So that’s a very high-level description. Forgive me for it being a tiny bit of a sales pitch, I promise I’m not selling you anything. But that’s what I see. I see that we need to build algorithms that optimize for oxytocin. We need to be building these things for relationships. I have an old student of mine who became a pretty great therapist. His thing is the 20 second hug. He is encouraging everyone to give 20 second hugs because it’s the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get oxytocin that he can come up with. We need systems that are thinking that way. So that’s the trigger topic for this forum. I’m excited to chat through all these pieces and go down rabbit holes. Wherever you guys want to go from here.

Jeremy

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Scott. I’m going to briefly summarize a little bit about what Scott talked about. He’s given us a great discourse on the harmful pathways of the dopamine juicing algorithms that were designed to make our eyeballs stay on websites as long as possible. That has inadvertently made us all addicted in some fashion to looking at webpages and clicking things. Scott has introduced the concept of an empathic, compassionate, empathy inducing and oxytocin releasing AI tool.

We might have a brief discussion about the differences between dopamine and oxytocin for those who may not be familiar with those terms. Oxytocin is a bonding hormone of the posterior pituitary. Scott foresees this oxytocin-releasing AI Tool as almost an empathy assistant or a communication assistant. It improves the ability of the receiver to ask the kinds of questions of the other person that provides a deeper understanding of them–at which point the relationship deepens. The deepening of the relationship can take place even if it is by means of a virtual medium that stimulates oxytocin and deeper bonding rather than producing an addictive kind of clicking. So that’s a bit of a summary.

I can link this with some of our other Forum conversations. We’ve had a lot of discussions during the last couple of Forums about substitution—how human beings try to substitute what nature does. We find ourselves with sugars that are saccharin—like you mentioned about AI messages. We can use the language of sugar substitutes, which over time is likely to be more harmful than actual sugar. I think I’ll stop there. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and reflections.

Bill B

Scott, I’m interested in systems and positive and negative feedback loops. And an addiction in part is a system in which there are just positive loops. In real life—real interactions—there are both positive and negative loops. The negative loops are things like a comment that “this is enough already, my attending to you. Why don’t you spend some time worrying about me!”? Or the issue is: “I’ve been nice to you long enough. Let me ask some hard questions.” The statements are usually not as direct as this, but the point is made. The conversation must change direction.