Recorded on: Oct 14, 2025
Description
Mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence tend to center around the technology’s economic and large-scale impacts. Yet it’s at the individual level where we’re seeing AI’s most potent effects, and they may not be what you think. Even in the limited time that AI chatbots have been publicly available (like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.), studies show that our increasing reliance on them wears down our ability to think and communicate effectively, and even erodes our capacity to nurture healthy attachments to others. In essence, AI is atrophying the skills that sit at the core of what it means to be human. Can we as a society pause to consider the risks this technology poses to our well-being, or will we keep barreling forward with its development until it’s too late?
In this episode, Nate is joined by Nora Bateson and Zak Stein to explore the multifaceted ways that AI is designed to exploit our deepest social vulnerabilities, and the risks this poses to human relationships, cognition, and society. They emphasize the need for careful consideration of how technology shapes our lives and what it means for the future of human connection. Ultimately, they advocate for a deeper engagement with the embodied aspects of living alongside other people and nature as a way to counteract our increasingly digital world.
What can we learn from past mass adaptation of technologies such as the invention of the world wide web or GPS when it comes to AI’s increasing presence in our lives? How does artificial intelligence expose and intensify the ways our culture is already eroding our mental health and capacity for human connection? And lastly, how might we imagine futures where technology magnifies the best sides of humanity – like creativity, cooperation, and care – rather than accelerating our most destructive instincts?
About Nora Bateson
Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”
An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.
About Zak Stein
Dr. Zak Stein is a philosopher of education, as well as a Co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He is also the Co-founder of Civilization Research Institute, the Consilience Project, and Lectica, Inc. He is the author of dozens of published papers and two books, including Education in a Time Between Worlds. Zak received his EdD from Harvard University.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
The TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.
00:00 –
- Zak Stein (TGS Ep 122, Ep 180), Works, Civilization Research Institute, Consilience Project, Center of World Philosophy and Religion
- Nora Bateson (TGS Ep 10, Frankly Episode, Reality Roundtable #2, Reality Roundtable #10), The International Bateson Institute, Warm Data Labs
05:13 – Intergenerational transmission
05:39 – B. F. Skinner, Operant condition chamber
06:04 – Emergence of AI tutoring systems
06:18 – Zak Stein & Daniel Thorson: AI Tutor Apocalypse
06:47 – AI rapid adoption by high school and college students
08:23 – Social media disruption of person-to-person connections, Social media affecting romantic relationships
08:50 – Human to AI relationship development
14:09 – Mirror neurons
15:35 – Nonverbal communication in human interaction (pace of blinking, pheromones)
19:30 – Anyma show at the Pyramids of Giza – “Quantum Genesys”
20:15 – Taxes in the ancient world
20:40 – The politics of calculation
20:50 – Early civilizational history of tax codes, predictions, and calculations
21:07 – Charles Sanders Peirce (more info), Pragmatism, Hired gymnasiums full of people doing calculations for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (Peirce Geodetic Monument)
21:34 – Lewis Mumford on the megamachine
22:05 – The Manhattan Project
22:11 – Turing test
22:52 – Wozniak’s “Coffee Test
23:28 – “Machine learning” (AI before it was launched as AI (via LLMs) in late 2022) had been present for a while
26:00 – Education in a Time Between Worlds, “Your Mind Is Not Like a Computer; It Is Like An Ecosystem: Minding Your Metaphors About the Mind”
26:55 – GPU cluster
28:30 – Dark history of Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests
28:40 – Antonio Damacio study involving woman with calcified amygdala
29:40 – Narrow metric optimization
32:40 – Supernormal stimuli
35:45 – Reality Roundtable on Dark Triad, Dark Triad (Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, Narcissism)
37:40 – The Carbon Pulse
38:45 – Railroads contributed to development of early antitrust laws
39:25 – Antitrust regulation, Stacy Mitchell TGS episode on Antitrust, Antitrust cases against Google by the European Union
44:08 – Link between AI use and dark triad traits (another similar study)
45:25 – College students using AI for companionship, therapy, and cheating
46:15 – The Harvard Gazette: What good is writing anyway?
46:50 – Cognitive atrophy and AI use
48:33 – GPS use and cognitive atrophy
49:50 – Literacy and democracy
50:50 – Albania has an AI-minister
53:30 – Human microbiome
57:30 – Confirmation bias, Narcissus
57:55 – Frankly #112: The Quadruple Bifurcation
58:45 – Job loss and AI
59:00 – AI developers’ interest in universal basic income
59:25 – Some AI developers want to “end the burden of human labor” (“this is a religious ideology in and of itself”)
59:58 – Break down of collective sanity correlated with civilizational collapse
1:01:10 – Wealthy were putting lead and mercury in wine during Roman empire collapse (anecdotal)
1:01:50 – Youth mental health crisis
1:03:25 – AI and attachment, Attachment Theory
1:03:50 – Google search results are different between users
1:07:30 – How to adjust ChatGPT so it’s less user-biased
1:08:20 – The Social Dilemma
1:11:54 – David J. Temple
1:14:45 – Replika Bot AI suicide
1:15:20 – People who believe AI is alive, Raising money for compute space to store AI personas
1:18:35 – Harry Harlow, Harlow’s monkeys, Original study
1:20:44 – Replika and Character AI, General Purpose models
1:22:00 – Transference
1:22:40 – Some AI users treat AI as god-like
1:26:25 – Zak’s research on absence of attachment
1:26:55 – Jonathan Haidt’s social media research
1:28:17 – Bearfat, honey, and salt metaphor from Eliezer Yudkowsky
1:29:10 – Facebook research showing they manipulated user’s moods
1:42:05 – Read more about “Distributed Educational Hub Networks” here
1:43:30 – Moloch, Superorganism: paper, video
