#466 — What Is Technology Doing to Us?
3/24/202619 min
Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about technology, society, and human nature. They discuss the harms of modern communication technology, polarization and anomie, how AI agents can improve human cooperation, the social implications of humanoid robots, Christakis's experience at the center of the woke moral panic at Yale, the Trump administration's assault on American universities and science, the collapse of public trust in institutions, and other topics.
If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSam Harris· Host0:00
[gentle music] Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas, thanks for joining me again.
Nicholas Christakis· Guest0:39
Sam, it's so good to see you again.
Sam Harris· Host0:41
Yeah, great to see you. Yeah, we don't, we don't see each other in person enough or even, even on the internet enough, but, um, I always love talking to you. So le-let's just jump right into it. I'll remind people you are the, uh, director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale. You are both an MD and a sociologist and have studied, uh, many interesting topics related to, um, I guess how human beings and, uh, and now technology affect one another. A-and, uh, I... We have, um, too much to talk about. I think I wanna start with the question of, I guess I just want your postmortem on the present. Like just we-- this, this last decade- I think- What, what has technology, uh, specifically information technology, done to us?
Nicholas Christakis· Guest1:21
Yeah. So I think for su-- I think we are gonna see the other side of the-- our present dilemma. I think, I think it is gonna take half a generation to really be on the other side of