addictive technologies are harmful

Something that I feel pretty strongly about is that technology currently does a lot of harm.

Don’t misunderstand me — obviously there is a lot about technology that is amazing. For instance, the ability to keep a blog and share it with people easily is super cool. Medicine is nice, heating is nice, showers are nice. Technology probably makes it possible to mass-produce food. I like my clothes and generally a ton of conveniences that come from technology. I like that I can call friends and family. I like that there are tools like Calendly that let me schedule meetings with people easily. I like fridges. Modern life is convenient and awesome in lots of ways. Most of all, I like vim and being able to have digital record of my thoughts.

But technology is also extremely harmful.

Many people (including me sometimes) have a hard time taking seriously the idea that powerful AI could, by attaining a detailed grasp of human psychology or something, be super manipulative / do some kind of mind control thing to humans. But, this doesn’t actually require very powerful AI’s --- the dumb AI’s of today already do quite fine at mind controlling humans!

Honestly, technology being addictive might be one of the biggest problems in the world, and a severely under-resourced one. In particular, this means that if you’re currently on the job market or going into school and considering what to study or want to do impactful research, then this could be a good area to look into. Although the AI situation is more urgent, so if you understood AI xrisk and think that you could be doing something about the AI situation, then please prioritize that. To see why addictive technologies might be a big deal, suppose you thought that 1 hour of walking around outside, or talking to your friends, or whatever, was worth 1 unit of goodness, whereas watching a movie on your phone is worth 0.2 units of goodness. Now, suppose that ~2 billion people had about 3 hours per day of such “passive conscious experience”. This estimate might be quite conservative --- I’m not sure because I blocked my internet while writing this blog post :). Anyways, if this were the case, then addictive technologies are stealing ~5 billion people hours per day. Put another way, they are decreasing the quantity of positive conscious experience that an average person has by maybe 10-20%. So, maybe this is equivalent to killing ~1 billion people every 30 years. Anyways, the math is a little bit sus, but hopefully the conclusion is clear --- this is a big problem!

There are some interesting questions here.

1. How much worse is time spent using addictive technologies versus regular time?
2. If people like addictive technologies, is it even good to want technology to be less addictive?
3. In a counter-factual world where, e.g., you dropped your phone in the shower, and also your laptop, would you actually be spending your time in a good way?

My personal answers to these questions are:

1. 5x worse seems like a reasonable estimate. Upon reflection I usually value very little time wasted online. It seems really important to me to not waste any more time online, given the fact that life may be very very short. If it was my last day on earth, would I wanna spend it in some random rabbit hole on the internet? Nope. Extrapolating a bit, even if I have 3 years, or even more than that, I’d rather just not waste it.
2. My role in helping free other ppl from technology addiction is probably best curtailed to writing blog posts like this and sharing methods for overcoming this problem when prompted. Empirically I’ve observed that pretty much everyone realizes that this is a problem, so sharing e.g., goals / methods that I have for dealing with it has generally been received pretty positively. I’m down to offer accountability, but it doesn’t seem effective / worth the reputation points to be prescriptive. There’s also probably stuff that I’m missing in my analysis of harm (i.e., stuff that applies to me but doesn’t transfer well to other ppl). Anyways, I’m not really willing to spend reputation points here on telling people something they don’t want to hear.
3. Heck yeah!

In the remainder of this blog post I will:

1. Taxonomize different harms caused by technology
2. Discuss some different things that I’ve tried to personally mitigate these harms,
3. and commit to doing the things that work!

Taxonomy of Harms, and Discussion of Solutions

Harm 1: Distraction while working. Recently, I was writing an essay. Often, I’d get an idea for some source / quote that I’d heard to include in the essay. And then I’d get caught in some super long rabbit hole reading a bunch of random stuff, when I really would’ve liked to have been working on the essay.

Mitigating Harm 1: The thing I’ve found most effective is going somewhere where there are other people. Ideally, an office with a few people --- although bring some head plugs if you’re me and need silence to concentrate. The library can work too, especially if other people can see your screen. Another thing that helps is editing stuff offline. If collaborating, maybe take a section of the paper into vim and then edit it locally --- this also has the bonus of meaning that you can have actually good key bindings!

Other things that are fairly helpful include:

• Writing down clear objectives for what you want to accomplish,
• and recording what you actually do accomplish.
• Taking breaks regularly.
  • One way to achieve this is to drink a bunch of water…
  • Which is good anyways.
  • (Unlike eating too much food).

Harm 2: constantly checking communications Often, I’ll get the thought “I should check my email! and my messages!” I wish I did this much much less frequently than I currently do. My understanding is that the reasons why communication software are so addictive is:

1. You have rare “winning the lottery” things. For instance, you got the job! Or your paper got accepted to the conference! It should be pretty clear that such things don’t necessitate checking your email 10 times per day. But, the sporadic reward trains your mind to keep trying to hit the reload button, just in case you get a cool email.
2. There’s some kind of feeling like --- oh, it’d be bad if I missed X’s message.
3. Getting email can make you feel important, or like you’re accomplishing something.
4. Getting messages from friends feels nice, especially if you haven’t talked to anyone today.

Upon reflection, it’s pretty clear that I’d be better off doing this less! I could definitely get away with checking email + messages once per day, and probably even once every other day.

Mitigating Harm 2

• My favorite technique here is leaving my phone in my room when I “go to work”.
  • This is pretty effective.

Harm 3: preventing focus Sometimes, for instance during lunch or something, I’ll be like “oh, maybe I should listen to a book while I eat lunch”. For me, having pretty much any type of passive information consumption / entertainment or whatever generally makes it hard to focus for the rest of the day, and makes it much more likely that I’ll spend a long time engaging in such activities.

The most egregious form of this is, if I’m procrastinating doing something and I’m like “oh, if I read a chapter of this book then I’d be more excited to work afterwords”. Predictably, reading a chapter of the book lessens my self control to not read another, and the unattractive procrastinated task is not going to happen.

Mitigating Harm 3:

• By being aware of this I can just avoid doing this thing which I know would be really bad.
• At the current moment, I don’t have a healthy strategy for consuming media, so I’d best just avoid it.

Harm 4: Something to do if you’re bored / tired Imagine you are bored or tired. The default easy option is to go mindlessly do something on the internet, like consume media. Maybe lots of the time you are a person that doesn’t endorse such behavior. But at least for me, my priorities are pretty different if I’m bored, tired, or don’t want to go to bed because I feel that the day “isn’t complete”. This is so sad! If this default option is removed, think of the possibilities that could open up! This is a pretty general theme. For instance, if you weren’t glued to your phone, maybe you’d say hi to that person at lunch, and have a really nice conversation. Maybe if you weren’t reading that blog post you’d go talk to your friend, or walk around the park, or cook some cool food, or write your own blog post.

Mitigating Harm 4:

• Something that helps is having an event early in the morning. For instance, if you eat breakfast with a friend at 7am every day, you’re probably not going to be so lacking in foresight that you don’t sleep before 11pm.

• Something that I’m very excited about that I very recently did is that I pretty aggressively tried to turn off the internet on my phone and computer from 9pm-6am.

• Today is the first day of trying this, so it’s a little premature to say that it’s working perfectly.

• I’ve tried blocking software before, and it was always trivial to disable, so it didn’t really work.

• However, I’m cautiously optimistic about the current setup.

• In particular the tool Plucky seems really hard to disable.

  • If you’re on linux this is a bit hard to set up though.
    • or well, not hard, perse, but requires doing some questionable things like deleting snap…
    • probably worth it tho
    • but note that the pluck + nhb option is pretty dang hardcore.
      • like they don’t even describe what it does
      • but it seems to be quite hardcore.
  • and if you’re not on linux
    • there almost certainly exists better software. sigh.

• I’m not likely to look up how to disable it when I’m not tired,

  • due to the restriction not being enforced then
  • and the fact that non-tired Alek doesn’t want to lose his life to technology.

• and it’s pretty hard to look up how to disable after 9pm… because I just can’t look up anything.

• Now, I’m sure I could possibly find a way around it. But it seems at least fairly annoying, which is what I was going for. If I break it, then I guess I’ll have to figure out how to strengthen the protocol.

• But it feels like there should be a way to precommit to being locked off the internet at 9pm. This feels like a technology that should totally exist, and I’m cautiously optimistic that Plucky + StayFree + whatever I did to my phone to make it lock is a winning strategy.

• Anyways, it feels like it’d be a huge hassle to circumvent all this blocking software, and I’m officially convinced that a tired Alek doesn’t have the ability to do it.

• for not night times, the main solution is to just be working in a public space eg an office.

Harm 5: Music This is probably my most controversial take of all, but I’ve recently mostly stopped listening to music when I work. I suspect that music is pretty distracting, even if it’s non-lyrical. I still occasionally listen to music, but usually not when I’m doing work, rather in a setting where I can fully enjoy it and e.g., do “zumba” to it, or sing or whatever.

If I’m doing something so boring and mindless that I need music to make it palatable… then does this thing really need to be done?

Anyways, probably the main thing that has helped with this is that I don’t have very good headphones and don’t tend to bring them with me places.

Conclusion

Technology can be very addictive, and eat your time. You should think of this as literally shortening your “effective lifespan” by 10 years by default. (disclaimer: the possibility of being killed by AI sooner than 10 years is not factored into this calculation, it’s guessing that you have 80 years left to live; anyways, my point would be more urgent if you’re dying sooner so it’s moot).

Relying on willpower to address this problem is super dumb. As has been clearly spelled out in this post, relying on willpower has a predictable failure mode. Furthermore, even if you’re a high will power person, presumably you have some finite amount of self control. Way waste some of it on a problem that you could solve via a good system? I’m currently feeling that it’s super relaxing to not need to fight myself to do the right thing here --- that it just happens by default, like water flowing down a river that is on a hill going downhill.

Future steps for Alek

• plucky or stayfree add block email except on specific times
• consider deleting messenger and discord accounts (because these are checkable on the web, and because less apps means less work to check them all)
  • alternatively, a reasonable strategy might be to just block these apps with plucky
• Keep track of tech use, see if there are any other problems, and then fix them with systems!
• Plausibly need to block obsidian (my note taking software) to help me go to bed. sigh.
• Would love to apply similar systemization or accountability tricks to e.g., helping myself do better research!!