Fireside Chat: Julia Freeland Fisher and AI Reshaping Human Connection

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Uh, this is a fireside chat. Today we are chatting with Julia Freeland Fisher. Uh Julia, who are you and what do you do? Great questions, Chris.

Um, thank you so much for having me, first of all. Um, I am currently the head of education research at a nonprofit think tank called the Clayton Christensen Institute. Clay Christensen, our founder, was a professor of business at Harvard Business School, um, and is best known for coining the term disruptive innovation back in the 80s. So I researched disruptive innovation across the education sector with a particular focus on young people's access to professional networks that can help them get by and get ahead. Got it.

In your works, you cite a lot uh the term social capital. Is that the Wayne Baker definition? Oh, good question. Um, so we have a particular definition that we use when referring to young people and sort of early talent, which is both the access to relationships and ability to mobilize those relationships in service of your goals. So, really, like we could have a whole debate, Chris, on the definition of social capital.

It is hotly debated in the academy. I'm sure you're gonna pull out a book right now and show me something. I would say this the original uh from There you go, exactly. Late 1999. Yep.

So you're an OG in this in this conversation. Um, but really, like for your listeners, the idea of social capital is the idea that our networks contain resources. So the same way that you have financial capital, dollars and census in the bank, your human capital, what the market will pay you to know and to be able to do. Social capital is a is a form of a resource or a currency. It's hotly debated though, in a way that financial capital maybe isn't, because there's so many types of resources that travel through our networks.

There's emotional support, there's information, there's job referrals, there's people who are then willing to lend you money or give you a ride. There's sort of that tangible resources. So it's a really um, as a researcher, I find it a really exciting, dynamic topic, but it can therefore be a little confusing when we translate it into sort of the real world. Got it. In terms of the real world, how how would you define it in a uh, you know, a single social post, whatever they whatever we're calling them on Blue Sky these days?

Oh my gosh. 280 characters. Yeah, sort of what I said, like your network has value. Um, and it may not be value that you've tapped into yet, but all networks have value. Uh the other way I would define it is the title of my book, which is just like who you know, who you know matters.

Um and we sort of in our society, sometimes we don't admit that in polite company. Sometimes we really lean into it, but who you know matters immensely in terms of what you have access to. Uh, my friend Mitch Joel, who uh ran a consulting firm for years, uh, has an interesting spin on this. He says, it's not who you know, it's who knows you. What's how what's your take on that?

Yeah, and I'll quote my friend Elliot Washer it's it's not just who you know or who knows you, um, but in the labor market, it's who knows what you know. Who has witnessed what you can do, what your potential is, um, and therefore, frankly, can vouch for you as a reference, but is also therefore sort of invested in you. So I think it's a really good call out who you know is sort of shorthand and doesn't get to the depth of the fact that you have to sort of be known to enjoy the upsides of social capital, to have people who are willing to share resources with you and vice versa. Um, so I like your friend's uh nuance on on the cliche. When it comes to the current labor market, one of the things that we are seeing, and this is this has been the case now for some time.

Uh we're seeing some very interesting distortions in the labor market. I'm gonna pull up here a chart of uh just marketing jobs. And this is marketing jobs by demand level, uh benchmarked to pre-pandemic levels. So uh the 100 line represents February 2020. This is marketing uh hiring demand from indeed.com uh for the last five years.

And what you see obviously, there's the the big drop at the beginning of the pandemic when everyone made very short-sighted moves. Uh, then there was the two years of rehiring to undo those uh moves, and then not a return to baseline, but in many cases a substantial decline from baseline, just saying, hey, you know, this is the this is how things are going. And we see this generally across many different industries. But what's of note is that in the US and the UK, uh it's not looking great. Uh there's a substantial drop.

And then if I bring up our demand chart overall, the the jobs that are most in demand, obviously therapy, physicals, physicians, and surgeons, civil engineering, but a lot of the things that people go to school for to college for, uh, software development, uh, 70% of pre-pandemic levels, and that has been declining with um because generative AI is eating those jobs. Yeah, it turns out that a developer with access to generative AI is two to five X as productive, which means you don't need to hire anyone. Information design marketing, which is my area of focus. Sure. Mathematics, media and communications, and so on and so forth.

So you see a lot of these jobs are 20% or more below pre-pandemic baselines. When we're talking about social capital and access to markets, if if it's who you know and who knows you for a student who's graduating who may not know anybody, the entry level jobs are getting slowly eroded. So how does a student think about things like social capital and how do they build it while they're still in school so that they have any level of access to the market when they graduate? Yeah, I love this question, Chris. And I couldn't read most of the font on there.

You made me feel real old for a sec, but I think your charts, the general direction that you're showing, I share all of your concerns. We really are seeing the decimation of entry-level work. And it's there's a couple layers to that, but what I think makes it just to put a point on it, entry-level jobs now require multiple years of experience, which is an oxymoron, right? But if you look at what we're hiring for, we're asking for multiple years of experience, which was not the case, not to date you, but when you and I entered the job market, we had a moment where where um employers, not just because of labor market conditions, but because of what they needed people to be able to do and eventually train people to do, were offering Slack to young workers to learn how to operate in the knowledge economy. That slack is starting to evaporate.

So the question is both what do students need to do to deepen and diversify their networks, and frankly, let's go one level out from networks to deepen and diversify the experience they are gaining before they're applying for their first maybe full-time postgraduate job. But we also have to ask the question of like what do institutions and colleges need to do to adapt to this moment because they are ill-equipped to ensure that every student is graduating, not just with credentials, but with skills, networks, and experience. And skills, networks, and experience are now the currencies that we need to be talking about, not just in this like very specific moment of the labor market, which is also impacted by the political environment and all that, but in an age of AI, which we know is not going away. So here's some really concrete things. One is gaining access to work experience and not overindexing on the notion of the internship.

Internships are great. They're known in higher ed as a high impact practice, meaning they're highly predictive of gainful employment post-graduation. 50% of college graduates today are underemployed a year out of college, meaning they're working in jobs that do not require a college degree, which is like we need to have a whole conversation about why we're not holding colleges accountable to that statistic. But you are significantly more likely to not be underemployed to actually be working in a job that requires a degree if you held an internship in college. The problem is demand for internships way exceeds supply.

So similar to the charts we were just looking at, in access to internships has been on the decline for a lot of the same reasons you described. So what we need to do is think creatively about what can work experience look like that is not a full stack internship. And there's some really compelling models out there that are much more sort of sometimes they get called micro internships. There's a platform called Parker Dewey where you're essentially doing gig work. There's client projects that can be conducted in the course of coursework at school where you're working often with alumni who are offering, you know, four to six week projects, which frankly, if they're well designed, can be better than an internship.

I personally, and many of my friends and colleagues had internships back in the day where we were sitting in a corner filing, right? The quality of both the skill acquisition and the networks being built was really, really low, which is a high opportunity cost to put on a student. So kind of shrinking the dosage of what otherwise I think we sort of pin all our hopes on internships and getting a variety of experiences, I think is really the name of the game. My hope is that colleges are going to be a partner with students in that, and we're not just telling students you have to hustle in the gig economy while also being in school to even have a chance of breaking through in this labor market. How do things like the digital divide um exacerbate those issues?

Because I would imagine for a lot of internships, even so there's a bunch of different things. At least certainly in Massachusetts, and I know in most places, the department of labor frowns upon unpaid internships. They uh you have to they have to be paired with something like academic course credit in order to be not paid, and most companies to avoid lawsuits, uh, will simply either offer paid internships or just not do internships at all. Um, and the second aspect is the digital divide, particularly for um underserved uh groups of uh populations, uh, they don't have access to even the technology to be able to find much less uh land any of those internships. How do we think about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So a coup a couple of thoughts that are not maybe an order of priority, but I'm just gonna riff for a second. My my first thought on the digital divide question, this is real. I think we're moving in the wrong direction politically, potentially, in terms of ensuring access to broadband and devices and digital equity in general. Um, and it's not like COVID didn't teach us that this was already the case, right?

We have a perfect case study, we have all the evidence. So I appreciate you pointing that out. The flip side of that is that I think it's dangerous to just assume that these experiences should be virtual because there are so many latent resources in our communities that often don't get tapped, but if asked, would be willing to allow a student to do a short project, even a short paid project. Again, that's why shrinking the dosage is powerful. That if you're asking less of a small, medium-sized business, it actually may be much more likely that you can scale access for students to even paid experiences.

Um, the last piece I was gonna say on the paid piece is that uh a number the models I mentioned, I want to underscore were either paid or for credit. So I'm glad you called that out. So Parker Dewey or paid experiences, they're gig, but they're paid. Um, and then for example, ripen is a tool that helps colleges stand up client projects inside of classrooms, those are all credit bearing. So that feels very um, thank you for calling that out, because I think otherwise we're basically saying to students, you have to go to college for this degree that has middling or unpredictable value, and you have to do free labor on the side, um, which is a really scary world to for young people to be inheriting right now.

I'm gonna put on uh my jerk hat for a minute and say, as an employer, yeah, why would I bother hiring uh entry level or student when I can use a machine like generative AI that can give me PhD level outputs for 20 bucks a month? Like what would be the point of hiring that recognizing that we have the subject matter experts we need and the cost of even a 50% because in in Massachusetts, the minimum wage is $15 an hour. Yeah, so I could pay $15 an hour for a human, or I could pay $20 a month for a machine and take one of my existing humans and have them operate the machine and get faster and higher quality outputs from the machine. I'll take my cat off now. So beautiful.

I appreciate the code switching there. So I wanna answer this. I I wanna attend to your question as an employer, but I also think we have to have sort of a macro policy conversation about your question because it because it is the question when it comes to fostering young talent in the age of AI and individual employers are not gonna solve this. We need actually a rethinking of tax credits and other incentives for employers to bring on young talent. But the the answer for an employer is something that my mentor and our founder at the Christensen Institute, Clay Christensen, spoke about way back when he was first studying disruptive innovation, which is that we have an innovator's dilemma right now when it comes to young talent.

An innovator's dilemma, just broadly speaking, describes the fact that companies are not incentivized to invest in high potential growth but initially low margin pursuits. So early days, RCA sees the transistor come out. And rather than following the playbook that Sony did, which was to make crummy transistor radios and walkmen that could compete on price but were really crappy on quality. RCA basically said that's that doesn't fit into our business model. We're gonna try and make the transistor good enough for our tabletop radios and televisions.

Lo and behold, fast forward 20 years, they lose to so to Sony, right? Sony disrupts RCA because they didn't have the patience with baked into their profit formula to invest in a low margin, high potential product. That's the same thing that we have to think about with young talent. Right now, there's an innovator's dilemma because investing in young talent has always been an innovator's dilemma. You pour stuff into young talent and whether they stay or leave is really questionable.

Whether they succeed or not is really questionable. So we're what we're gradually going to do, I think as a society is invest less and less and less in our future leaders, which not only hurts individual companies, obviously, who are going to be in a war for talent, but eventually hurts society as a whole because we just haven't built leaders. And so that's that's number one. That to me is the clearest case for don't fall into the trap that we have a formula we have disruptive innovation theory to show us what happens when we underinvest in low margin, high potential endeavors. The second piece um well maybe I'll pause there and see what your your thoughts are on that since you're the employer with the with the hat well from that perspective yes from the long term picture obviously junior employees become senior employees become managers become directors become VPs become you know leaders uh in 40 years uh in the macro picture.

Like I don't care about 40 years from now. But given how right given how companies in a hypercapitalistic uh landscape work four quarters is too much to ask for a project and when you see the quality of work so if I care I care about bigger better faster cheaper like everybody else right yeah if I see that I can get faster cheaper bigger and better from a machine why would I choose to invest in a human when I can invest in the machine and and the the the most sociopathic take on this I've seen uh was an interview uh with uh between Sam Altman and uh Alexis Zahanian. Well you said there's a race going on in Silicon Valley to be the first billion dollar unicorn with one employee. Right. Yeah, that just makes my body hurt.

Um, maybe then I'll connect this to the second point I was gonna make, which again, I I consistent with disruptive innovation theory, a lot of these things are like hindsight is 2020, and it's really hard to align investment capital to the incentives that I'm describing. So I don't want to be naive on that. Um, but the other thing is the literature we have on social networks and um in particular exposure and mentorship, literally predicting future innovation and innovators. So, how are we gonna get that single CEO of the billion dollar unicorn? Like what is in place in again our education system, which is where I tend to lean, and our um workplaces that are cultivating innovation potential and research from Raj Chetty, who spent a ton of time, he's a professor at Harvard and economist looking at sort of what leads to growth and greater economic mobility in America.

Exposure to the innovation economy for individuals is a key predictor of that. And this was part of one of his landmark studies on this is called Lost Einstein's. He looked at sort of predictors of who was registering for patents, which is an imperfect proxy for innovation, obviously. There's some like crazy people that will never capitalize on whatever they have patents for. Um, but exposure to people working in the innovation economy was sort of the leading predictor, particularly people with whom students could identify.

So I just plant that as another seed for um why we need to have a people powered innovation strategy, not just an AI powered one, because the way you build those innovators is through relationships and exposure. A theoretical think tank asshole answer to a very practical question that we need to grapple with. No, that's totally fair. Totally fair. I was talking to an agency owner who said, our goal in the next 12 months is to lay off 60% of our staff because they're mostly dead weight.

We we we know who is tech forward, we know who can use AI, and everybody else has to go. Um so not only are they probably not hiring students and graduates, they're they're also actively looking to shed more than half of their staff. And this is the person who ran like a 2,000-person company. So they want to ditch about 1,200 people. Um can I ask what you said when he said that to you, or do you not want to share?

Oh, I said that's an approach. Yeah. Um, they weren't paying me to give them advice. So uh, but when I look at that business and what they do, yeah, that is not an unrealistic thing to do because most of what they produce is such commodity stuff. Yeah, that yeah, machines could produce all it's not the in fact, they produce I would I would call it corporate garbage.

Uh, like, hey, here's uh, you know, here's 40 blog posts that say nothing. I think this to that person, you did not share it. I did not say this as a person either because again, they weren't paying me. Um but what they were producing was such garbage that a machine would be an improvement over what their humans were doing because they would they just did such a poor job. Now, granted, they're probably going to use the machines badly as well.

No, when students and and academic institutions look at that landscape, are they even looking at that landscape? Are they having those conversations with industry to say, like, here's how the market is changing? You had mentioned that institutions maybe need a hard lesson in here's what the market is asking of students of your graduates. Absolutely. Yeah.

So this is there's a sort of long tradition of what will it take for colleges to pay attention to students' return on investment? What will it take? And part of this is a policy conversation. Right now, we fund college to enroll students. That is their only incentive.

They want to keep them enrolled as long as possible. So that's good if you want a system that graduates students, for example. We've actually done it, we're not doing great, but we've done better and better over the years in creating more college graduates. But there is nothing in the way that we fund or hold colleges accountable that that connects to the outcomes of their graduates. That's at the federal level.

Some states have actually started to move on this. And then on the other side, we have visionary entrepreneurial leaders in higher ed who are doing exactly what you're describing and trying to get embedded enough in industry to understand what are the trends, where are the high demand, high wage, high growth jobs that we should be training students for. And that is sort of the most broken piece of the higher ed chain. Um, there's also some real logistical challenges that I just want to name, um, which is there's sort of you can do this at the national level, but what becomes much more relevant given that I think it's 80% of college graduates stay where stay in the the geography where they graduate from. So, like you may picture a highly mobile market if you're working on like if you're coastal elite uh working um in the knowledge economy, but you actually what you need is colleges working closely with local and regional employers, which should not be as difficult as it is, um, but has remained a struggle because the incentives still aren't aligned.

Employers aren't highly incentivized to source local talent, and colleges aren't highly incentivized to ensure their their graduates are getting jobs um in the region. So that work is starting to happen. There's some great examples around the country, but it's still the exception, not the role, because of the policy climate we're in. When turning our attention to the students, um, I obviously access to resources is is an ongoing challenge both for students and for education to just try to provide them. And I'm sure that's going to be even more challenging with um the current climate where with the government sort of taking a chainsaw to literally everything.

Um in that landscape, obviously a lot of companies from fast food companies uh to higher education institutions are looking at uh generative AI as as a way to to patch some of those gaps. Um I want to get your take on is that a good idea, assuming it's done well. Is that a good idea? Uh, and if so, uh, what are the ways that someone could do that thoughtfully? I'll give you a very ridiculous example.

Excellent. This this is for guys. This is a synthetic chat bot that I wired up this morning. I took I I went out to Google's deep research, um, and I built a persona of an academic and career counselor. So this is generated by Google's Gemini Deep Research.

This is a 20-page briefing on what a good career counselor should be. I distilled that down to a character card for a role-playing system. Um because as a marketer, I ruin everything. Um then I started having a conversation with this thing saying, like, hey, I've got some concerns about you know my my the my degree program I'm in. Yeah.

And at a very basic level, now this obviously the character card part itself needs some tuning because it speaks still kind of robotically. But the advice it's giving is not wrong. Um and you have done uh a recent paper and presentation on whether things like these conversation agents are even a good idea or not. Yeah. So from that perspective, is this a good idea or is this a terrible idea?

Um obviously the answer depends partly on implementation. But what do you see as the upsides and downsides of of universities looking at tools like this as part of higher ed? Yeah, absolutely. So the research I recently published in January was all on basically college and career guidance bots. Um, and I was really interested in this space, not just because guidance is important, it obviously is, and it's part of what you and I have been talking about for the last half hour around students having resources, advice, information, and networks to break into jobs.

Um, but because I think AI companions and chat bots like the one that you built this morning are gonna take hold first and foremost in the places where the system is the most over-leveraged. And student support and guidance is one of those places. In high school, as an average of 385 students to one high school counselor, those ratios get way worse at lesser resourced high schools. In college, over 2,000 students to one career services person, which is like absurd. What could what could possibly happen with the with a ratio like that?

And so that is where it makes sense to bring bots as a supplement, right? Where students could have more access, more on demand access, because it turns out often students have questions about their careers or their financial aid at like midnight, not during between the hours of like 10 and five when the office is open. And also what we heard in our research, access to a tool where they don't have to feel shame asking what they might perceive to be dumb questions or stupid questions or vulnerable questions. So we're seeing a lot of growth in this area. And I think this is a two-sided coin.

On the one hand, this could disrupt the social capital advantage. What I mean by the social capital advantage is that right now, if you know people who work in the industry you want to work in, if you inherited a network of affluent people that can network you into a job, you are at a steep advantage in America's labor market. And this is saying, well, maybe you don't have to have inherited that silver spoon to have access to the accurate information and advice, right? The place this breaks down though is when we go back to the importance of social capital in the labor market, which is that an estimated half of internships and jobs come through personal connections. So if we are using these bots and only these bots, we are not actually addressing that last milepiece of getting a job, which is having access to human beings who will vouch for you, who will bet on you, who will connect you to other people and who will open doors for you.

And so that was really what we found in our research. Bots can do a lot of things really well. They can't broker warm introductions. Now, interestingly, I don't know how much you're tracking some of the startups in this like very boutique space that I'm talking about, but like there's um there's Borty, there's a new startup uh by two Yale College students called series that is essentially AI to broker networks, where you sort of tell the tool about yourself and it it recommends people that you should talk to, not just based on like you should talk to this person, like a LinkedIn recommendation, but based on we actually think this would be a mutually beneficial conversation. It brokers that introduction.

That's a really interesting use of AI that to me is a step change difference from a self-help bot that is it's actually trying to connect you to human health. Um so I'm keeping a close eye on those because those are pushing on again what we heard in our research, which is like bots can do all these things, they can't do the warm introductions that we know the labor market weren't runs on warm introductions. Um want to hear more though about what you thought about your bot. Like, was the advice okay, but you were like as a discerning wise person, you were like, eh, or were you like, oh, this is actually pretty good. It was decent.

The tone is off. Um, because part of construction character cards. There's a whole there's a whole rat hole to go into there with that we'll we'll bypass. Um, but it what it what it was saying was not wrong, and the process by which it was performing was not incorrect, like listening first, not leaping to conclusions, trying to gather as much input as possible. Um, yeah, real quick, just on tone, really quick.

Like what we heard in our research, right? Is that people are training these bots to sound for, for example, quote unquote, like a cool older cousin or like a cheerleader. Like, so the tools that are really trying to optimize around this are thinking a lot about tone. We can have this conversation if you want to. Like, I'm worried about that, right?

Because the tone that can lead to better engagement and sort of uh an expert better user experience is the same tone that continuously anthropomorphizes these bots and can be leading young brains, young developing brains astray in terms of like what an actual relationship is. So just because you said tone, I couldn't help myself. No, that's fine because part of the, you know, so part of the deep research project uh was to develop a big five personality analysis of what the most effective counselor's personality analysis would be, like what are the ocean samples, uh, and then trying to wire that into the bot to say, like these are the personality traits you have to evince. Um, not giving it an archetype like cool older cousin, but just saying these are the things that from a language perspective you should use. And there's there are technical reasons why what I did uh is not effective because I did not have time.

Um but it only takes about an hour or so to really dial in on that. Um there is substantial risk of anthropomorphization because uh language models are very, very good at that. They're really good. They're they are they are shockingly good. So in the version I was using, I was using Deep Seeks API.

Um, and so because it was cheap, uh and it was a demo only. I would never use it for anything uh in production because uh it has no privacy policies. But um, but they're all very, very capable. And so from that perspective, yeah, there's a there is a substantial risk of anthropomorphization. Uh, I talk I've talked to a couple of folks who are therapists who've said that generative AI tools can be very effective substitute therapists, kind of like what you were mentioning, the safety net.

Like when the the counselor's not in the office and they need to talk to somebody at 2 a.m., they can load this bot that has a decent amount of memory and have a conversation and maybe get some short-term help until the next time they see that you know they're qualified medical professional. But it does have a personality, it does have a uh it can it can feel it. In fact, um models recently also just passed the Turing test um where humans are unable to tell if they were talking to a human or machine. Yeah, I mean, I'd urge your listeners like to go way out on this, like to use tools like sesame, the voice um technology, real human sesame. Yeah, so so things like that I think will land for people even more than like a chat experience where it's like, yes, I do maintain a large portion of my relationship with my husband over text, but I can still discern like right.

But but the voice piece, I think is where you start to get into the like uncanny valley. Um yeah, I just think the the part of this, you know, the example of a therapist, and there's actually really recent research showing incredible results on um acute mental health challenges using chatbots. So I think we gotta really like celebrate some of the progress that we're seeing. But I want to quote Sherry Turkle, who's a researcher at MIT, um, who I think without knowing it was describing disruptive innovation as a market process. She said with these with AI companions, it starts off better than nothing, and then it's better than everything.

And that's what disruptive innovation is do. They start off in pockets of non-consumption, which the example you gave, right? Maybe I there's a moment in the day where I can't access a therapist. Maybe I am actually priced out of therapy, right? And so these two thoughts were like, these are great.

What a wonderful alternative. But the market are is then gonna pull those up market and displace the human version, right? That is actually what we're seeing as the market phenomenon, not just the technology phenomenon. And so I think we just have to be wide awake to that, because what we don't have in the United States is a clear commitment in policy or culture to preserving human connection. It's why we have a loneliness epidemic, it's why our workplaces are increasingly lonely.

Like we don't have a safeguard against this. So it's like, I'm not really indicting the AI. I'm just worried about the conditions against which it's emerging in our society. I have uh because I've been a bunch of different online communities, I have friends who are much, much younger, like in their 20s. Um, or and they have said, you know, they're they for one reason or another in their lives economically or family structure, whatever, cannot get access to therapy resources at all.

Um in an experimentation, um, they found that a machine, uh a properly designed machine therapist, like you said, it was not just better than nothing, it was better than literally everything, and it costs them no money to to use it. And so the and when I talked to a couple therapists, they said, yeah, any any therapy, as long as it's not you know uh malicious, any therapy is better than no therapy. Um because the and the one thing I want to name here, right? So, first of all, these are it's not just like Chris's random friends that are doing this. There was a recent study in HBR of like how are people actually using um uh generative AI?

I don't know if you saw this, top use case therapy and companionship. Second was help me like get my life organized, or something like sort of mundane but critical. Third was help me find purpose, which is wild to me. And sort of productivity, this is a year over year study. Productivity actually dropped from sort of the top use case down.

So I just think it's interesting that it's like it's not just your friends. This is there's a mass migration to using these tools for these purposes. One warning though, right? Is like, what do we know from the mental health literature on prevention? Social connection is a key buffer against more acute mental health challenges.

And so again, if we scale self-help bots with all of the best intentions to reach these users who are priced out of the market, but we are actually underinvesting in the very thing that would prevent mental health challenges in the first place. We're in the same tautology that our whole healthcare system has been in, which is like we actually reward people remaining sick so we can make money on their illness versus make them healthy and and sort of prosper from that. So that's uh again, think tank asshole sort of frame on what I think is unfolding in this market. Is there and this is gonna be a very, very possibly sociopathic question. Uh second time you've used that word in this conversation.

I don't know what to make of that, but keep going. It's just a reflection of the times. Is there a case to be made that social connection should include machines? Yeah, so some people are are making that argument. Um, I am not one of those people.

Um, but you know, and even the folks that we interviewed in this in this little study on college and career bots, you know, we're sort of like future generations, the definition of real is just gonna be different, and parasocial relationships are gonna be part of our social lives. Um around sort of psychology and maintaining the skill to be in the messiness of human connection, that we might deteriorate, that that muscle might atrophy. But I also, you know, I initially come at this market through this lens of social capital. And I just I worry that we will go down that road while continuing to ignore the fact that opportunity travels through human networks and that humans are the ones opening doors for other humans, uh, sometimes in great ways, sometimes in highly exclusionary ways. So that's where I am on that.

I I'm reading a book. Oh my gosh, I have to Google it. Sorry. The new breed, have you heard of this? I have not.

Um, it's by an MIT researcher. Uh, I just want to get her name right, so I'm not just talking about her book, Kate Darling. Um, she's looking a little bit more at like physical robot relationships with humans, so not just like chat bots. But her big push is we should think of these like the way that we've thought that we think about animals, which is animals over the course of history have been, we've used them for work, for consumption, and for companionship. And it gives us a better frame than this like human versus robot kind of uh paradigm that sometimes this gets debated in.

So that's interesting. I'm not yet persuaded by the argument, but I'm finding it interesting. I could see that argue being made because your dog can't speak to you in the same way that you know, using using uh verbal language, but no one would no one would who's a a pet owner would ever argue that your dog is not a companion in some kind, in some shape or something. Yeah, and I right the issue there with the anal like where it breaks down for me and I don't actually think she's pushing on this as much as sort of like how we categorize the rights of robots in these different ways that we're gonna use them. I mean I I don't know if you've had dogs I lost two dogs in the past two years and their mortality is part of what makes the experience of that relationship so profound and that is like not the case with robots and so I I just um I I'm not buying it yet but I I appreciate it.

Are you a dog I do I have a dog I have a dog a cat and six chickens okay so you're an animal person so you get it. Yes. And yeah my friend CC Chapman says uh life is a series of dogs um that's that's his uh his definition of it every chapter yeah exactly however um I can see the the raw technology behind a generative AI model today is very capable of impersonating but it still struggles with long-term memory um we are very rapidly closing in on fixing that problem there are a number of of technical things that we we won't bring up here because it's all math um but it we are probably months away from having production ready resources where they the machines will have infinite memory because it's just like every other database when that becomes the case then I think you have a case certainly for things like AI therapy and AI career counseling and college counseling where the machine can not only have a fluent conversation that's reasonably factually grounded, but will remember you as the individual. Like, hey, I remember we had a chat a month ago about this. How is it going?

Right? Today's models struggle with that. Right. In in as we add functional memory to these tools, when you pop into your your your virtual Christine the counselor personality, Christine say, hey, you know, last week you were talking about uh applying for that job. How'd it go?

Yeah. And again, like the the tightrope we're walking there is increased access and the potential for increased over reliance on that relationship with that bot who is becoming better and better at being in what feels like a true relationship. Um, you know, chat uh openAI just came out with some new research looking at sort of the emotional reliance stuff and what they found. I don't know, it was out of MIT and OpenAI in partnership. And like just to summarize, they sort of found their power users, which is their name for like people really, really using Chat GPT were more likely to be lonely.

And their their gloss on that was like, so we need to we need to not overgeneralize. We should be thinking about particular populations who may be at risk. And the only problem I have with that interpretation is like, don't you want everyone to become a power user? Like, isn't that your motive? So, so again, I just want us to really keep an eye on what are the business models behind these tools that either are bending us towards what the same researchers from MIT called addictive intelligence, right?

Addiction and over reliance versus access and then going out into the world and using that access in a in a pro social way. Could you make the argument that social media already kind of did that to us? 1000%. Yeah, I think this is the new like anti-social media. And the interesting thing, what I worry about with young people is like social media was highly addictive, particularly for some subgroups of students, like based on sort of certain needs profiles.

Um it it what it did that has sort of had a little bit of backlash among Gen Z, 50% of Gen Z says they wish TikTok had never been invented. Um the backlash is that it scaled judgment. And what we're hearing in the in the chat bot space is like part of the appeal is that they're not judgmental, they're infinitely patient. And so we've we've not just like created this whole digital world that has sucked our young people in, I think, and and taken their attention and time away from the real world, but we've also scaled judgment in a way that they are now looking for solutions for that. And this new technology is a very compelling solution.

So that's a line that I'm sort of tracing and very worried about. And it what's interesting in this moment in time, I don't know if you've read Jonathan Height's stuff. He came out with a book called Anxious Generation that has really spread like wildfire in the parent and school community, kind of calling for more age restrictions, um, age verification, banning cell phones in schools. Um, and then his last recommendation, which is my favorite, which is like get out into the real world and do things, which gets the least attention because it's the least um sort of draconian of his recommendations. But that's led to a lot of will around legislation and policy around cell phones and social media.

All of that energy is being poured into that. And meanwhile, this new market has ballooned and we're we're playing catch-up. So um, I like that you liken it to social media, and I hope that listeners will appreciate, particularly listeners who are parents, will wake up to the fact that there is a new technology out there. Character AI is like one of the most popular tools out there being used by young people that is doing a lot of what social media was doing in terms of like risks of addiction and isolation, but is not regulated in the same way as social media right now. Um, and isn't even part of that conversation in some ways.

Although I would argue that social media pretty much has no regulation. Um, I'm saying that we're getting traction on regulating social media while this new trend has already taken off and we're buying 10 years after social media really 50 years, it's assuming we hit the mainstream. We're finally getting regulation on that. That's that's typical of government. Um this might be a false choice.

Which is worse to you in a the highly toxic social media environment or an environment where people have you know nurturing relationships with machines. I love that question, and I don't have a good answer. Um, that like hit me, Chris. That was a really good question. Um I think that the hope, the little hope I can see is nurturing relationships with machines that are engineered to promote pro-social behavior.

So rather than those relationships being disruptive relative to human connection, part of what makes them nurturing is that they are encouraging us to engage in our offline network, engage in real relationships, engage in our offline lives. And like that just isn't, you know. I just this morning actually typed into chat GPT because I'm so interested in this therapy use case or therapy lowercase t use case. I typed in chat GPT, like I'm feeling really overwhelmed. I'm trying to work on old projects but launch this new project.

Like, help me think about it was like an executive function question. Like, like help me think about how to organize my day. The advice was good, it like aligned to what my therapist or my naturopath just to like at myself is like I have a whole like army of helpers, like what I think they would say, but nowhere did it say talk to someone else about this. That's not it's not in the fabric of how self-help tools or how even the internet is optimized. So it makes sense.

I want to know your answer to your question, by the way. Um generally speaking, my answer is uh is so my bias is that I'm very fluent with these machines and uh I build stuff all the time and I know what their limitations are. I would much rather have my kids speaking to a machine than to a human, because a significant majority of humans are just trash. Um and you know, given the choice between a certain personality type that thinks that you know your your gender is irrelevant or your sexual orientation is relevant, or a machine that has some guardrails to say, like, yeah, we have to, we can't invalidate any one group of people, talk to the machine, talk to the machine 10 out of 10 times because they're not going to tell you that because you dress a certain way or you have a certain perspective on life that you're wrong, and there's a whole bunch of people that online that will tell you just exactly just how wrong you are. Um in terms of the the uses for these things.

I think I've built like I said, as an experiment, I'll be happy offline to send you the therapy system instructions. It's like 19 pages long of instructions because it's built specifically of using the VA's cognitive behavioral therapy guidebook as the reference. Um I think in cases where the machines are well designed, they're a substantial advantage. The challenge, particularly with tools like character AI, is that they're not well designed. Um they're they're very poorly designed, and they're being designed by people who don't have either either machine background or subject matter expertise.

Human development background, yeah. Exactly. Uh, and that's where I think the risk is is that the underlying models have some guardrails, but you really need um very clear uh instructions written into the machines with things like you know, the like you're saying the pro-social uh aspects, all these machines have to be told what to do. Yeah, so it is not that the machine can or can't recommend it, it is that no one put it in the instructions. And let's go one level out from that.

The market is not demanding pro social solutions. That's no, because pro social solutions don't make you money. Yes, right. So this is like despite the fact that I work for like a think tank based on market theory. This is like after 10 years of studying social capital and social connection, I am so well aware of what you just said, succinctly, and just in a morning riffing on this topic, that it's a really scary moment for these tools to have the human-like capabilities that they do, and for us to be so ill-equipped from a business model and policy standpoint to remain steadfast in a commitment to human connection.

In the in that regard, then a tool that's designed to be addictive, um, can it still be made beneficial even though it's addictive? Yeah, well, I mean, there's sort of like there's light touch versions of this in in a lot of um the ed tech conversation around like gamifying learning, right? So I think that's there's a long tradition of that that I think merits celebration, right? Because the learning needs to be engaging. We have an engagement crisis by high school, like the vast majority of students are wildly disengaged from learning and it's costing us, you know, a GDP and individual thriving.

So I think that's where that's sort of the line I would tell, at least inside of education. Um with the addictive sort of like, can it be good in in maybe an outside of education context? I'm just my big concern, and and I'm maybe saying this as a parent as much as a researcher right now. My husband and I were literally just talking about this last night, is that we have lost the muscle to robustly invest in our offline lives. So it's like, could it be productive?

Yes, but like why are we so attached to productive solutions online and we're not giving this, we're not giving the same attention and investment to offline. So that's maybe a little bit of a lame answer, but that's where I come down on like gamify learning, yes. Gamify therapy, maybe, yes. Um, but we gotta like do a time study of how we're spending our time and recalibrate in terms of investment in our offline lives. And that's in the office as well, right?

That's that's I'm making this sort of like sentimental point about childhood and parenting and all that, but like think about in the office environment as well what that might look like. My last question have you looked at the impact of the SARS virus itself on our physiology as it relates to things like loneliness and our uh our cognitive deficits? Um, we know without a doubt that multiple infections of COVID in particular, not only create physiological symptoms but cause some considerable neurological changes in everybody, regardless of their diagnosis of long COVID or not, to the point where hundreds of millions of people are walking around with damage to their dopamine receptors, damage to the neurology overall that is persistent over years, and that may be contributing to things. Oh, actually, no, we know for sure that some of the mechanisms of COVID, uh post-COVID infection include uh clinical depression. Uh, like it is capable of creating clinical depression in your neurogy.

How much, if at all, have you studied that as it relates to the way students which are literally sitting in disease factories in schools? Um and the impact it's having on them and it's it's causative factors on things like social capital and pro-social interaction. Yeah, Chris, such a fascinating question. So far above my pay grade. I like no idea how to answer it.

Uh you know, what we've looked at more in the education space is sort of the impact of COVID on isolation and loneliness, but not at that neurological biological level. So would love to know the answer. I'm gonna like dig deeper on it. And I think it's a fascinating um additional layer to what often gets cast in the education conversation as sort of just like the COVID generation losing learning, but we haven't gotten deep enough into what you're talking about. Yeah, because I think there's a biological aspect as well on top of everything.

Versus the social, cultural and well, it's everything. It's and yeah, it's all of it together. Yeah. Great. So uh wrapping up, where can people find you to learn more about you?

Yeah, absolutely. Christensen Institute.org and whoyouknow.org both have all of our research. I'm on LinkedIn, Julia Freeland Fisher. I have started to really loathe LinkedIn. It's like millennial social media, but I am on it all the time.

So find me there and would love to connect. All right. Thank you very much. And we will talk to you all next time.