Episode 1: Is AI Making Us Stupid? A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
September 18, 2025
AI Summary
5 min readIn 2009, Facebook released EdgeRank, a simple system that prioritized content by predicted interest rather than reverse chronology. Within a few years, it was upgraded to a machine-learning tool optimized for one thing: engagement. Every other social media company followed. Tobias Rose-Stockwell places that moment as the hinge—the first large-scale deployment of an AI in consumers' hands, pointing back at them. By 2012, the system reached a billion people. A decade later, political violence, conspiracy, distrust, and anxiety are all up. The machine that studies what we click, and then feeds us more of it, is now responsible for how the majority of us spend our time online. This episode of Into the Machine opens the conversation about that machine, beginning with a conversation with Jonathan Haidt about what it has already done—and what it will do next.
The social media algorithm as the first misaligned AI
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:06) **The Hinge Year: 2009 and the Birth of the Attention Algorithm** - The host sets the stage by tracing the origin of the current crisis back to 2009, when Facebook launched EdgeRank, the first large-scale AI-driven engagement algorithm.
- 2 (02:57) **Introducing Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation & The Attentional Threshold** - The host presents his guest, Jonathan Haidt, and frames his core thesis: that the crises of political chaos and childhood mental health are symptoms of a single rupture in our ability to hold attention.
- 3 (04:17) **The Exponential Curve & The Darkness of the News** - Haidt agrees that the problems have gotten worse faster than expected, comparing the current trajectory to the early stage of an exponential curve.
- 4 (07:59) **Democratic Vulnerability: Affective Polarization Over Issue Polarization** - Haidt explains that the American form of liberal democracy is uniquely vulnerable to social media because it requires consensus and compromise, unlike parliamentary systems.
- 5 (11:14) **AI's Three-Front Threat: Mental Health, Truth, and Super-empowerment** - Haidt outlines his core concerns about AI, moving beyond social media to the next technological wave.
- 6 (14:32) **The Slavery Analogy & The Alien Arrival** - Haidt introduces a powerful analogy for the human-AI relationship, drawing on Frederick Douglass to warn of the "fatal poison of irresponsible power".
- 7 (21:25) **The Attentional Threshold: Humanity Getting Stupider** - The conversation pivots to the core concept of an "attentional threshold", where the sheer volume of incoming information overwhelms our collective ability to solve problems.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Today I’m launching Into The Machine.
My first episode is a conversation with my colleague, social psychologist and #1 NYT bestselling author Jonathan Haidt.
Jon and I wrote a piece in The Atlantic called The Dark Psychology of Social Networks — hoping to add clarity to the debate around social media. AI has changed the conversation. We now find ourselves in a stranger moment with LLMs, asking deeper questions about what these tools are doing to our ability to think.
In this episode we discuss:
* Attention as civic infrastructure: the erosion of sustained focus undermines shared reality, and with it the preconditions for governance, compromise, and democratic legitimacy.
* Engagement algorithms as centrifuges: rather than reflecting consensus, they pull discourse toward the edges, making fringe views appear as if they represent the center.
* Democracies as uniquely fragile: unlike authoritarian systems that can integrate these technologies into centralized control, liberal democracies are structurally more vulnerable to their fragmenting effects.
* Childhood as the front line: the breakdown of “serve-and-return” interactions, compounded by algorithmic feeds, represents not just a developmental crisis but a possible precursor to broader societal instability.
* Human agency atrophied by delegation: when writing, thinking, and decision-making are outsourced to machines, individuals lose the cognitive muscle required for original judgment.
A small ask
The irony is not lost on us in trying to explain/critique the algorithms while we’re dependent upon them to reach the right audience.
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Our next guest is Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why.
Thank you, as always, for the gift of your attention.
-Tobias
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