Category: Behavior

  • Gen AI and the Future of Entertainment

    Will algorithms take over Hollywood and make personalized video the dominant way people entertain themselves? Like me, my friend Shelly Palmer is in the futurist business—peering into trends, technologies, and tea leaves to make sense of what’s coming. Last week, Shelly published, “Hollywood’s AI Blind Spot: The Fatal Mistake That Will Kill the Industry,” which…

  • Attentuon

    What if we’ve been thinking about attention the wrong way? Perhaps the single most famous sentence about attention comes from William James in his 1918 book The Principles of Psychology: “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (page 401). It’s surprising that such a short, nine-word sentence contains two ideas that have not aged…

  • B.L.U.E. revisited…

    In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever). Here’s the context from The Dispatch: Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a…

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Can You Only GenAI Your Way to the Middle?

    Should we take seriously a recent study that shows people like AI-generated poetry? And what are the broader implications? A few days ago, La Profesora sent me an intriguing link to a Poetry Turing Test set up by a couple of philosophers at the University of Pittsburgh. The test is a simple Google Form that presents the…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • My Ozempic Journey: Packing Up

    Sometimes, when you know a change is coming, the anticipation itself can create other sorts of change. Regular Dispatch readers might remember a few issues back—in Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?—when I explored how the possibility of 10% of the U.S. population going onto GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic might be the final nail in the collective coffin…

  • The Digital Cyrano

    How realistic is the idea that an AI-driven “digital intimacy assistant” could help a shy man woo somebody he finds attractive? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Flyrt about Chris, a shy man, Roxy, the woman he finds attractive, and Cyr, a snarky, AI-powered “digital intimacy assistant”…

  • New Cracks in Reality

    Deep fakes, voice cloning, and other technologies are making fraud more convincing and widespread than ever, but there’s another threat to our ability to answer “what is real?”  An ongoing topic here is how answers to the question “what is real?” keep changing as new technologies (Generative AI in particular) make it easier to create…

  • Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?

    The social disruptions that new, injectable, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic will create go far beyond health and health care. We humans organize our mental worlds with categories and consideration sets, so it can be hard to see when trends from different categories collide. Back in the day when I worked at EarthLink, a dial-up ISP,…