Facebook’s $18B settlement + AI in the classroom

0:00I'm here on Talk of the Bay with Nolan Higden. He's a professor at UC Santa Cruz, where I also teach. And we're going to talk today about a couple of things here on Talk of the Bay. We're going to talk about the settlement that just happened with multiple states suing meta, the owner of Facebook. So if you're listening right now and you're about to tune out and say, well, I quit, you know, Facebook along time ago. So this doesn't apply to me. It applies to everyone because of the societal effect. So don't go away. So what are some of the terms of this settlement? I understood it was almost 18 billion. Which sounds really big on top of that. There were conditions. Would you like to walk us through some of those and what you think their implications are if they're really going to help? Yeah, I think, you know, the headline number of the 1718 billion has caught a lot of people off guard. I think because a lot of folks I feel like rightfully notice that this isn't really going to hurt them.

1:01There's, you know, I saw some research through claim that they're going to make that money back in like 30ish or so days. But the money itself almost is immaterial. The bigger part of this is we've just seen a dramatic paradigm shift in terms of where the country is at. And what I mean by that is largely, you know, since the post 1970s, the United States has not regulated tech very much. They've been under this kind of ideological belief that whatever's good for the tech industry is good for the public. And so things like regulation, taxation or bad for tech. So we shouldn't do that. And so they've been really reticent. In fact, they've done the opposite with things like the communications, decency acts where they actually protect big tech from lawsuits for things that third parties post on their website. Which effectively is what makes social media legal is you can't sue the platform for something a user posts on there. This that all changed with over the last year. There's been a series of lawsuits that rather than look at the actual content are going after these companies for the structure of their platform, arguing that the structure is designed in a way to keep kids addicted to manipulate users.

2:10And it's knowingly done by the companies for those of us who've been following this. That's not too big of a shock whistleblowers for quite some time. I've been telling us like, oh, they they care about not wanting to hurt users. But as soon as changing their platform to help users means cutting into profits, they don't do it. And that's precisely a meta was a company very famous for that. So they lost this this lawsuit as a result. And so this is why it matters. The money itself is not so big. There are thousands of other lawsuits, currently in the courts. And this is going to set a precedent where these people do have standing. So I think big tech is in a lot of trouble as a result of this outcome. Now what big tech has to do with the media or in this case meta is somewhat miniscule. They're going to set up a time limit on users during the day, during so called school hours that parents can turn on and off. They're going to have some different controls for like age appropriate material. But meta agreed to do all this in exchange for the government saying that their competitors were going to do the same thing.

3:17And this is like they want, for example, a cap on like time limits at night from Google on like the YouTube on how much young people can go to YouTube. A lot of this stuff is going to be difficult to do. You're going to have to do this through legal changes. Congress is going to force these companies that doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So I think we're at the start of something that could potentially be regulating big tech. But a lot of these changes, I don't think you're going to have an immediate impact that people may want. Right. I read about that there's a portion of the money set aside that if these other companies do good things, then that money will go to the States, which seems weird to me. Like very rare that you have a company being sued saying, well, I'll give the you the money. But only if my friends over here, my competitors do the same thing. And they're different, you know, not so much YouTube, but Google is a different beast. Right. It's all different model. I think, you know, I mean, so these changes in the short term, I think aren't going to do anything.

4:19But in the long term, you know, who knows if we have a generation that is limited and they've made a time to use these devices. Are they going to find other hobbies, other interests, other than brain drain on social media. So we might see a big difference, but it's going to be like 25 years. And so I think that's where people skepticism is coming in is this is a great start. But I mean, it's far from solving a lot of the problems people are concerned with. And we see the effects on, well, late teens, because you and I both teach core, which is the freshman course up at UC Santa Cruz. And I've talked to some students who say their parents were super strict about social media until they were like 16 and didn't give them a phone with internet access till then. They're really different students in my observation is not very scientific, but they seem to be more curious. They're readers. They are more critical thinkers because they've sort of had and also their social skills are better. They're able to speak in class because they've been talking to their friends more and going in in real situations that are complex rather than interacting solely through a screen.

5:25Yeah, yeah, so I would be surprised if what you kind of see their anecdotally is true. I've had similar experiences as well. In terms of whether I use social media on the impact that has on you, I think it's also important for folks to remember how different social media is now versus where it was. So when I first came out, I think I was roughly early 20s, something like that when I was using this. And the way it originally got people hooked was that you effectively, you essentially connected with people you knew offline in the online world. And so it's kind of like a digitization of phone calling in a way if you can think of it like that. But increasingly that wasn't making enough money for the platforms. And so over time, more and more advertising, more and more people could pay for access to your feed, who you didn't know. And now it's rare you actually interact with people you know offline. You're usually getting things starting you from complete strangers, companies, bots, influencers, etc. And so it's honestly the social media young people have been using for like last 5, 10 years is more reminiscent of like the fears that people had about TV.

6:36How was just going to be a wasteland of commercial nonsense trying to sell people stuff without any intellectual value. That's what social media became. And so I think the longer you can keep people off that, the better. Apologists will always point to the fact that like yeah, but some people need it, you know, if you're a LGBTQ person in a rural area, you want to learn more about your experience, you want to find solidarity that you're not normal, not you know, should be hated. And it's true, there are these tiny little areas, but what I say in response to that is, way those positives against the negatives. I don't want to see you fixate on a little positive. I want you to show me how that outweighs the negatives. And I think most people ultimately agree you can't really supersede the negatives with the minimal positives that come from social media use. One of the settlement terms I read said they were getting rid of the infinite scroll, which was developed in a course of how to keep engagement regardless of what kind of nasty content you're hooking people on. You know, whether it's anorexia clubs or whatever people are self hating about in the day and age. So what's your take on that because that seems to be that an Instagram if you keep on scrolling.

7:50That's how you get stuck is there's a dopamine hit you get every time you see something new and your novelty seeking so psychology of it just gets you wasting time. Essentially. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the most, um, pernicious, um, addictive tools that social media companies have used, um, because as humans, we are generally curious. Um, you know, this is what motivates humans to to ponder these larger questions like of life, right? Like the universe. We want to know what it looks like, what everything is in the universe. It goes on seemingly forever, but we want to know more about it. The scroll is a version of that it plays this human need to know like where is the bottom. I'm going to keep scrolling. I'm going to find it. And along the way you're getting these like dopamine hits these reinforcements that your view of the world is correct or the rage you're feeling about the world is justified. And these things just keep people scrolling, keep people scrolling. Um, but in the process, you're not really learning anything. You're not connecting. These are all industry tools.

8:55And young people are being taught to socialize this way just through scrolling and connection. And I think that leads to some serious issues. Like we're seeing, you know, these amazing statistics about like a minority of young men have actually approached a woman in a bar to ask her out on a date. Dating has been digitized. So just that like human connection one on one has been digitized. And so I think we're starting to see a lot of those problems because. A synchronous communication is not the same as that face to face communication. People this way people go nuts when they like get lost in like a cave or a forest or something. You need that human connection. You need those nonverbal cues that sense of presence. And social media is not a replacement for that. So that's why it's so pernicious. It's not just distracting and wasting time. It's robbing young people of the ability to develop critical skills for their existence and having us. And we're going to talk about AI in a minute, having some of the same problems. And we've been talking about young people and teens up till now. But really, we're all susceptible to the same kinds of brain activity that these social media platforms seem to engage us with me, you know, being just as vulnerable as an expert. And I study this stuff.

10:11When we look at that, the social dilemma film, you know, they talk, these are the people who made these things saying that they don't let their kids use them and that told me a lot. But there's no regulation for adults for these infinite scrolls. It sounds like we're on the right track for younger people. And they'll be accusations of nanny state, you know, regulating our behaviors. But at the same time, we become a bit vulnerable to much more pernicious psychological manipulation through these apps, right? Yeah, I mean, the nanny state narrative always drives me mental. If you really have a government that's of buying for the people, then you're making decisions as the people for the people. It's not some authoritarian nanny, but I get the concern is right that like not everyone has the same views on some of these things, but I think historically we have seen that you're on majority of people do draw certain conclusions about what's good for the population like gambling, you know, that was something that they really tried to relegate to small parts of society because we knew how damaging it was as addictive properties. It caused trouble and marriages, the lead of violence, it causes economic degradation, criminality, et cetera.

11:24Well, social media companies studied the gambling industry. That's where they stole a lot of these techniques. And so I always told people like, how can you allow these addictive pathologies of social media continue? You wouldn't do that to gambling. What I didn't realize was the public would then say, well, actually we should have gambling everywhere. Are you referring to that pew charitable trust poll, which showed that the moral, you know, acceptance of gambling was quite high nowadays. Interestingly, that that and just, you know, like I'll go to cities like Las Vegas Reno and whatever have fun gambling, but it is now on people's phones. I mean, people are doing it constantly. They these prediction markets that are on our news media. The same like I think in some way social media's primed audiences to accept this type of like addictive gambling behavior that we're seeing. So I do think historically we have been able to regulate some of these vices. If it's not getting rid of them, but regulating them responsibly for the good of society. And I think we're long overdue for a conversation about that with social media. At the beginning, you know, 2006, you could you could make the one friendster in my space came out.

12:29You could make the claim of like, oh, you're just an old foggy. You don't understand the technology in the future. Now we've got 20 years worth of data. You know, it's really hard to defend that this has been a good thing for our society as a whole. Whether you look at it from like emotional intelligence growth or human connectivity or democracy, it becomes really difficult to defend. Yeah. And you know, what's interesting that was also not just kind of discussed in any of these articles talking about the settlement of of meta with this $18 billion settlement that what was never discussed is the divisiveness of these platforms to that they actually make money every time you are outraged or hating on someone that that it's outrage content that actually keeps people more engaged. And we've seen, you know, we've always heard about this word, you know, divisions divisions and wonder where it all started. And Maria Reza, who studied this and worked for CNN for years and reported on the Philippines says, you know, she gave it 10 years before these fractured society started, you know, really fighting each other with from within.

13:39We are seeing that in US in a big way, politically. This does this touch that I mean, this is start to address the real kind of elephant in the room, which is misinformation and propaganda. This this settlement does not address any of that unfortunately. And this is where you really have to just talk about the business model itself. The algorithm feeds you the information that keeps you on the screen. We love we love the conflict. We love divisive stuff. And this is an age old thing in like tell entertainment writing. You have to have some conflict, right? That's what keeps people watching the Odyssey, for example, yeah, exactly right. You have to have that that conflict is essential to the story telling aspect of it. But you know, when you're dealing with real people's lives, it becomes really problematic when we're not trying to understand people we disagree with, but we understand them as the worst character of themselves.

14:39And we feel emboldened and empowered by attacking that character, even though that may not be that person actually is. And then you have pernicious actors who feed into that. I mean, Donald Trump totally fed it into like the character of leftists and Democrats and and all this sorts of stuff. I'm going to use the divisive rhetoric that was normalized online by the time you ran for president. And it resonates with a lot of people. This is how they talk. They don't talk like the standard and authentic political speech of a Barack Obama. They talk like Trump. They say insults. They have a little inside jokes, gags. And so I think he's at representative of kind of that that culture shift of how just divisive we became. We're now we don't even like we we just assume like someone from one party won't support something, even though we don't know the individual. It's become like so normalized where most people are just all over the place. You always point this out to like, you know, not all people on the left like eight guns. You got like Bernie Sanders who votes for access, you know, to guns, for example, not all people on the right are necessarily opposed to all government.

15:42So some you know, do support some level of like social security social services. People are very complex, but you wouldn't know that on the internet. It feeds into your belief that these are not only people I disagree with, but people who threaten my way of life. And January 6, I think should have been the kind of inflection point where we were like, this is out of control. These people think an election was stolen. Trump had 60 opportunities to prove in court couldn't. There's no way they should put their life on the line to protect this guy that shows the power of social media. We need to address it for that reason. It's a threat to all of us. That's exactly what Maria Resa was saying that it's not just confined to your screen anymore. It's popping off the internet and into real life where, like you said, in January 6 and in other countries. People with, you know, less access to critical thinking education are fighting each other over rumors or, you know, fake news of where they're acting off of complete falsehoods or just something that was out of context.

16:44This even happened in Belfast recently when I was in Ireland. There was a couple of videos circulated of horrible crimes being perpetrated by someone who looked like an immigrant. And then suddenly the right wing popped up and started in flaming racist. Beliefs and turning people against each other. So that's just it's a tool. It's been going on a long time. The attempts to try to divide people to deflect attention away from those who are robbing us. However, in those situations, it turned deadly. And that's really worrisome. Is there, are there any lawsuits or any attempts to try to get a handle on both the misinformation and the hate speech. You know, it seemed like we were moving in the right direction and now we're in deregulation central. I think, you know, I don't know if it's going to directly attack the political question, but I do think this lawsuit has some teeth to move in that direction. I'm going to talk to some some lawyers about this. So as I mentioned at the beginning, like you can't sue because the way the laws currently written, you can't sue the social media companies for the content that another user posts. So another user posts these fraudulence claims about the quote unquote.

17:55Other side and you believe them, you can't go after the platform for that. However, with these lawsuits have made open in the spoke to New Mexico in California started this. You can go after the platform for the content it decides to bombard you with. And so if it's bombarding you with contents, you know, that leads a young person to engage in like attempted suicide, for example, I think that's going to win big and court. And that's going to set a precedent that these companies are held liable for the content. They push it people that that would be a big game changer because that says it's it's not just the fact that the content is there it's that you pushed it and that gives some responsibility for the company that could be a way I think to bridge those two to questions you're asking there. So there is some hope there that maybe we won't get fed such garbage. It's so ironic because we're sitting here talking on the radio where there's lots of rules. We can't say certain words. And all you have to do is go on any, you know, platform that social media and be exposed to all kinds of things. And that's I can see why they wanted to regulate for teens for that reason.

19:01And then maybe the adults will have their day in court eventually. I'm George George Carlin. George Carlin did what he could to get us to be able to say those words on the radio. But he actually did the opposite in some ways he clarified. We definitely are careful over here case would not to say them. I don't know if we would say them anyway, but we can't according to the law. So I want to spend the rest of our time. We have about 20 minutes and I'm speaking with Nolan Higden. He is a professor up at UC Santa Cruz and teaches about social media among other things. AI in the classroom. So I recently saw a survey and I'm sorry, I can't pull it up to my memory where I saw it. But it was a survey of teachers going back into the classroom this fall. And the top concern was not having enough supplies, which is often the concern or having two big of classes. It was AI cheating in the classroom. And I was at my physical therapy the other day and I overheard the staff member talking to a patient and they said, Oh, yeah, my son's been never been writing his papers for Cabrillo for the past four years.

20:07As a professor, I just sort of wilted. Yeah, it's on us to catch these things. Huh. So what's your take. You're going back in the classroom to in a couple of weeks. I mean, one, obviously, I'm nothing but empathetic for the difficult role that educators have right now for what I found from being an educator for about 15 years is most people don't get into it to be a cop. They don't want to be hunting down cheating students. They really care about watching students learn and progress and an AI is a challenge for that. And that's certainly true. You know, I think I think I think there's a desire and I understand it also amongst educators. They want some guidance like, where is it appropriate to use this? Where is it not appropriate? What should we be asking our students in terms of use? What should we not be asking? But I will say I sort of take on a position that I think it's largely too early to have that kind of scaffolding at this point.

21:10I've, you know, there was this big rush to get AI policy and everyone syllabus and maybe I'm not even aware of this. We'll see. But for the last about two years and I plan to do it this year as well, I sort of just leveled with my students. Now they're adults. So it's different than a lot of K 12 folks. But I kind of levels my students just so like, look, I think it's too early. If AI writes your entire assignment for you, I know that's cheating. If you don't use AI at all, I know you're not using AI to cheat. But I'm not sure where the middle is where like it's appropriate to use some AI. Be it, you know, search engine, be it help with like construction of reference lists, you know, whatever, right? Or proofread my assignment tell me if there's a grammatical or spelling errors. Like there are some, I think appropriate uses for it. So I told my students like, let me just talk to you about it and ask you how you're using it. I'm not going to get in trouble. I'm not going to report the campus. I'm not going to give you a zero. I just want to understand how young people are thinking about it because I think young people are the generation right now is presenting a very interesting paradigm shift.

22:14And I noticed this. This isn't my new book, Critical AI Literacy that's coming off from Relage and spring of 27. It starts out with the commencement speeches in 2026 where students are booing speakers who are advocating for AI. This is a historical usually young people are the earliest adopters of new technology and they lecture us old folks on how we're out of touch for not adopting it. That's not what happened here. Young people are like a viscerating AI and they're not in the the cope from media is to reduce it's a young people are just worried about their job, their selfish. That's not true. They're writing op eds and you can see this in polls. They think AI is ruining their education. They think it's ruined their college experience. They think it's ruining their relationship with other students. And I think that's really important. These are people are actually using it who are telling us this is bad. And this is coming from the generation that usually is like the biggest defender of tech. So I think for those reasons, we be wise as educators to listen to our students and just hear them out. Maybe they can make a good case that it's used in a situation where I don't think it is.

23:22Maybe they can make a good case of them that they shouldn't use in some situations they are. I think that's education. That's how we should be approaching it. Maybe five, 10 years in line will become very clear where that line is, but I don't think we're there yet. That is fascinating. And you know, let's talk about some of the things they do like about it. They seem to like, you know, spell check and grammarly, which you can use it, you know, in a gradient kind of way, you can either use it to completely rewrite your paper. Have it do that for you or you could have some suggested words that are more interesting like a Thessaur as used to be. Give me a better verb. And so we talk about that in my class, like, how are you using it? Because it's almost like for some they co write, you know, with grammarly. So it's hard to tell what's theirs because they've written a rough paper and then they get grammarly to almost completely rewrite it. So it pops up as with chat GPT zero and detection tool. We have it pops up as you know 100% AI written, but it isn't really.

24:26So that's the tricky part. And now, you know, it's like an arms race. We're watching from the sidelines because we aren't the authors of these things, but now you can have a humanizer. So you can get AI to write your paper and then you send it through the humanizer and it'll make mistakes and little grammatical errors and like, so there are people making money off of the people who want to cheat. And it's causing I think a lot of us who've been in educational well to wonder why we're here. And I think the students are having the same experience from the other side where, you know, a fraction of the students are, I don't know what fraction are you using AI to write papers. And then the ones who aren't are at a disadvantage, right? Because you give the ones an A if you're not careful. The teacher that used AI and the ones that didn't, you know, are falling behind and worried about their GPA. And part of this is, you know, grade competition, but it's also just the confusion and the mistrust that it inserts. Like you said, we aren't.

25:34We're not supposed to be catching cheaters every day. That's not our main job is to instill the excitement of education in these students. Yeah, so I think the, you know, I think there's a lot going on there with that example. You have like the humanizers and the detection, the AI detectors as well. It's important to say this. The humanizers are exist because they're trying to basically make the claim that if AI was writing something to be perfect, but if a human was writing it would have mistakes. I'm going to argue the opposite. I'm going to say that AI actually makes a significant amount of mistakes and human writing usually is more coherent in a lot of cases. You know, AI, for example, like it'll always try and do these like ridiculous analogies that don't make sense, you know, like make some comparison between like say like a golf ball on a war or something like that. And it's really, it's just bad writing. And the, I think the important lesson for students is that these AI systems are not intelligent.

26:37They call them artificial intelligence, but they're not. They're statistical predictions. They get things wrong. Like there's summaries of articles are wrong about 50% of the time. They fabricate information that doesn't exist. A little site studies or case law that doesn't exist. This has gotten scholars in trouble that's got journalists in trouble. It's gotten law firms in trouble. And the AI system just scrapes the internet and it's, it makes us a statistical prediction about whether or not something is accurate to give you an example in the Bay Area here. We had this criminal who was scamming women by claiming he was a player on the San Francisco 49ers. And you know, somebody's women did their research. They googled the guy and the AI on Google said that he was a 49er because he had written so much online about being a 49er. The AI assumed it must be true. So it's examples like that of how you can't trust AI. But on top of that, the study showed the more you use it, you talked about being like a co writer. The more you use it, you develop this cognitive atrophy. We think we know more than we actually do, but we can't recall the information we just wrote.

27:42Our skills start to atrophy. So it makes people stupider. Gary Smith jokes. The only way artificial intelligence will become equal or superior to human intelligence. So because humans get stupider using it in that sense. And so when I tell my students, I tell them all these things that we just we've talked about here. But I say like, look, you're paying a lot of money for a degree. And your whole life, I said, for sure that since you've been born, people have been freaking you out about how you need to go to college, get a good job. But you know, if the degree, let's say it does get you the job, you actually have to perform the job. You know, you have to like no stuff. You have to have skills and using AI, it's not going to happen. You don't want to lose that job and be in massive amounts of student debt. Also, everything happens with AI is kept. All that data is kept. What if there's a data breach 5, 10, 20 years from now and they find out you're cheated your way through college. Would your degree get revoked? Would you still be out that money? I mean, these are these are like questions I make. You know, people kind of confront that there is a cost to using this. It's not just a passing college is not the goal. A lot of people, as we both know, have passed college without looking a lot over the years.

28:51The goal of spending this money is to actually get the skills, get the knowledge and using AI over using AI, I should say, is not going to help you do that. I will say I know some colleagues who use it to create quizzes to create prompts, you know, they have the AI writing their stuff. So in a way, telling students not to do it seems a bit hypocritical. Unless we're all agreeing we're on the same page about what's acceptable and what isn't. But it's all changing so rapidly. I think that's part of the reason why they just want to opt out completely. I want to talk a little bit about data centers because it seems to have cropped up as a bipartisan concern among communities that this stuff is moving so fast that people are caught unaware is that there was a giant power sucking water sucking data center going up in their backyard literally. So people in small communities are up in arms because they didn't get consulted and it seems like the city elders, you know, the elected people haven't been as forthcoming about being contacted or maybe some of them are out in the dark because it's just being dealt somehow other way outside of zoning process.

30:04I think this protest against data centers and relatively flock cameras. I think is one of these unique examples of where I think what people tell pollsters is different than what people actually think what I mean by that is. I think this rejection of data centers and flock cameras. I do think there are some people are very concerned with the climate and the use of energy use of water. There are some people maybe living in communities that have data centers and they fear the higher prices of energy and the noise pollution from these data centers as well. But I think data centers and flock cameras have become like a tangible example of the way in which people have grown to hate big tech. And this one of the few ways they can actually stick it to big tech. They've been told for 20 years that these technologies are going to make people's lives easier. I think people feel like they didn't. They've been doing more work. Everybody's been living in like a gig economy. And so I think coming after these data centers, I think brings together that coalition you're talking about.

31:07It's the environmentalist. It's the tech skeptics. It's the working class. It's right left center. It's urban. It's rural. It's communities of color. It's white communities, etc. All the way down the line. And that's why I think it's such a powerful political issue that we seem like politicians just flip on a dime. Usually politicians are thinking in the short term like, hey, I'll build a data center because it'll bring 500 jobs to my district. And by the time they realize, I've destroyed the environment and energy. I'll be on my way to like running for vice president. And I want to worry about it. That's not happening here. I mean, Kathy Hokel in New York, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Abbott, Greg Abbott in Texas is a Republican. They all came out for data centers and now have flipped the lid and put a moratorium on them. And so I think it's a great exercise in like reminding people what democracy looks like if you come out in your community and you refuse to compromise with the powers of B you can make change quite quickly as we're seeing here. What we saw in the inauguration of Donald Trump were all the high tech people sitting behind him, not his cabinet, not his family. The people had given him $250 million recently to be there.

32:15$1,250,000. So what do you make of the populace like turning on this idea of AI being the savior of everything? Are they looking ahead and thinking, well, there goes my job. And why should I be paying $200 more a month for power? Because this is on top of gas prices going up. People's power bills are doubling in these communities. It is seeming like this is the only tangible thing you can see, you know, is a data center. So people are against them. I'm surprised they're not as against attention centers. They're both centers with a D, which seem to be having harm. But that's another topic. What do you think though? I think, you know, on the one hand, I think big tech kind of enjoyed this above the politics type brand that they had developed in the early 2000s. And it increasingly became obvious that they that wasn't going to last. They were getting pushed over things like misinformation online during the first Trump administration.

33:20There were concerns about whether or not their workers should unionize. And slowly but surely they got pushed to like take a political position. And they decided to put their money behind the Trump administration, which in 2024 Trump had accrued enough political capital in the short term that was good. In the long term, that's a disaster because now Trump's numbers are in the tank and big tech's numbers are going with it. And I don't think they can crawl out of this idea that they're attached to the mega movement, which is low in popularity right now. But I'm but having said all that, I don't think it was just them moving with Trump. That rule and they're kind of public persona. I think along the way for a multitude of reasons, people saw things in their lives that made them skeptical or distanful toward big tech. I mean, parents reach out to me constantly because they're concerned about their child and what's going on with smart devices and platforms. You know, students, we see this like the mental health issues and the connections there to big tech. Also, just to feel like a older person, you recognize how big tech actually doesn't make things easier.

34:27My favorite example is when I go on vacation and I go to a restaurant, I say to you guys have a table and they say, no, we've got about a 10 minute wait. Can I give you your name and I give the name and then they want my phone number. I'm like, why do you want my phone number? I'm standing right here. But it has to add all these like extra steps or you go to an Apple store. They want you to log in with like your your tech info. That does not make things easier whatsoever. It's creating more steps. You can have more data or got forbid you have a problem with any of your tech and you want to try and call a call center. Good friggin luck. Or the IRS. I mean, this is happening at the same time Elon Musk with the big tech tight and got in there and mucked around with those so you can wait all you want to try to reach a human in the federal government. I think it just creates this sense of alienation that these people have made our lives rather complex without a lot of pay off. I spent a bunch of hours yesterday like using those irritating second verification codes that I had to then get to my phone and then enter and then go through five more steps. It's for my own good because of security, but it also just added hours to my day because of what I was up to.

35:34Yeah, sorry, can I just add something that real quick because that's always the claim and like in higher ed. I mean, I don't know where you stand this, but I think like all these trainings are largely a waste of time and it's a CYA for the administration. They actually don't teach people what they actually need to not engage in sexual harassment racism or cyber security. But they always blame it on like the user about cyber security. It's like, can this just got hacked and paid ransom to get all the information back? Like, why don't you build a better system? Why is up to me to do like 10 steps? I mean, this is just again a way that big tech I think colonizes so much of our time and the process. And to your point of I like Elon, you know, I think him working in government and him having the audacity to after he's became the richest person. And part from government loans by taxpayers during the Obama administration to then cut people's jobs for working class people and celebrate with a chainsaw on stage. I mean, I think that's all you need to know for why people hate big tech is that right there.

36:35Indeed, yeah, the symbolism alone is enough to make you just go, why do these people think they can rule the world? And the big, you know, unspoken thing is what he's supposed to do when all these people are without jobs Bill Gays actually did a talk and he said we should reserve 40% of the jobs in the future for humans. All of that's generous. What are you going to do with the 60% that is left out of the equation and you never really they never really go there. They're just looking at short term savings from kicking people out of their businesses. This seems like a worldwide problem that would result in societal chaos because you don't want to have a bunch of unemployed people with nothing else substantive to do because AI is doing it for them. You know, I think we have more agency than that and creativity and we have been given this idea that we somehow suddenly lost all of that that we're no longer creating anymore. And I think that's wrong.

37:36Yeah, look, the. In San Francisco when they had those like get rid of your humans or play some of AI billboards. That was just total nonsense. AI is not going to replace all jobs. If you're if you're old enough to remember 1995, you can remember when they were writing books about the internet was going to replace all jobs by 2025 a year later didn't happen. I think the same thing is going to be the case with AI. The reason why they sold it like that, those because they wanted to get investors and companies involved. But 95% of AI pilots fail, meaning they don't actually save money. Also, let's not forget AI is running in a deficit right now open AI's own estimates is that they're going to go 115 billion dollars in debt by 2029 at which point they expected then be able to actually achieve artificial intelligence close to humans and then start making money. I'm skeptical. So I don't think they're going to actually replace all these jobs in fact like every other technology they're creating jobs. Like a lot of these AI systems can't do what they claim they can do is they bring in humans to do it. These are things like checking for nudity fact checking humans are doing that work behind the scenes security work and AI is needed behind the scenes training programs.

38:48So there's a lot of jobs that are actually being created, but to your point about what what Gates was saying. They have to keep giving the narrative that all jobs are going to replace because this is how they're keeping investors excited this other keeping the bubble growing which will probably pop soon. And one of the places they keep this narrative going really is like in the right wing podcasting space like Joe Rogan entertains this idea that you know Elon Musk and all the tech oligarchs are so altaristic that they're going to get rid of all jobs and we're all going to be able to live or we're going to have enough money to live in a great house and a great life and we're able to pursue whatever we want in our human perception. That is never happened when human history have oligarchs ever designed something for the betterment and profit of everyone it's always for themselves and so yeah we're in a guild of age for sure it's just nonsense. It's nonsense well we have to end it there, but I really want to thank you and when your new book comes out I look forward to reading it can you give the title again so people can be ready in the spring to read it sure it's critical AI literacy from Silicon Valley to democratic resistance and it's going to come out with

39:52a great relic and it's a mix of history analysis and things you can do to actually be more AI literate so actual steps you can take as well. And I want to say thank you so much for having me on the show always a pleasure to talk to you the work you do is incredible. Thank you. Great thanks. Case good thanks you and I thank you. I'm Rachel Ann Goodman that's Nolan Higden. Thank you for being here.