorporation into our lives is likely a questionable move.

“Money, money, money,” as the great ABBA said. One positive aspect of capitalism is the search for efficiency, which I see as a valuable pursuit with a goal of making life easier for everyone. The immediately present negative aspect of the capitalist obsession with efficiency is the side effect of job loss. Kai-Fu Lee, in the documentary, defined efficiency essentially as “How can I do this with less people?” and explained how AI integration into workspaces is only making the rich richer and the poor poorer by increasing efficiency. A common response to the ‘people will lose their jobs’ protest is the ‘they can retrain’ argument, but the reality is much more complicated than that. People who lose their jobs do not usually have the resources nor time to pay for and complete educational programs and, as for company training programs, hiring managers will almost always prefer either a candidate with 1) experience and age to cut down training cost and reduce the time before an employee adds value or 2) no experience and fresh out of college so that they can save on salary, making it extremely difficult to obtain enrollment in a company training program as someone who lost their job after years in the workforce.

An even sadder implication of this constant pursuit of efficiency in the name of capitalism, a distinctly American thing, is that the fabled American Dream, another distinctly American thing, no longer exists. Exact wording differs slightly across sources, but all would probably agree on Britannica’s definition of the American Dream being the “ideal that the United States is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.” This country, on its current trajectory, does not, in fact, offer equal opportunity to people of all classes and backgrounds, regardless of work ethic and will to succeed.

Especially now with AI, efficiency threatens the lives of real people. Lee states in his interview that we see increasing “inequality of opportunity,” making it less and less likely that we’ll do better than our parents. This brings to mind the insanity of people who complain loudly about immigrants stealing our jobs, whether it be the Irish in the early 1800s, the Chinese who build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, or the Mexicans now, who are the same people touting the virtues of the same American capitalism that seeks to replace them with code, which is certainly more insulting than displacement by a person. AI, in a large-scale integration into business practices in the US, will only catalyze the country’s already growing wealth gap issue.

In the documentary Pedro Domingo asserts that the growth of AI and its implementation into any and every aspect of our daily lives is a positive thing on the basis that AI adapts the world to you. I, being a somewhat lazy person, am always looking for ways to cut down on time-wasting tasks and make my life easier. AI was originally marketed to us under this time-saving/lifestyle-improvement kind of umbrella of products like Alexa, the Roomba, and Tesla’s self-driving cars, and I bought into it immediately out of, as the documentary points out, an inherent trust in the forward progression of technology improving our lives based on a long positive track record. It’s gotten to the point now, I think, that AI has become too invasive and is actively altering our minds. There’s something to be said for going through a little bit of hardship, and if AI becomes too good at adapting the world to us, we run the risk of leeching all opportunity for people to become mature, well-rounded, empathetic adults from our environment.