Is There a Way to Regulate the Slot Machine?

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"I call it homo economicus homunculus. Right. And then there's a little part of you that's in trouble here," he says. "And the reptile brain's evil or wrong or something like that." In gambling, we try to regulate machines by adding screens and modules on them - but they don't go far enough, Nadeau argues. The only way for this to be modeled isn't just to limit the power around how people have to say 'no' instead of 'yes,' he adds.

In part two of our interview with cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, we learn what gamblers are really after a lot of the time — it’s not money. And it’s the same thing we’re looking for when we mindlessly open up Facebook or Twitter. How can we design products so that we’re not taking advantage of these universal urges and vulnerabilities but using them to help us? Tristan, Aza and Natasha explore ways we could shift our thinking about making and using technology.