If you don’t like Facebook or networks, don’t look at them and that’s it… right?
It’s like saying that if alcohol causes social problems, it shouldn’t be regulated: don’t drink it and that’s it; but alcohol is addictive for many and we must protect them, and also children.
Are networks addictive?
Children easily become addicted to screens. And on the networks it is not easy for adults to give up, because it is also giving up virtual social ties that – and this is the danger – are replacing the real ones and causing emotional disorders.
I don’t know if I see that danger.
It exists, believe me. As an algorithm engineer at Facebook, I studied their plans, and I worry, for example, that instead of building homes worthy of the elderly, the day will come when we can leave them plugged in day and night…
How powerful is this metaverse?
The metaverse project is just taking off and with the new power of generative artificial intelligence its possibilities are immense: we must control it now to protect the weakest and prevent it from degrading our lives.
Do you advocate to regulate or to prohibit?
For now, the surgeon general, the top health authority in the US, has warned parents that 30% of children in the country were connected to their mobile phones until midnight every day. They were official figures.
This can’t be good.
It causes mental disorders and school failure. And he also warned them that 10% of children remained glued to their mobile phones every day until 2 in the morning.
These do have a problem.
Do you think the networks will give up this lucrative market for children’s health?
Should this use be regulated like any addictive product?
For this reason, I have become an activist for personal contact in the face of screen addiction; but I fear that it will be very difficult to stop the wave of technological innovation that will turn education and school into a succession of screens and more 3D.
What do you suggest to avoid it?
What I have advocated in the Senate is that the networks be taxed with new taxes to promote with this money, instead, education and interpersonal contact, and that legislation be passed to prevent the metaverse from replacing real residences and schools.
Apart from taxes, can other solutions be sought?
Technology can fix the problems it creates, and I’ve proposed that the apps on platforms that hook kids become, for example, slower instead of faster by hooking them to an addictive, demonic pace.
What would the tax invest in networks to promote personal contact?
In the countless associations of all kinds that have always held our community together with meetings where real people could talk face to face…
With?
Gardening, chess, golf clubs, the Rotary… heck, there are thousands of associations that find it increasingly difficult to meet people and less to post activities on the networks without a personal presence. And we subsidize the churches and their face-to-face activities, because they need it.
“Religion”: from the Latin religare : to gather.
Bringing people together; not avatars And they’re running out of face-to-face parishioners, because they’ve been meeting online since the pandemic. It’s a danger to feel when you connect “like you’re with people” instead of being with real people.
Maybe the future is inevitable?
It would also be sad because if you are always connected online in solitude, you become insecure and fearful; because you lose the sense of security that only real contact with other people gives us.
We are still animals…
And this fear is having political repercussions because it favors the populism of strong leaders who promise security. It is a cause and effect of Facebook.
Does it influence US politics that much?
And of the world, because the algorithms that, in principle, favored debate and discussion, today, grouping millions instead of hundreds of users, have become mere radicalizers of emotions.
Isn’t this radicalization inevitable by digitizing the public debate?
The inevitable thing was to see that, as Facebook and the other platforms on which I worked as an engineer grew in users by the millions, the quality of our content degraded…
Because?
I remember the chief engineer admitting that the most popular and profitable content was also the one that made us feel least proud.
