The fourth, last but not least, they don't go in any particular order, digital exit strategy might be that we asked ourselves create a new human basically, a mind that is able to deal with our digital mind extensions. They've been very interesting studies in recent years to show actually the power that these digital mind extensions already have on our minds and how liberating it might be for our minds to, for example, deactivate them. A few economists did some very interesting studies, there two or three of them out there by now, that they motivated people to deactivate Facebook. Active Facebook users that they deactivated, and two very interesting things happened. First of all, people were much less informed. It shows you that people mainly inform themselves politically on social media even so it's not the task of social media to inform you. That task was social media is to have your attention in order to change your behavior, that's their business model. But they were also at the same time much more politically engaged. Interestingly enough, polarization increase significantly. Polarization, the ideas that the left and the right don't talk to each other anymore has increased a lot over the last 20 years. Since the end of the 90s, it increased to a certain extent. The left and the right drifted apart and four weeks of turning of Facebook decreased this drifting apart by half. Basically, it diverted half of two decades of drifting apart in only four weeks. That also shows you that probably our media landscape has to do with the fact that we don't talk to each other anymore because the like-minded is just a click away, so why would I have to talk with somebody who disagrees with me? It's just uncomfortable. That was the first interesting finding. The second interesting finding is that well-being increased a lot, happiness and life satisfaction for these people increased a lot and depression and anxiousness decreased a lot. In general, subjective well-being of people who turned off Facebook for four weeks increased about 25-40 percent as much as a standard psychological therapy. If you're not happy with your life, you can take psychotherapy or just turn off Facebook for four weeks, you get like 40 percent of the benefit that was quite impressive or this increase in subjective well-being is the equivalent to $30,000 of additional income per year. Either you could work harder, which might make you a little bit happier. It's very interesting how big the effect actually is that this pervasive technology and social media already have over us and you know that yourself. You know that yourself, the effect that they already have on you, for example, remember the last time you really wanted to go to bed because you had to go to bed because you were tired and you had to sleep and you didn't sleep enough but before you just wanted to watch this one YouTube video or check this one social media posts that just came up or be a TikTok or Snapchat or Facebook or whatever it is, this one little thing you wanted to check on and then two hours later you're just like emerged from a ditch or a black hole that you were sucked into you and you're like, "I really wanted to sleep now I again, I spent this entire evening." The same going to have with studying or with working, which you actually do not want to but against your will, it dragged you down this digital. How did that happen? You know how that happened? Well, there was a supercomputer pointed at your brain. A supercomputer that knows many aspects of you better than you know yourself. It docked onto your mind and your thoughts, your emotions and then drag you down this digital black hole, getting your attention, your little brain didn't have a chance basically, you might say that in some technological ethicists, like Tristan Harris here in the New York Times writes, ''Our brains are no match for our technology.'' They have a center, the center for main technology, which works on designing new technology that does not exploit humans through the attention economy. Now for me, this sounds a lot like this against your will something happened. There's actually another technical legal term for it is called volitional impairment, is often used in court cases as an excuse for somebody who did something really bad but he has volitional impairment. Let me read you the definition, it's impulsive behavior, talking about addiction, behavior resulting from impairment affecting the ability to choose to engage in behavior or to inhibit such behavior, that is not consistent with the self-interest of the individual. That sounds a lot to me like last time what happened when you and me we're on this YouTube, social media, Facebook, whatever thing and then we're dragged down, that goes against our self-interest because we wanted to study or sleep. It's interesting these technologies actually are in charge of a big aspect of our minds. What's going on here? Who is in charge of our minds? Well, let's do an experiment, stop, take a breath, observe, and now proceed. Where were your thoughts? Where were your thoughts just right now? Where were they? Who is actually with your thoughts? Well, persuasive technology is observing them all the time, your thoughts, your emotions, and thoughts emotions and put them in the same Daniel Kahnemann. Again, the Nobel Prize winner behavioral economics, he calls them, thinking fast, thinking slow. Thinking fast, feelings, emotions, thinking slow, reasoning. They're basically our mind, they're different parts of our brain, and what we call our mind does. Who's in charge of your mind? Well, a quote comes to mind, which is from Viktor Frankl for me as a German, very important is he said [inaudible] from him, he is a Holocaust survivor. He said, "Well, look guys between stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space is our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom." Now, what persuasive technology does, it illuminates. There's space between stimulus and response, because that's what it's doing, it knows you better than you yourself in order to change your behavior, get you to the next thing, condition you, and on this conditioning get the next thing out of you. How can we then amplify the space that lies between stimulus and response? How can we take the power back, a new human, somebody who's like more in-charge? Well, first of all, I think it starts with getting to know our minds ourselves. Look guys, as I said now redundantly, these are extensions of our mind. If we are not in control of our own minds, if we don't even know our thoughts and our emotions and how they work and how actually what's happening around, how on earth are we going to be in charge of the superintelligence machines that dock onto our thoughts and our motives and drag them all over the global Internet? It starts with looking in the mirror, looking inward and getting to know our minds, which are extremely powerful, and that's the first step of taking the power back here. Something very interesting during the COVID -19 lockdowns we did with some former students of mine, some studies for the United Nations Secretariat in Latin America, Big Data project. We basically monitored the impact of COVID -19 on the digital economy. One thing we found which was very interesting in Latin America Facebook users is the increased, the exploding interest in meditation. What is meditation? Well, meditation is an ancient practice that exists in all world traditions, it doesn't matter from where over the world, some count rows beads, some chant, some sing, some sit on a pillow, some just walk or stand, it doesn't really matter, but meditation is basically an umbrella term for getting to know your mind. There are many meditation techniques, same as think about physical workout techniques. There are some big groups for example in physical virgo, there's cardio, and strength, and in meditation there are samatha and vipassana and the [inaudible]. But anyways, there are thousands and thousands of techniques out there, but that's basically what they are. Same as physical workout is to get to know and be in control of our body. Meditation is an umbrella term as, doesn't have to do anything religious, or even spiritual, it just has to do with really mindfulness, being mindful of your mind, basically. You saw that exploding during the COVID 19 lockdown. In Latin America, if you take the left-hand side, and percentage of Facebook users at the beginning of the pandemic, before the pandemic, it was 10 percent of men and 25 percent of women, and at the end of the pandemic, during the end of 2020, it was over 40 percent of female Facebook users and 20 percent of male Facebook users, in terms of the population that's over 20 percent of women and over 10 percent of men. That's an amazing amount of people that suddenly got interested in studying their mind. I cannot prove this, I do not think it's a coincidence. I do think the lockdowns had locked many of us down, and also realized being forced to interact with this person based on technology realized that's too much, we have to see, and it's very interesting. Usually, I've done these United Nations studies a lot, you find them in some countries but not in others. In this case, in every country of Latin America and the Caribbean that we studied, that increase was observable. So it's on the present trend at least a Latin America and the Caribbean. I do think so that's the fourth part of our digital exit strategy, that we ourselves evolve, the human mind and the evolutionary pressure is on here, it's on a little bit. So it's Artificial Intelligence and we always thought like, oh, it would be the terminator or the major is more like this, the evolutionary pressure is on over who's in charge of our minds, who is in charge of our attention. We probably as humans, has to take up the challenge, stand up to the challenge, and evolve a little bit further. Because if the human mind is nothing else but a machine for thinking and feeling, the future doesn't look so good. Because these machines are extremely good in thinking, in manipulating our emotions as well. That's the fourth part of our digital exit strategy. These were the questions for today. We talked about the ethical downside of persuasive technology, then we talked about to what extent it's already present, and in the social media landscape, it is everywhere, and then we talked about some digital exit strategies of how we can get the upper hand back, and get the best out of these technologies, and that's what ethics is all about. Well, thank you very much for me, with me for your attention, and the attention, I hope you take your attention back and you're in charge of it. Thanks. Stop. Take a breath. Observe, and now proceed. Where were your thoughts? Where were your thoughts just right now? Who is actually with your thoughts?
