While you can use muscle-memory to unconsciously move your thumb to open an app without thinking, it's actually impossible to type on a keyboard unconsciously.
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.
YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.
I'm not against technology.
Our brains are already bad at seeing exponential curves.
While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.
Yes, online privacy is a real problem that needs to be addressed. But even the best privacy laws are only as effective as our Paleolithic emotions are resistant to the seductions of technology.
The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee.
You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
If one app or news site or friend gets your attention, that means something or someone else loses it. It comes out of our sleep, our time with family or our reflective time with ourselves.
Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.
Every year, more and more friends, apps, media or news stories want our attention. We need a better way to organize all the kinds of choices we have.
None of most powerful tech companies answer to what's best for people, only to what's best for them.
New technologies always reshape society, and it's always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason.
I actually worry that we're so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.
Information that confirms our beliefs makes us feel good; information that challenges our beliefs doesn't.
The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don't speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It's because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.
There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren't driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.