Social Media Was Just A Dry Run
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It’s hard to ignore the implications of the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence, especially in education.
This is always on our minds somewhere, but since ChatGPT stormed the social scene a couple weeks ago, our founder, Brian Lamb, and I have been going back and forth about this more furtively.It was Brian’s concerns about AI several years ago that got us started down the path of developing what has become Focusable.
I’ll admit, it’s not always easy to understand immediately what appears to be obvious to him. So I often have to listen a lot, ask questions, do some thinking on my own, and then come back to it. It’s a process that proves to be invaluable as we’re doing this work. Now that the conversation about ChatGPT has surfaced to the mainstream, he’s been challenging me to think about the potential impact of AI in light of our experience with social media. This is something I likely would not have thought of in exactly this way on my own. That way is this: it’s a wild new technology, it depends on our attention to exist, and has widely promising (and scary) implications. In the midst of all of that, there is optimism.
So you can think of this edition of The Optimalist as a kind of exploration - a kind of record of my ideas as I’ve been talking to Brian about the theories he’s developed after extensive research over the years, and about building Focusable with this moment in mind all along. My hope is that it helps at least some people grapple with the energy of the moment as well, and invites further discussion. Let’s not shy away from that.
Whether we knew these sophisticated leaps forward in AI were coming soon or not, isn’t really of relevance anymore. What matters is what we do now that it’s here and will continue to evolve. Now, we have to focus. That’s a hard thing to ask of ourselves when the future is fuzzy, and the present is riddled with everything from outrage to opportunity. It’s overstimulating, to say the least.
I believe that part of being an optimalist is accepting challenges when you’re not sure how they will turn out or if you’re making the best choice. The challenge I’m referring to here is not what you’d think; I’m talking not about how to approach uses of AI, but rather how to manage our attention in the wake of it.
The way I’m understanding how we will culturally experience this challenge is in steps. Step 1 is reacting to shut it down. Step 2 is thinking ahead to applications for it. Step 3 is what happens after applications become pervasive. Step 4 is overstimulation. We’ve been hovering at step 4 for awhile now, trying to think ahead to what the world will need when it feels blindsided. This is where Focusable was born.
I think we can start by asking what we’re currently doing that distracts us from being better. We are more aware than ever of how easy it is to get caught up scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, forgetting what we meant to do or neglecting who we’re with. It’s not so long ago that distraction meant little more than daydreaming and looking out the window. Your mind somewhere else, stuck on the fight you had this morning or the decision you have to make tomorrow. All things we still do. But distraction now also comes branded with the insignia of every social media platform and major tech company. And we’re called out on our distractibility so often that it’s hard not to want to dismiss the word with a swipe to the left. I was listening, I swear! It’s like we’re expected to not be paying attention as a default.
But that’s only the surface, really. Last week’s newsletter addressed the impact of overstimulation on all of us in, Are the Adults Alright? The argument is that the impact of media and social technology on the choices adults make - not just kids - can not be underestimated. Our moods, anxiety levels, and even life goals are now disrupted by the overwhelm of both information and ways to escape every little thing that we might want to avoid.
Of course, all of our lives have been enhanced by social platforms, whether we like to admit it or not. We have the opportunity to be better connected to far away-family, network with strangers across the globe, build communities from scratch without leaving home, or engage in lively discussion to progress new ideas. Brian’s always adamant about resisting this urge to remove technology from our lives and I think he’s right. We get consumed and want to pull back completely. Like everything built on holding our attention, I think the right approach is to use discretion so that we experience the richness of those benefits. After years and years of regular and unlimited exposure, the harmful effects of social media use can feel overstimulating. When we feel bad, we forget what we came there for. As I said last week… it’s all too much. The problem is when that feeling doesn’t urge us to stop and take a break.
What Brian has been saying is that social media was just the warm up, and as I’ve now seen how people are responding to ChatGPT, I’m starting to agree.
The latest frenzy over the widespread availability of generative AI lends us a living example of this potential problem as it already threatens to escalate.
Overstimulated yet?
As you can see, there’s a range of reaction and emotion here amongst educators as they explore ChatGPT - some surprising, bold, or even playful. There are suggestions to use it for writing samples, to get a more nuanced search result than Google, even to provide feedback on your own writing. If you pan out, there’s an underlying sense of everyone wanting desperately to say “this might be really crazy, but we’ve got this,” and to an extent, that’s a completely healthy and necessary survival tactic right now. It leans towards the optimism that we also have to embrace. The emergence of AI-created content will be the catalyst for great things, most of which we can't even begin to imagine yet.
The concerns educators express are real - cheating, the end of homework, the loss of pure writing skills, academic integrity, even a general sense of panic for the future. It’s clear we’re both mesmerized and puzzled, afraid of losing our routines and systems (ourselves, really), and so we scramble for a way to control what’s happening. A human reaction.
Yes, all of these things are valid concerns. But if you get wrapped up in them, you aren’t seeing the forest through the trees - something I think Brian is right about.
I totally understand how in the midst of both our initial excitement and attempts to control what AI does for us, it’s easy to obscure what Brian believes should be the biggest concern of all - the complete disruption to our nervous system.
So when I point to all the tweets above and ask, will overstimulation by AI be even worse than our experience with social media - what I mean to point out is that it likely presents to us more opportunities for endless instant gratification. You can think of it as the attention-optimization of TikTok manifested across everything you do.
Despite the incredible advancements in human culture we are surely about to see unfold, how do we convince people that just because we can ask a machine to do something doesn’t mean we always should? That happiness and joy results from persistence and effort, and the pursuit of happiness should not be confused with easy access to pleasure.
The comparisons to social media here are illustrative. Like social media, AI will start as exciting, prove wildly useful, we will use it with abandon, and only then will the negatives begin to emerge. Before social media, we couldn’t have really known how to handle that revolution. Now, we have to be better.
I believe we’ve become accustomed to the feeling of tech overstimulation and, like Brian says, are quick to diagnose it as a symptom of larger neuro-biological disorders. In this way, our culture ignores the problem on a wide scale, instead repeating misnomers, such as claiming modern humans just have shorter attention spans. Experts say that overstimulation from social media shifts our nervous system into fight or flight mode, making us feel constantly anxious and out of sync. And getting out of that loop is very hard, nearly impossible for some. Brian and I talk a lot about what that means for kids, because this concern led us to start building Focusable. Way before ChatGPT, we were already thinking about this reality.
There are companies built on the promise that they want your attention, and they will get it at the expense of your wellbeing and sense of self. We built Focusable with this concern in mind from the start. When I get lost in the details, I can hear Brian’s voice reminding me that the point of our work as a whole is that we intend to make a case for optimism. In our discussions, our writing, our product - the responsibility is to provide platforms for helping educators confront hard challenges like this.
Maybe in the age of AI our capabilities as humans will, in fact, get even more amazing - who knows? That’s part of the uncertainty that lies ahead. But it's not going to happen if you are so overstimulated that you can’t concentrate. The emergence of new technology requires that we learn to be better at managing the negative it brings with it. And if I’ve learned anything from the work I’ve done with Brian over the last year, focus is the way we get there.
Something For You to Think About & Share With Others
When the future is fuzzy, it’s difficult to focus on what we can work on in the present. But what we do now matters greatly, and we have to keep talking about it.
In the face of so much information, it’s real easy to get overstimulated. The problem will be avoiding the effort it takes to recharge, manage our attention, and feel healthy.
Reflect: Who are you with and without social media? Who would your students be?
Try: Think about a way social media has a positive influence on you. And what about the negative? My challenge to you is to block out intentional time for what brings you joy or makes your life better. And replace at least one negative or energy-draining use with either a mindful activity or focused effort on something you love.
Build your new habit into your daily schedule or routine. After a week: what’s the impact?
You might be surprised at the results of starting with a small challenge to combat overstimulation and restore energy. Reply to this email to let me know how it went this week.
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What is focus and how do you manage it? And how can you help kids use their own powers of attention? Learn to break from overstimulating experiences to promote a better control of attention, higher performance, and enjoyment of the things you do.