The Slot Machine - A Way Out of This Ethical Impasse

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Next week on the show, natasha daushol offers us a way out of this ethical impasse. She says it will not run through the user's sense of self control or even the user inter face, but will go straight to the algorithm itself. You can raise awareness by pointing out slot machine tactics in designs of products that you already see in use and ones you're making. Call it out. We want to see screen shots of these problems and your ideas for solutions. And yes, we're inviting you to share those ideas with on twitter and facebook.

Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, has spent years studying how slot machines hold gamblers spellbound, in an endless loop of play. She never imagined the addictive designs which she had first witnessed in Las Vegas would go bounding into Silicon Valley and reappear on virtually every smartphone screen worldwide. In the first segment of this two-part interview, Natasha Dow Schüll offers a prescient warning to users and designers alike: How far can the attention economy go toward stealing another moment of your time? Farther than you might imagine.