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"The Medium is the Message" applies... or some analogy to that idea.

Yes, individuals have choices. But in a collective, dynamics occur and those dynamics can't usually be overcome by individuals.

Social media could be used differently, but the way it exists Irl is determined by the nature of the medium, the economic structure and other things outside of individuals' control.

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OK but the car DID have the effects that Kyle described. The fact that you have to imagine a world where people collectively made some other "wiser" decision about how to use cars perfectly demonstrates that those decision's don't happen. In some cases it's because because other choices seemed rational, some times because people are irrational, and some times because of the prisoner-dilemma like situation where multiple people making the rational individual choice results in an irrational choice for all of society.

Kyle' recommendation to stop/slow using AI is phrased as another individual choice, but given that lesson I think it's appropriate to interpret it as a collective choice - collective through regulation, collective resistance etc.

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While I agree in principle, I don’t know how much faith is warranted in humans using it wisely in practice.
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I agree with you that the majority of people will use it to feed their attention and energy to the attention economy. Meta will be more profitable than ever, as will TikTok, Netflix, YouTube

But the majority have always chosen the path of least resistance. This is not new! Socrates’ famous exhortation is “the unexamined life is not worth living”. People were living mindlessly on autopilot before TikTok.

I think if you want to give a call to action, as this piece does, the right call to action is “think carefully about how you can make a good use of your time and energy, now that the default path has changed.” I know it’s not as simple or emotionally powerful as “go down kicking and screaming, stick it to the man”, but as a rule of thumb, the less fiercely emotional path is usually the right one.

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I have a lot of faith they will use it unwisely.
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Indeed.
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