Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews Dr. Anna Lembke - Author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice. Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine overloaded world in her NYTimes bestselling book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Her previous book Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic.
"There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their devices. So I'm not seeing a lot of encouraging stuff there. And basically what you have is you have a fundamental structural problem. These technologies are engineered literally to keep us clicking and swiping. You can't ask them...in a way, it's very difficult for them to have their product that's not engaging. Now there's a big push to do this, to see, Okay, well what if we get rid of the likes, or what if we eliminate the bottomless scrolls? Or what if we get rid of the alerts and the push notifications, or what if we go to grayscale and make the images...? And I think all those can work as nudges and be helpful, but I think we also need to start looking more proactively at having time where we literally are just not touching our device. Distance from the actual device itself. And so I think there's some movement in that direction as well."
https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.html
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/