October 18, 2025 • 41 mins
It promised a world of self-expression and connection. But instead, it’s encouraged us to create performative versions of ourselves; curated by algorithms and validated by likes.
To help us find the reality, we’re joined by Colin Corby, Digital Detox Coach, Technologist, and CEO of Technology Wellbeing.
https://thedigitaldetoxcoach.com
https://www.instagram.com/the_digital_detox_coach
https://www.youtube.com/@thedigitaldetoxcoach
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colincorby
In this episode, Colin joins us to explore the complex relationship between technology and the human identity. We discuss how online personas are curated, the psychological effects of social media, and the role of influencers in shaping self-worth.
We also look the implications of AI on identity, the psychological toll of a permanent online record and the diminishing empathy in digital interactions - ultimately contemplating the future of human identity in a technology-driven world.
00:00 The Impact of the Internet on Human Identity
02:49 Curating Online vs. Offline Selves
05:46 The Psychological Effects of Social Media
08:51 The Role of Influencers in Identity Formation
11:57 The Stress of Online Performance
14:44 AI and the Future of Human Identity
17:46 The Need for Digital Detox
21:00 The Psychological Toll of a Permanent OnlineRecord
24:05 Empathy in the Digital Age
27:00 AI's Role in the Workplace and Identity
30:07 The Future of Human Identity in a Tech-DrivenWorld
If you like what you hear, please follow the show, leave a review, or let us know what else to look into at https://www.ruinedbytheinternet.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Ruined by the Internet.
I'm Gareth King. Today we're asking, has the
Internet ruined the human identity?
It promised a world of self expression and connection, but
instead it's encouraged us to create performative versions of
ourselves, curated by algorithmsand validated by likes to help
us find the reality. We're joined by Colin Corby,
digital detox coach, technologist and CEO of
(00:23):
Technology Well Being. Colin, thank you so much for
joining us and welcome to the show.
Thank you for inviting me, I'm very much looking forward.
To it. Yeah, me too.
But before we get into it, can you tell us a bit about the work
that you do and the journey that's LED you to this point?
So I'll try and keep it short. When I was in my mid 30s I had a
(00:46):
fantastic job in technology. Lots of world firsts, great
people to work with, but I was suffering from stress.
So what was happening is the heart rate went up and up and up
until I started to see stars and, and I passed out a few
times at work. So loads of tests at the time
they said inconclusive results. So I thought well what am I
going to do because I've got to do something.
(01:06):
So I remember being a good swimmer because I live near the
border and so I thought, ah, I'dbetter get myself fit then.
So I went swimming couple of lengths, absolutely wrecked.
It was a tipping point. I had to do something.
So I persevered with the swimming.
I got fitter, I took lessons to learn all the strokes.
(01:28):
I started racing, started triathlon.
To cut a Long story short, I ended up doing 4 Ironman
triathlons and and winning county titles in swimming and
stuff like that. But it was in doing the Iron Man
I just realised that how you talk to yourself can change the
way that you think and change what you can do.
That fascinated me. So the psychology aspects
(01:50):
started to set in and then I gotthe opportunity much later on to
leave the corporate world and I was going for some interviews
and one or two other things and and I was being guided by a
coach and I said you know what, I don't really want to do this.
I said I love technology, I lovesport and the thing about the
mind and why am I on my, my iPhone so much so, and I
(02:13):
researched that and I thought, yeah, I can just smash all of
the three things together and, you know, work out what's going
on, but actually be able to coach, give talks, help other
people. You've previously spoken at TE
DX around the human identity andthe effects of of technology and
(02:33):
kind of our online selves and our true selves.
Do you think that our online selves and our offline selves,
do you think the line between those is, is so much more
blurred these days? Do people really realise that
they're even curating an online identity, or do they just see it
as an extension of themselves? I think that most people now
(02:57):
must curate their online presence because we've, we've
had it long enough. So I, I curate my online
presence, I use it mostly for work activities and very little
for personal activities. And it's curated.
So I think everybody knows that it's curated.
A lot of people now realise thatactually it's self censorship,
(03:19):
right? Because there's a record.
Every website you've ever been, everything you've ever
purchased, every message you've ever sent, every post you've
ever sent is recorded as online memories.
So we basically self censorship says the whole hope things I
would never say online as if I was in the real world with with
(03:40):
people. So self censorship, now we're
quite lucky in the sense that wecan observe what's happening in
China and that has a very interesting way of self
censorship, whereas we're we're being influenced by
predominantly the US. In preparing for this talk, I
said, well, we're going to talk about the Internet and then
we're going to talk about our identities.
So if we look at the Internet first, well, what is it?
(04:02):
Well the Internet today isn't what it was last year, or the
year before, or the year before.The Internet today has a large
percentage of non human content.The Internet is an artificial
construct. It's the most complex thing
humans have ever created, but it's it's a facsimile of the
(04:23):
real world. Yeah, for sure.
And I think that that was kind of where I was just heading
towards with the reference to the the lines blurring, as you
said, that being the facsimile of the real world.
I can remember a time there was no Internet.
And so it was a thing that came into my life.
My, my entity was an offline identity that the Internet got
added into at the time. And then I think over time, as
(04:46):
it's kind of become so much moreall encompassing across
everything, as you said there, depending on on where you are
online or or what you're doing, people are self censoring and
curating like a different version of their identity.
So I'd love for us to get into how maintaining all of those
different versions of your offline identity in an online
(05:08):
space can either a lure togetheror be become such a huge part of
your identity that the offline part is either equal or less
than the sum of those parts. So there's a lot to kind of get
into there, yeah. So the thing to say is that who
you are, who I am, it's got 2 components. 1 is who other
(05:30):
people believe we are. So these multiple curated
personas of ourselves, that's how other people are perceiving
us in the online world. That's how governments
perceivers, job search companies, algorithms.
The other thing to think about is that there's an infinite
amount of information on the Internet, more than we can
(05:50):
possibly access. And we're being fed feeds,
curated feeds from all the different apps and algorithms.
So they shape what we experienceon the Internet.
Now if we come down to our cells, evolution thought it wise
for biological animals to have this conscious experience of
(06:10):
self. We experience the now and and we
predict the future based on all of our experiences.
So if most of our experiences are online, then those, our
experiences are shaping who we are.
And if you like a lot of people,if they spend predominantly most
of their time online, then most of the experiences are online.
(06:34):
And that shapes who they are more so than when you switch off
online, you go out for a bit with mates, you have a good
laugh or you play a sport or youdo something in, I can call it
the real world, but we we have aperception of the real world.
So what I'm interested in doing is getting that balance of
getting people to have more human contact that they can hang
(06:57):
on to who they are. But we know in in a non Internet
world we were a different personat work to who we were in a
Sports Club, who we were down the pub, who we are to our
families. So that that part of it isn't
new. No, absolutely.
And I think you touched on something there around, you
know, if you're predominantly experiencing the online or the,
(07:19):
or the digital world, those experiences are shaping who you
are both online and then beyond.But one thing I'd, I'd love to
kind of get into about that is we know that people are curating
their online selves. And so, you know, everybody
knows that there's a lot of discourse around mental health
problems that might come out of social media, whether it's
(07:42):
people getting body image issuesand things like that, you know,
jealousy about it seems like everyone else has a perfect
life, et cetera. And we know that that's because
you're only seeing everyone elses highlight reel O if you're
if you're taking in that their identity is this most perfect,
picture perfect life. You know, everything seems
flawless. That's obviously going to give
(08:03):
you some feelings of inadequacy in the online space that are
then going to translate into theoffline space potentially.
But how do you think that likes and shares became such an
important and valued form of digital currency for our self
worth? So.
At the root of it is with socialanimals, part of the success of
(08:24):
Homo sapiens is that we're social animals.
That's a safety thing, a sense of safety.
And within a group, everybody is, is always trying to pitch
themselves where they fit into that group.
You know how high they are, what's your, what's your
standing at, those sorts of things.
And, and those instincts, that social behaviour that we've all
got have migrated to the Internet and it's migrated to
(08:47):
all the likes. So particularly as you get
older, you get less worried about it, but.
Yeah, of course, you know. When when you're young, you're
worried about everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And. And but if you're missing the
physical contact with friends, you know the going out and the
the real world activities. And if you're focused solely on
this, then, you know, if people don't like you, then that has
(09:09):
serious consequences because that's, that makes you feel
instinctively unsafe because we're social animals.
We we need to be liked, we need to have a social standing.
And so it's just migrated to theInternet and it has horrific
implications for people that arevery sensitive to that.
Yeah, look, that's, that's perfect there.
(09:31):
The way that you've summed it upas it's, it's kind of a
biological thing that's instead of playing out in that primal
structure where you might have had, I don't know, 2 lions or
something fighting and that's their competition or, you know,
you, we know animals do mating rituals and things like that.
But in the online space, as you've called out, you don't
need to actually be anything other than what you are in that
(09:53):
one little moment, which I can imagine is just fragmenting
people's identities beyond and all sorts of repair I.
Heard at schools in You have a career talk at school.
What do you want to be an influencer?
Yeah, Yeah, yeah. It's, it's something, something
interesting in there too, because I think that humans love
influence. And no matter what we're doing,
(10:14):
you know, as you said, even in your peer group, you know,
there's always that leader of the group and everyone kind of
settles into their structure andthe hierarchy offline.
And I think that the influencer is just kind of a globally
reaching, very easy way to kind of sort and section yourself
into different things on just a crazy scale that, you know,
we've never seen seen before theother.
(10:36):
The other interesting thing is in the real world, if you want
to be a sports person, a musician, an academic, whatever
it is, it's hard work. It's a novel hard work,
everything to do with technologies about keeping the
appearance of everything being easy.
So if you see the influences andyou, you see this perfect world
(10:58):
that they have and then you think, oh, I could be that all I
need to do is tweet my videos orcurate myself a little bit more
or find a niche or just be lucky.
But the sad, sad thing is a lot of influencers suffer enormous
mental health issues because once they're on the treadmill,
they then have to carry on finding content.
(11:20):
Had a holiday in Italy and we went by the it's by the lakes.
We went by the lakes. And there were so many young
people who were there purely to take the Instagram shots.
And yeah, totally. Yeah, look, I've I've seen, I've
been out for nice dinners with, with my my fiance and, and we're
(11:43):
so like keen just to get this delicious food and and taste it.
And we've seen tables next to us, you know, people young,
younger than us and, and with, with kind of mini tripods and
doing full shoots and things around the food that I'm
thinking, Oh my God, this incredibly amazing tasting stuff
is just getting cold and, and you're not even eating it.
(12:04):
And that, like you said, it's just all about the, the
pictures. And I think for me, being a
little bit older than growing upjust into that world as a, a
natural thing, like I don't see the appeal in it.
And I would almost feel a littlebit awkward giving myself an
identity like that, a digital identity.
But I guess if you're doing thatto a community or followers who
(12:25):
are all into that kind of thing,you could see how that
performance of a self in the digital space could influence
our own core beliefs and sense of self.
As you said, the demand to keep doing that, you may feel that
that becomes who you are, not just this very special curated.
And I don't want to say fake because it's real people doing
(12:47):
it, but it's not like a real representation of of the whole
you. How do you think that just so
much emphasis on the influence side of ourselves in the in the
digital space, How is that affecting people offline?
Like have you, have you seen any, anything around how it
affects those influences? As you said, when they're on the
(13:08):
treadmill trying to come up withcontent, how is it changing
people? So what I've seen with
influences is the stress, so theincreasing stress of always
having to perform. And quite often an influencer
feels so stressed and burnt out that they go offline for a while
(13:28):
and then they come back. So there's a, there's a burnout
associated with that in the sameway there's burnout associated
with working all hours in our jobs and things.
But there's a big difference. You see you and I, because we're
biological animals, our sense ofself is a biological sense of
self. It involves the body, involves
the mind, it involves all of oursenses and emotions.
(13:51):
Whereas on the Internet you it'sa facsimile.
So they're digitised images, digitised things, but it's a
very flat 2 dimensional representation in many ways.
So in a sense, there's this mismatch between who we are as
biological animals and this sortof two dimensional Internet
version of ourselves. Yeah.
So can you just explain a littlebit about what the most common
(14:14):
forms that mismatch might take well?
I'm, I'm fascinated because I, Ilove technology and I'm, you
know, I'm fascinated by where it's going and, and problems
associated with it. I'm not, I'm not in favour of
the dead Internet theory. The dead Internet theory is as
soon as something has so much machine content that we stop
(14:36):
using, I don't think that will ever happen.
But there's this arms race and one of the biggest problems is
it's very, very difficult to prove that you're human online,
right? Because it's because it's so
easy, because of the way technology has advanced.
It's so easy if you have the right resources, processing
resources and and training models to create clones of
(15:01):
people now in in the Ted X talk that I did a couple of years ago
now, are we losing our identity technology because we're
outsourcing our knowledge and skills to technology now at the
simple level, sat NAV turn left,turn right, we get somewhere.
We don't know how we got there and we could probably couldn't
get there again without the SAT NAV.
With AI, it can now write our emails, it can do our
(15:23):
presentations, it can read reports.
It can do lots of things. And there are lots of Cos in, in
the US technology companies who are saying, well, OK, you know,
the internet's so, so complex. What you need is an AI personal
assistant who can be online. Now that's got lots of privacy
problems associated with it at the moment.
(15:45):
But so if I was talking to you online in let's say 1015 years
time, it might be your AI agent acting on your behalf and my
agent acting on my behalf. And so that's going to change
the picture of who we are again,because technology has moved on.
That's a great tangent that we've headed down now as we've
(16:08):
started off talking about how the Internet and the digital
world has affected the biological human identity.
And as we've discussed, over time, as people get more and
more digital, as you know, theiridentity demands more time
online. In that space, as you've raised
now with the sophistication constantly increasing about what
(16:29):
we can fake and pretend and outsource, it seems like the
next evolution that we should be, you know, we can discuss now
is what happens to the digital identity or the digital human
identity now that these large language models and agentic AI
and generative tools come about.Where is this going to go?
(16:50):
Colin, do you think so? I, I, there's lots of things
that I can't control. So I'm a firm believer in
saying, well, OK, what is it I can control and how can I
communicate that to, to other people?
So I, I come from a sustainability.
So you've got to be online, but you've got to be human as well.
And the reason why I've sort of homed in on digital detox
athlete is that because because it gets across.
(17:13):
We all know an athlete has to doall the right things
biologically to perform at theirbest.
They have to get enough sleep, eat the right food, but also
this idea that things take effort and take time.
So if we wanted to create a new,you know, digital detox habit,
we're going to have to spend some research suggests 66 days
(17:35):
to create a new habit, but it could be as long as 250 perhaps
or, or sure, but depending on oncomplexity.
So that's that's why I've gone it's this effort.
Everything we do in the real world takes effort, human
relationships and human connection really, really
important. Lots of studies have shown that
although we might be the most connected people in the world
(17:57):
online, it's not the the same thing.
It's still at a superficial level.
It doesn't replace human connection.
So hence I'm trying to get people offline to balance out
their time online so there's biological animals they can
survive. You said something there about
almost relying too much on the online space, and we've seen
(18:20):
with large language models what happens when people get so
reliant on a false reality. There's not even a person that
they can't handle it not being there.
Do you know what I mean? Like how does somebody from that
there? Was a terrible thing.
Reported a while ago that one ofthe tech companies, US tech
companies was had this idea of creating a best friend for
(18:42):
children, an AI best friend for children, and I think it was
shot down very quickly. It's so dystopian, yeah.
But it takes us away from our humanity.
We're very, very complex animals.
We we need all of the things around us.
If you take some of them away, then for some people they might
(19:04):
come unhinged, It might be really important.
Whereas for other people, they'll be fine with it.
We survive by being different from each other.
So, so we need all of those differences and we need that
complexity because at the end ofthe day, evolution has given us
the task. If we want to survive, we have
to survive in this real world that's changing all the time.
(19:25):
We possibly know everything about it.
We just have to know enough about the world in order to be
able to sigh. The past for us isn't about
remembering what happened in thepast.
Luckily for me, all the bad things I've done in the past,
all the people I've upset, all the hateful things I've said,
he's not online. Yeah, yeah.
(19:48):
No, absolutely. But.
The past is about helping us in the future, surviving the
future. Whereas online it's just a a
straight record of what happenedas if you're the same person 20
years ago, 30 years ago and and it's very easy to be a prisoner
to that, no. For sure.
And and you said something therearound there not being a record
(20:09):
of a lot of the stupid things that you've done.
And look, I'm the same, you know, and I've, I've had so many
conversations with people my ageabout the exact same thing.
And everybody seems to, to get to the same conclusion, which is
I'm so glad smartphones and everything wasn't around when,
when we were, we were that age. And it's not like, you know,
committing heinous crimes and, and things like that.
(20:32):
But it's just, we've seen that there's so much risk and, you
know, when everything's being documented at every given moment
could have substantial effects on your life that you of course,
obviously have not not meant it to be.
What would you say the psychological toll of knowing,
like if you're a young person now, you don't really know a
(20:54):
life before Internet, It's just a thing, like it's just part of
life. What kind of psychological toll
that puts on somebody, knowing that there is that unerasable
record of your past that, as yousaid, you can never escape from.
Like it's always part of you. You can't kind of reinvent
yourself somewhere else and do something else.
Well, I mean, there's been lots of cases where something a child
(21:17):
would have said as defined in Australia or the UK has affected
their job prospects with children.
The brain is growing and it grows in certain stages, but
some of the cognitive skills of self regulation and control are
some of the last things that children and young adults get.
And it goes into the 20s. So if you imagine then you're in
(21:40):
a a family and every bad thing you did at home, someone was
spilling the beans to all your friends, every word you said.
I mean, that amount of pressure,yeah, is incredible, isn't it?
I I I children. Have.
Got to be indeed children because we learn by mistakes and
the culture that I grew up in iscertainly not acceptable today,
(22:04):
no. For sure.
And I think that we could even say that about this point right
now that we're speaking. But you, you said something a
couple of minutes ago as well around potentially losing bits
of ourselves, whether it's psychologically or emotionally,
you know, the more we're kind ofinteracting with, whether it's a
large language model or, or a stranger online, we know that if
(22:24):
you're encountering a stranger offline, you still recognise
them as a person. You know, as you said a couple
of minutes ago, they're just this kind of flat 2D
representation of who knows whatit is that I don't know, someone
might have a picture of a tree. Instead of them.
You say you actually are just talking to a screen or, or
interacting with a screen, whichI can imagine it doesn't require
(22:49):
as much empathy and any of thosehuman emotions that form part of
your real person identity. Do you think or, or over the
time that you've been, I guess, looking into and exploring this
space, have you seen us becomingless empathetic as a society now
that we're so used to interacting with pixels rather
(23:10):
than strangers? Those skills about emotions and
those things, they're slower skills.
So if you read a book or if you talk to a person, you've got
enough time for those those feelings.
So we've got mirror neurons. So when I'm talking to you to
try and understand what it is you're saying in the fullest
(23:34):
sense, I've taken all the information, the way that you're
saying something, the intonation, your facial
expressions, if it's a face to face, I get lots of other
feelings, the way you're standing, those sort of things.
And in order for me to understand it, I have to almost
like mirror some of those thingsto understand what you're really
feeling. Are you upset?
(23:55):
Are you happy? Is there something you're not
saying? So then you come online and it's
very, very superficial. And so we make snap judgements.
So whether or not we're talking to a bot, an AI bot or a real
person, we're we're projecting the first level of humanity onto
them, but we're not going into the emotion.
(24:17):
That's why people can immediately react to someone
says something about some bad thing that's happened and we're
outraged. Instantly we're outraged, but it
might be 20 years old that thinghappened.
We've got no sense we've that that critical thinking hasn't
engaged. Yeah.
I mean, that is interesting because I think as we we touched
(24:38):
on a little while ago around that kind of social currency and
I think that that I'm an outraged person by this thing,
whatever it is, whoever you are,you might have seen something
and you can easily just move past it in three seconds, you
know, but signalling that you'reeither outraged or like so in
love with this thing. It's almost as we go back to
(25:00):
formula formulating this identity as the angry person or,
or the Super pleased person, which is again curating online
or that's not even your real identity.
Yeah, or. Proving and we believe in this
thing as opposed to that thing, yeah.
And having, yeah. Yeah.
(25:21):
Look, it's, it's, it's so interesting to think about.
And as you said, those algorithms are designed to keep
you embracing, let's say the outrage or the anger part of
your identity and then maybe spending enough time looking at
that you will become that personoffline.
But you've mentioned now around AI and I'd love for us to to
kind of dig around with that a little bit.
(25:43):
You're very aware, aware of it, and I guess you've spent quite a
bit of time thinking about whereit goes from here.
What personal and social implications for the human
identity, whether it's offline or online, do you imagine that
we need to be aware of due to where AI is now and then also
where it can potentially go? Yeah.
So I've I've already started talking about an AI detox.
(26:07):
OK. And it's different from a
digital detox. Digital detox is where you go
offline and AI detox is, is something you can do online.
If I go on ChatGPT and I say, look, I've created this post,
can you suggest some improvements?
ChatGPT, you're going to say brilliant, you've done
exceptionally well on this. Here are a few minor things.
(26:29):
And I look at it and I think, oh, that's interesting, but that
sounds really American. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So. AI is creating the new average.
So I, I, I experiment with it. And as we all know, I can't do
that as a British English speaker.
And that's not something I woulddo.
And it basically creates this, the same sort of thing.
But it's always that, oh, you'vedone great type of thing.
(26:50):
I think that we have to be very,very careful with AI.
If you outsource too much to AI and, and let's face it, big
companies are, are basically using AI as the next step of
digital transformation. And digital transformations
ultimately are about removing people really.
(27:11):
I mean, you know, making it lessexpensive.
But if we personally rely too much on AI, then what are our
skills as humans? So if you think about the future
of work and the future of humans, you know, it's a bit
sad. All technology makes life easier
for us. I mean, who would, who would do
the washing in the local stream anymore?
You know, washing machines are fantastic.
(27:32):
So we have to learn how to be biological animals.
We have to go down the gym because we don't move about
enough, or we have to go runningor we have to go walking.
We have to learn about cooking from real vegetables and food
because all of a sudden processed foods seems to be a
problem now. So for us to survive in the
future, we have to focus more onbeing human and being humans
(27:55):
together because that's that's going to be what's left for us.
Yeah. You, you, you mentioned
something there that I'd love for us to to look at now and it
was around the role of AI in theworkplace and, and whether
whether they're admitting to it or denying it or whether
something else is going on. We know that everybody right now
is seeing it and feeling it and hearing about it as this kind of
(28:19):
replacement for lower level tasks and people now, of course,
as we know this kind of technology increases in
sophistication exponentially. So it's, it's only a matter of
time till it's going up the ranks and then who know it goes.
I guess the point I wanted to tolook at through this was we know
that for so many people, a huge part of their identity is their
(28:40):
job. Yes.
And so if, if their employment, their purpose, or, or even their
job or their title is removed thanks to technology, that feels
like an even larger potential problem that technology is
indirectly causing to somebody. Except the problem now is not
(29:00):
just losing parts of yourself toonline.
You have lost a huge part of your offline self and how that
recovers if those avenues to replace it aren't there thanks
to AI. It's, it's interesting now what
we've got to say about AI is AI within certain fields where
they're heavily bounded, like the medical field, image
(29:22):
recognition, those sorts of things, absolutely fantastic.
They go through proper studies, field trials.
The benefits are enormous. But not all AI is the same.
A lot of people have identity. Who are you?
You know, your title is your, your badge in life, particularly
in the US, you are that person. Unfortunately, in the US you can
be sacked at a moment's notice. It's not true in Europe and the
(29:45):
UK and and certainly not in Australia, but it's very much
that badge of who we are. So in a sense, there's a lot of
hard work for people to actuallybe bigger than their job.
Now I've, I've worked for a lot of technology companies and
enjoyed working for a lot of technology companies, but my
first company was British Telecom International and I
(30:08):
spent 19 years there and I was institutionalised.
It took me two years to actuallyreconnect with, you know, who I
was to be able to make a move. And, and that's going to affect
a lot of people because if you, if you lose all those skills,
then what have you got left? And So what an AI detox is about
(30:29):
deciding what are the skills that you need personally, as a
professional, as a person, and then you need to practise.
We might and we work hard on something, problem solving, but
we don't have the answer. And then all of a sudden the
next day after a sleep or when we go for a run, the answer pops
into our mind. That's because our unconscious
(30:50):
has worked on all the assumptions and come up with it.
But what if we don't have all ofthat, those knowledge and skills
for it to work on? So our ability to be as good at
problem solving and critical thinking is diminished if we
don't practise those things. But all of this is hard work.
All of this is hard work and youknow, oh, it won't happen.
(31:12):
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
And we've got a tendency to takethe easy option.
That's such such an interesting paradox that you've just
highlighted there around doing stuff, let's say the human way
is is hard work. And when you've you've got all
these tools in front of you giving you the Super easy
option, obviously it's super, super tempting.
(31:33):
But as you said a little while ago, too, like people are
handing over more and more and more of themselves to technology
and losing those parts of their identity that what does happen
when it's gone, You know, everyone's outsourced everything
to technology. What do we have left?
Like how far can we go? So I'm.
I'm a fan of science fiction because I think science fiction
(31:53):
works on sort of really weird ideas and sees how sees how they
go. One version of humanity is that
we're not really very good at looking after ourselves.
I mean, there are, you know, there, there's inequalities,
there's wars, there's all of these other problems. 1 outcome
is that at some point in the future, and we don't know when,
(32:14):
the AI sort of funds us. Yeah.
And we and we might be perfectlyhappy with whatever it does for
us. It's a simpler life and it's not
a human. Life, no.
And I think that it takes me right back to certain biological
beings have got that gift of sentience, being able to ponder
(32:34):
what our station is not only in life, but kind of in in life
itself. And then I think that, yeah,
look this, you look at the positive value, it's.
Hope because the current versions of AI, they calculate
the past, yes, they they don't really know the relationship of
(32:55):
all of those things in the past and certainly the past can't
predict the future. They have no concept of self and
therefore they have no real concept of the reality that
they're in. It's not to say that at some
point in the future they might, but they don't.
Yeah, I was just I. Was just thinking that like how
how far off do you reckon we aretill they they get sophisticated
(33:15):
enough to be aware of their own shortcomings and kind of address
that at. The moment the nuclear powered
data centres they've got plannedin order to get enough
processing power is, is on a trajectory where you know,
climate change is, is going to be a real problem, more of a
problem than it currently is. But every six months
(33:37):
approximately, there's there's something new happening.
And you, you can't predict, there's this thing called
general intelligence. You can't, can't predict when it
might happen. But I'm of the view that
actually real intelligence is biological and it's about
testing in in, in this world. And you mentioned it, the great
(33:57):
thing about what humans can do, we can make a decision based on
no information at all. In this world.
We'll go with something because we have to.
That's the way we're designed. We can think about things that
don't exist. We can think about future
things. Now, it's all influenced by what
we already know. But there are some marvellous
(34:18):
thinkers who think that step beyond.
And so as humans, the hope is that because we're in the real
world and because that other world is facsimile, then it's
missing out. And I know a lot of the AI
companies are now thinking aboutgetting AI down into the robotic
level. So if they can re experience the
real world, because they've run out of the Internet data, human
(34:41):
data to work on, and that data has been polluted by robotic
data. Yes, of course.
So. Future generations of large
language models, you know, soon,as soon as you train yourself on
yourself for previous versions of yourself, it all rains up in
a mess some way. So yeah, so there's a robotic
shift in order to try and experience this world.
(35:02):
So there's a little bit of Pope and time for Yeah, look.
We'll definitely keep that, thathopeful mindset.
I think and he kind of alluded to something there, which was
what sets us apart is that ability to take previous data
sets and information, recognise patterns, put it all together
essentially and imagine something that may not exist.
(35:23):
Now, as you've also said, and, and we've seen around these kind
of AI tools, LLMS, whatever theyare, they're just aggregating
what exists. Potentially one day it gets to
the point where it can imagine in a, in I guess a biological
way. I don't know, that will be a bit
scary because then where does that leave humans?
But I guess the hopeful part of it as well is we do eventually
(35:45):
get some sort of guardrails thatrein this in a little bit and
corral it into certain avenues, as you said, around medical and
things like that, that could have much better positive
outcomes for humanity. Yeah, I'm.
I'm going to have to be an optimist because the alternative
is not not as good. No, it's, it's definitely,
(36:05):
definitely not as good as we could become, you know, literal
cyborgs with, you know, tools inour minds and in our bodies and
things like, what will a human identity look like into the
future if that's the case? So, so let's look at the
positives first. There are, there are a lot of
people who through no fault of their own, their bodies don't
(36:26):
function in the same way that they would like them to.
And the ability to have an implant, and this is the way
it's being proposed, gives them the ability to, let's say, walk
again to, to do lots of wonderful things.
And, and they're really, really great.
This idea though, and that's relatively simple because it
uses the motor part of the brain, we have no idea what
(36:48):
consciousness is, or to be fair,how the brain works properly.
Now. We've got more idea than we had
10 years ago and 20 years ago, and in 10 years time we'll have
more idea than than now. But it's incredibly complex.
The human brain takes about a millionth of the power of a
(37:08):
supercomputer with roughly the same processing power.
So. A biological brain and all
animals brains are doing something slightly different,
but they're all potentially conscious that conscious beings,
even down to the tiniest animals.
So there isn't any way that thatwill happen in a sort of a
Cyborg sense anytime soon. I always relate it to I'm still
(37:32):
waiting for self driving cars and that's been about for what,
20 years? I can try.
And do something really complicated.
Yeah, I tell you what, it's funny, I remember, I remember
being a kid and I don't know if they had it in the UK or not,
but we had this show here. It's called Beyond 2000.
And obviously it was before 2000came, right.
And like it was hypothesising what would happen after the year
(37:53):
2000. And I remember the intro because
I look it up on YouTube every now and again and it will have
like a a robot. I think it's pushing a kid on a
swing, you know, so it's like the parents are now giving their
play time to a robot. But then there was like, yeah,
the flying car and, and some of the technology is like long
surpassed by now. But yeah, I think flying cars
have been, you know, kind of imagined forever, haven't they?
(38:16):
Yeah. But flying taxis are just
starting to get licences now. Really.
Yeah, MIT in in the US has got robots to run, which is quite,
it's quite complex. And there's that dog.
Are we talking like, you know, the Boston Dynamics?
Yeah. The Boston Dynamics Dog.
(38:37):
That's very scary as. As time goes on, the robotic
things are are happening, but the great thing about the future
is that predicting time scales, as you say from you know flying
cars and all that sort of thing is incredibly difficult.
But in the Internet, because it's an artificial construct, A
relatively simple one, then things can appear to move much
(38:57):
faster because it's a almost a controlled environment as
whereas in, in, in the real world, who knows what's really
happening. I mean, we, we haven't even got
to the bottom of quantum theory yet and how it shapes the
physical world that we know. I grew up learning about
electricity. Now I have to comprehend the
fact that electrons probably exist within the outer shells of
(39:21):
atoms, atoms. But we're using it so we don't
have to know everything and there's tonnes of stuff that we
don't know. Yeah, look that that's a little
bit above my, my mental capacityto understand that stuff, but it
sounds, it sounds quite serious.But yeah, look, a lot, lot to
think about there on on how our identity started, how they've
(39:43):
been changed and and affected through technology and where
they could potentially go. And I think I'm going to be on
the same campus. You, I want to be hopeful about
this because as you said, the alternative is is too, too bad
to think about just to finish upthen Colin, what's coming up for
you and, and where can people follow what you're up to?
So. As a digital detox coach, I'm
(40:05):
going to say the Internet because we all have to be online
to live in the in this world. So the the website is
www.thedigitaldetoxcoach.com. If, if people would like have a
look at the Ted X talk, because the introduction of the Ted X
talk is about imagine a possiblefuture.
And it was done a couple of years ago, but I, I was already
(40:27):
familiar with AI before it sort of hit.
And so you imagine the future and then we end up is that
actually it's about human sanctuaries at the end.
So have a look at the Ted eggs, but all the other information's
on on the website. Awesome, Colin, you've given us
quite a lot to think about. Thank you so much for joining
us. Thank.
You for having me? For more info on what we've
(40:48):
discussed today, check out the show notes.
If you enjoyed this one, you cansubscribe to Ruined by the
Internet on your favourite podcast app and help spread the
word by sharing this episode or leaving a review.
I'm Gareth King, see you next time.
Welcome to Ruined by the Internet.
I'm Gareth King. Today we're asking, has the
Internet ruined the human identity?
It promised a world of self expression and connection, but
instead it's encouraged us to create performative versions of
ourselves, curated by algorithmsand validated by likes to help
us find the reality. We're joined by Colin Corby,
digital detox coach, technologist and CEO of
(00:23):
Technology Well Being. Colin, thank you so much for
joining us and welcome to the show.
Thank you for inviting me, I'm very much looking forward.
To it. Yeah, me too.
But before we get into it, can you tell us a bit about the work
that you do and the journey that's LED you to this point?
So I'll try and keep it short. When I was in my mid 30s I had a
(00:46):
fantastic job in technology. Lots of world firsts, great
people to work with, but I was suffering from stress.
So what was happening is the heart rate went up and up and up
until I started to see stars and, and I passed out a few
times at work. So loads of tests at the time
they said inconclusive results. So I thought well what am I
going to do because I've got to do something.
(01:06):
So I remember being a good swimmer because I live near the
border and so I thought, ah, I'dbetter get myself fit then.
So I went swimming couple of lengths, absolutely wrecked.
It was a tipping point. I had to do something.
So I persevered with the swimming.
I got fitter, I took lessons to learn all the strokes.
(01:28):
I started racing, started triathlon.
To cut a Long story short, I ended up doing 4 Ironman
triathlons and and winning county titles in swimming and
stuff like that. But it was in doing the Iron Man
I just realised that how you talk to yourself can change the
way that you think and change what you can do.
That fascinated me. So the psychology aspects
(01:50):
started to set in and then I gotthe opportunity much later on to
leave the corporate world and I was going for some interviews
and one or two other things and and I was being guided by a
coach and I said you know what, I don't really want to do this.
I said I love technology, I lovesport and the thing about the
mind and why am I on my, my iPhone so much so, and I
(02:13):
researched that and I thought, yeah, I can just smash all of
the three things together and, you know, work out what's going
on, but actually be able to coach, give talks, help other
people. You've previously spoken at TE
DX around the human identity andthe effects of of technology and
(02:33):
kind of our online selves and our true selves.
Do you think that our online selves and our offline selves,
do you think the line between those is, is so much more
blurred these days? Do people really realise that
they're even curating an online identity, or do they just see it
as an extension of themselves? I think that most people now
(02:57):
must curate their online presence because we've, we've
had it long enough. So I, I curate my online
presence, I use it mostly for work activities and very little
for personal activities. And it's curated.
So I think everybody knows that it's curated.
A lot of people now realise thatactually it's self censorship,
(03:19):
right? Because there's a record.
Every website you've ever been, everything you've ever
purchased, every message you've ever sent, every post you've
ever sent is recorded as online memories.
So we basically self censorship says the whole hope things I
would never say online as if I was in the real world with with
(03:40):
people. So self censorship, now we're
quite lucky in the sense that wecan observe what's happening in
China and that has a very interesting way of self
censorship, whereas we're we're being influenced by
predominantly the US. In preparing for this talk, I
said, well, we're going to talk about the Internet and then
we're going to talk about our identities.
So if we look at the Internet first, well, what is it?
(04:02):
Well the Internet today isn't what it was last year, or the
year before, or the year before.The Internet today has a large
percentage of non human content.The Internet is an artificial
construct. It's the most complex thing
humans have ever created, but it's it's a facsimile of the
(04:23):
real world. Yeah, for sure.
And I think that that was kind of where I was just heading
towards with the reference to the the lines blurring, as you
said, that being the facsimile of the real world.
I can remember a time there was no Internet.
And so it was a thing that came into my life.
My, my entity was an offline identity that the Internet got
added into at the time. And then I think over time, as
(04:46):
it's kind of become so much moreall encompassing across
everything, as you said there, depending on on where you are
online or or what you're doing, people are self censoring and
curating like a different version of their identity.
So I'd love for us to get into how maintaining all of those
different versions of your offline identity in an online
(05:08):
space can either a lure togetheror be become such a huge part of
your identity that the offline part is either equal or less
than the sum of those parts. So there's a lot to kind of get
into there, yeah. So the thing to say is that who
you are, who I am, it's got 2 components. 1 is who other
(05:30):
people believe we are. So these multiple curated
personas of ourselves, that's how other people are perceiving
us in the online world. That's how governments
perceivers, job search companies, algorithms.
The other thing to think about is that there's an infinite
amount of information on the Internet, more than we can
(05:50):
possibly access. And we're being fed feeds,
curated feeds from all the different apps and algorithms.
So they shape what we experienceon the Internet.
Now if we come down to our cells, evolution thought it wise
for biological animals to have this conscious experience of
(06:10):
self. We experience the now and and we
predict the future based on all of our experiences.
So if most of our experiences are online, then those, our
experiences are shaping who we are.
And if you like a lot of people,if they spend predominantly most
of their time online, then most of the experiences are online.
(06:34):
And that shapes who they are more so than when you switch off
online, you go out for a bit with mates, you have a good
laugh or you play a sport or youdo something in, I can call it
the real world, but we we have aperception of the real world.
So what I'm interested in doing is getting that balance of
getting people to have more human contact that they can hang
(06:57):
on to who they are. But we know in in a non Internet
world we were a different personat work to who we were in a
Sports Club, who we were down the pub, who we are to our
families. So that that part of it isn't
new. No, absolutely.
And I think you touched on something there around, you
know, if you're predominantly experiencing the online or the,
(07:19):
or the digital world, those experiences are shaping who you
are both online and then beyond.But one thing I'd, I'd love to
kind of get into about that is we know that people are curating
their online selves. And so, you know, everybody
knows that there's a lot of discourse around mental health
problems that might come out of social media, whether it's
(07:42):
people getting body image issuesand things like that, you know,
jealousy about it seems like everyone else has a perfect
life, et cetera. And we know that that's because
you're only seeing everyone elses highlight reel O if you're
if you're taking in that their identity is this most perfect,
picture perfect life. You know, everything seems
flawless. That's obviously going to give
(08:03):
you some feelings of inadequacy in the online space that are
then going to translate into theoffline space potentially.
But how do you think that likes and shares became such an
important and valued form of digital currency for our self
worth? So.
At the root of it is with socialanimals, part of the success of
(08:24):
Homo sapiens is that we're social animals.
That's a safety thing, a sense of safety.
And within a group, everybody is, is always trying to pitch
themselves where they fit into that group.
You know how high they are, what's your, what's your
standing at, those sorts of things.
And, and those instincts, that social behaviour that we've all
got have migrated to the Internet and it's migrated to
(08:47):
all the likes. So particularly as you get
older, you get less worried about it, but.
Yeah, of course, you know. When when you're young, you're
worried about everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And. And but if you're missing the
physical contact with friends, you know the going out and the
the real world activities. And if you're focused solely on
this, then, you know, if people don't like you, then that has
(09:09):
serious consequences because that's, that makes you feel
instinctively unsafe because we're social animals.
We we need to be liked, we need to have a social standing.
And so it's just migrated to theInternet and it has horrific
implications for people that arevery sensitive to that.
Yeah, look, that's, that's perfect there.
(09:31):
The way that you've summed it upas it's, it's kind of a
biological thing that's instead of playing out in that primal
structure where you might have had, I don't know, 2 lions or
something fighting and that's their competition or, you know,
you, we know animals do mating rituals and things like that.
But in the online space, as you've called out, you don't
need to actually be anything other than what you are in that
(09:53):
one little moment, which I can imagine is just fragmenting
people's identities beyond and all sorts of repair I.
Heard at schools in You have a career talk at school.
What do you want to be an influencer?
Yeah, Yeah, yeah. It's, it's something, something
interesting in there too, because I think that humans love
influence. And no matter what we're doing,
(10:14):
you know, as you said, even in your peer group, you know,
there's always that leader of the group and everyone kind of
settles into their structure andthe hierarchy offline.
And I think that the influencer is just kind of a globally
reaching, very easy way to kind of sort and section yourself
into different things on just a crazy scale that, you know,
we've never seen seen before theother.
(10:36):
The other interesting thing is in the real world, if you want
to be a sports person, a musician, an academic, whatever
it is, it's hard work. It's a novel hard work,
everything to do with technologies about keeping the
appearance of everything being easy.
So if you see the influences andyou, you see this perfect world
(10:58):
that they have and then you think, oh, I could be that all I
need to do is tweet my videos orcurate myself a little bit more
or find a niche or just be lucky.
But the sad, sad thing is a lot of influencers suffer enormous
mental health issues because once they're on the treadmill,
they then have to carry on finding content.
(11:20):
Had a holiday in Italy and we went by the it's by the lakes.
We went by the lakes. And there were so many young
people who were there purely to take the Instagram shots.
And yeah, totally. Yeah, look, I've I've seen, I've
been out for nice dinners with, with my my fiance and, and we're
(11:43):
so like keen just to get this delicious food and and taste it.
And we've seen tables next to us, you know, people young,
younger than us and, and with, with kind of mini tripods and
doing full shoots and things around the food that I'm
thinking, Oh my God, this incredibly amazing tasting stuff
is just getting cold and, and you're not even eating it.
(12:04):
And that, like you said, it's just all about the, the
pictures. And I think for me, being a
little bit older than growing upjust into that world as a, a
natural thing, like I don't see the appeal in it.
And I would almost feel a littlebit awkward giving myself an
identity like that, a digital identity.
But I guess if you're doing thatto a community or followers who
(12:25):
are all into that kind of thing,you could see how that
performance of a self in the digital space could influence
our own core beliefs and sense of self.
As you said, the demand to keep doing that, you may feel that
that becomes who you are, not just this very special curated.
And I don't want to say fake because it's real people doing
(12:47):
it, but it's not like a real representation of of the whole
you. How do you think that just so
much emphasis on the influence side of ourselves in the in the
digital space, How is that affecting people offline?
Like have you, have you seen any, anything around how it
affects those influences? As you said, when they're on the
(13:08):
treadmill trying to come up withcontent, how is it changing
people? So what I've seen with
influences is the stress, so theincreasing stress of always
having to perform. And quite often an influencer
feels so stressed and burnt out that they go offline for a while
(13:28):
and then they come back. So there's a, there's a burnout
associated with that in the sameway there's burnout associated
with working all hours in our jobs and things.
But there's a big difference. You see you and I, because we're
biological animals, our sense ofself is a biological sense of
self. It involves the body, involves
the mind, it involves all of oursenses and emotions.
(13:51):
Whereas on the Internet you it'sa facsimile.
So they're digitised images, digitised things, but it's a
very flat 2 dimensional representation in many ways.
So in a sense, there's this mismatch between who we are as
biological animals and this sortof two dimensional Internet
version of ourselves. Yeah.
So can you just explain a littlebit about what the most common
(14:14):
forms that mismatch might take well?
I'm, I'm fascinated because I, Ilove technology and I'm, you
know, I'm fascinated by where it's going and, and problems
associated with it. I'm not, I'm not in favour of
the dead Internet theory. The dead Internet theory is as
soon as something has so much machine content that we stop
(14:36):
using, I don't think that will ever happen.
But there's this arms race and one of the biggest problems is
it's very, very difficult to prove that you're human online,
right? Because it's because it's so
easy, because of the way technology has advanced.
It's so easy if you have the right resources, processing
resources and and training models to create clones of
(15:01):
people now in in the Ted X talk that I did a couple of years ago
now, are we losing our identity technology because we're
outsourcing our knowledge and skills to technology now at the
simple level, sat NAV turn left,turn right, we get somewhere.
We don't know how we got there and we could probably couldn't
get there again without the SAT NAV.
With AI, it can now write our emails, it can do our
(15:23):
presentations, it can read reports.
It can do lots of things. And there are lots of Cos in, in
the US technology companies who are saying, well, OK, you know,
the internet's so, so complex. What you need is an AI personal
assistant who can be online. Now that's got lots of privacy
problems associated with it at the moment.
(15:45):
But so if I was talking to you online in let's say 1015 years
time, it might be your AI agent acting on your behalf and my
agent acting on my behalf. And so that's going to change
the picture of who we are again,because technology has moved on.
That's a great tangent that we've headed down now as we've
(16:08):
started off talking about how the Internet and the digital
world has affected the biological human identity.
And as we've discussed, over time, as people get more and
more digital, as you know, theiridentity demands more time
online. In that space, as you've raised
now with the sophistication constantly increasing about what
(16:29):
we can fake and pretend and outsource, it seems like the
next evolution that we should be, you know, we can discuss now
is what happens to the digital identity or the digital human
identity now that these large language models and agentic AI
and generative tools come about.Where is this going to go?
(16:50):
Colin, do you think so? I, I, there's lots of things
that I can't control. So I'm a firm believer in
saying, well, OK, what is it I can control and how can I
communicate that to, to other people?
So I, I come from a sustainability.
So you've got to be online, but you've got to be human as well.
And the reason why I've sort of homed in on digital detox
athlete is that because because it gets across.
(17:13):
We all know an athlete has to doall the right things
biologically to perform at theirbest.
They have to get enough sleep, eat the right food, but also
this idea that things take effort and take time.
So if we wanted to create a new,you know, digital detox habit,
we're going to have to spend some research suggests 66 days
(17:35):
to create a new habit, but it could be as long as 250 perhaps
or, or sure, but depending on oncomplexity.
So that's that's why I've gone it's this effort.
Everything we do in the real world takes effort, human
relationships and human connection really, really
important. Lots of studies have shown that
although we might be the most connected people in the world
(17:57):
online, it's not the the same thing.
It's still at a superficial level.
It doesn't replace human connection.
So hence I'm trying to get people offline to balance out
their time online so there's biological animals they can
survive. You said something there about
almost relying too much on the online space, and we've seen
(18:20):
with large language models what happens when people get so
reliant on a false reality. There's not even a person that
they can't handle it not being there.
Do you know what I mean? Like how does somebody from that
there? Was a terrible thing.
Reported a while ago that one ofthe tech companies, US tech
companies was had this idea of creating a best friend for
(18:42):
children, an AI best friend for children, and I think it was
shot down very quickly. It's so dystopian, yeah.
But it takes us away from our humanity.
We're very, very complex animals.
We we need all of the things around us.
If you take some of them away, then for some people they might
(19:04):
come unhinged, It might be really important.
Whereas for other people, they'll be fine with it.
We survive by being different from each other.
So, so we need all of those differences and we need that
complexity because at the end ofthe day, evolution has given us
the task. If we want to survive, we have
to survive in this real world that's changing all the time.
(19:25):
We possibly know everything about it.
We just have to know enough about the world in order to be
able to sigh. The past for us isn't about
remembering what happened in thepast.
Luckily for me, all the bad things I've done in the past,
all the people I've upset, all the hateful things I've said,
he's not online. Yeah, yeah.
(19:48):
No, absolutely. But.
The past is about helping us in the future, surviving the
future. Whereas online it's just a a
straight record of what happenedas if you're the same person 20
years ago, 30 years ago and and it's very easy to be a prisoner
to that, no. For sure.
And and you said something therearound there not being a record
(20:09):
of a lot of the stupid things that you've done.
And look, I'm the same, you know, and I've, I've had so many
conversations with people my ageabout the exact same thing.
And everybody seems to, to get to the same conclusion, which is
I'm so glad smartphones and everything wasn't around when,
when we were, we were that age. And it's not like, you know,
committing heinous crimes and, and things like that.
(20:32):
But it's just, we've seen that there's so much risk and, you
know, when everything's being documented at every given moment
could have substantial effects on your life that you of course,
obviously have not not meant it to be.
What would you say the psychological toll of knowing,
like if you're a young person now, you don't really know a
(20:54):
life before Internet, It's just a thing, like it's just part of
life. What kind of psychological toll
that puts on somebody, knowing that there is that unerasable
record of your past that, as yousaid, you can never escape from.
Like it's always part of you. You can't kind of reinvent
yourself somewhere else and do something else.
Well, I mean, there's been lots of cases where something a child
(21:17):
would have said as defined in Australia or the UK has affected
their job prospects with children.
The brain is growing and it grows in certain stages, but
some of the cognitive skills of self regulation and control are
some of the last things that children and young adults get.
And it goes into the 20s. So if you imagine then you're in
(21:40):
a a family and every bad thing you did at home, someone was
spilling the beans to all your friends, every word you said.
I mean, that amount of pressure,yeah, is incredible, isn't it?
I I I children. Have.
Got to be indeed children because we learn by mistakes and
the culture that I grew up in iscertainly not acceptable today,
(22:04):
no. For sure.
And I think that we could even say that about this point right
now that we're speaking. But you, you said something a
couple of minutes ago as well around potentially losing bits
of ourselves, whether it's psychologically or emotionally,
you know, the more we're kind ofinteracting with, whether it's a
large language model or, or a stranger online, we know that if
(22:24):
you're encountering a stranger offline, you still recognise
them as a person. You know, as you said a couple
of minutes ago, they're just this kind of flat 2D
representation of who knows whatit is that I don't know, someone
might have a picture of a tree. Instead of them.
You say you actually are just talking to a screen or, or
interacting with a screen, whichI can imagine it doesn't require
(22:49):
as much empathy and any of thosehuman emotions that form part of
your real person identity. Do you think or, or over the
time that you've been, I guess, looking into and exploring this
space, have you seen us becomingless empathetic as a society now
that we're so used to interacting with pixels rather
(23:10):
than strangers? Those skills about emotions and
those things, they're slower skills.
So if you read a book or if you talk to a person, you've got
enough time for those those feelings.
So we've got mirror neurons. So when I'm talking to you to
try and understand what it is you're saying in the fullest
(23:34):
sense, I've taken all the information, the way that you're
saying something, the intonation, your facial
expressions, if it's a face to face, I get lots of other
feelings, the way you're standing, those sort of things.
And in order for me to understand it, I have to almost
like mirror some of those thingsto understand what you're really
feeling. Are you upset?
(23:55):
Are you happy? Is there something you're not
saying? So then you come online and it's
very, very superficial. And so we make snap judgements.
So whether or not we're talking to a bot, an AI bot or a real
person, we're we're projecting the first level of humanity onto
them, but we're not going into the emotion.
(24:17):
That's why people can immediately react to someone
says something about some bad thing that's happened and we're
outraged. Instantly we're outraged, but it
might be 20 years old that thinghappened.
We've got no sense we've that that critical thinking hasn't
engaged. Yeah.
I mean, that is interesting because I think as we we touched
(24:38):
on a little while ago around that kind of social currency and
I think that that I'm an outraged person by this thing,
whatever it is, whoever you are,you might have seen something
and you can easily just move past it in three seconds, you
know, but signalling that you'reeither outraged or like so in
love with this thing. It's almost as we go back to
(25:00):
formula formulating this identity as the angry person or,
or the Super pleased person, which is again curating online
or that's not even your real identity.
Yeah, or. Proving and we believe in this
thing as opposed to that thing, yeah.
And having, yeah. Yeah.
(25:21):
Look, it's, it's, it's so interesting to think about.
And as you said, those algorithms are designed to keep
you embracing, let's say the outrage or the anger part of
your identity and then maybe spending enough time looking at
that you will become that personoffline.
But you've mentioned now around AI and I'd love for us to to
kind of dig around with that a little bit.
(25:43):
You're very aware, aware of it, and I guess you've spent quite a
bit of time thinking about whereit goes from here.
What personal and social implications for the human
identity, whether it's offline or online, do you imagine that
we need to be aware of due to where AI is now and then also
where it can potentially go? Yeah.
So I've I've already started talking about an AI detox.
(26:07):
OK. And it's different from a
digital detox. Digital detox is where you go
offline and AI detox is, is something you can do online.
If I go on ChatGPT and I say, look, I've created this post,
can you suggest some improvements?
ChatGPT, you're going to say brilliant, you've done
exceptionally well on this. Here are a few minor things.
(26:29):
And I look at it and I think, oh, that's interesting, but that
sounds really American. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So. AI is creating the new average.
So I, I, I experiment with it. And as we all know, I can't do
that as a British English speaker.
And that's not something I woulddo.
And it basically creates this, the same sort of thing.
But it's always that, oh, you'vedone great type of thing.
(26:50):
I think that we have to be very,very careful with AI.
If you outsource too much to AI and, and let's face it, big
companies are, are basically using AI as the next step of
digital transformation. And digital transformations
ultimately are about removing people really.
(27:11):
I mean, you know, making it lessexpensive.
But if we personally rely too much on AI, then what are our
skills as humans? So if you think about the future
of work and the future of humans, you know, it's a bit
sad. All technology makes life easier
for us. I mean, who would, who would do
the washing in the local stream anymore?
You know, washing machines are fantastic.
(27:32):
So we have to learn how to be biological animals.
We have to go down the gym because we don't move about
enough, or we have to go runningor we have to go walking.
We have to learn about cooking from real vegetables and food
because all of a sudden processed foods seems to be a
problem now. So for us to survive in the
future, we have to focus more onbeing human and being humans
(27:55):
together because that's that's going to be what's left for us.
Yeah. You, you, you mentioned
something there that I'd love for us to to look at now and it
was around the role of AI in theworkplace and, and whether
whether they're admitting to it or denying it or whether
something else is going on. We know that everybody right now
is seeing it and feeling it and hearing about it as this kind of
(28:19):
replacement for lower level tasks and people now, of course,
as we know this kind of technology increases in
sophistication exponentially. So it's, it's only a matter of
time till it's going up the ranks and then who know it goes.
I guess the point I wanted to tolook at through this was we know
that for so many people, a huge part of their identity is their
(28:40):
job. Yes.
And so if, if their employment, their purpose, or, or even their
job or their title is removed thanks to technology, that feels
like an even larger potential problem that technology is
indirectly causing to somebody. Except the problem now is not
(29:00):
just losing parts of yourself toonline.
You have lost a huge part of your offline self and how that
recovers if those avenues to replace it aren't there thanks
to AI. It's, it's interesting now what
we've got to say about AI is AI within certain fields where
they're heavily bounded, like the medical field, image
(29:22):
recognition, those sorts of things, absolutely fantastic.
They go through proper studies, field trials.
The benefits are enormous. But not all AI is the same.
A lot of people have identity. Who are you?
You know, your title is your, your badge in life, particularly
in the US, you are that person. Unfortunately, in the US you can
be sacked at a moment's notice. It's not true in Europe and the
(29:45):
UK and and certainly not in Australia, but it's very much
that badge of who we are. So in a sense, there's a lot of
hard work for people to actuallybe bigger than their job.
Now I've, I've worked for a lot of technology companies and
enjoyed working for a lot of technology companies, but my
first company was British Telecom International and I
(30:08):
spent 19 years there and I was institutionalised.
It took me two years to actuallyreconnect with, you know, who I
was to be able to make a move. And, and that's going to affect
a lot of people because if you, if you lose all those skills,
then what have you got left? And So what an AI detox is about
(30:29):
deciding what are the skills that you need personally, as a
professional, as a person, and then you need to practise.
We might and we work hard on something, problem solving, but
we don't have the answer. And then all of a sudden the
next day after a sleep or when we go for a run, the answer pops
into our mind. That's because our unconscious
(30:50):
has worked on all the assumptions and come up with it.
But what if we don't have all ofthat, those knowledge and skills
for it to work on? So our ability to be as good at
problem solving and critical thinking is diminished if we
don't practise those things. But all of this is hard work.
All of this is hard work and youknow, oh, it won't happen.
(31:12):
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
And we've got a tendency to takethe easy option.
That's such such an interesting paradox that you've just
highlighted there around doing stuff, let's say the human way
is is hard work. And when you've you've got all
these tools in front of you giving you the Super easy
option, obviously it's super, super tempting.
(31:33):
But as you said a little while ago, too, like people are
handing over more and more and more of themselves to technology
and losing those parts of their identity that what does happen
when it's gone, You know, everyone's outsourced everything
to technology. What do we have left?
Like how far can we go? So I'm.
I'm a fan of science fiction because I think science fiction
(31:53):
works on sort of really weird ideas and sees how sees how they
go. One version of humanity is that
we're not really very good at looking after ourselves.
I mean, there are, you know, there, there's inequalities,
there's wars, there's all of these other problems. 1 outcome
is that at some point in the future, and we don't know when,
(32:14):
the AI sort of funds us. Yeah.
And we and we might be perfectlyhappy with whatever it does for
us. It's a simpler life and it's not
a human. Life, no.
And I think that it takes me right back to certain biological
beings have got that gift of sentience, being able to ponder
(32:34):
what our station is not only in life, but kind of in in life
itself. And then I think that, yeah,
look this, you look at the positive value, it's.
Hope because the current versions of AI, they calculate
the past, yes, they they don't really know the relationship of
(32:55):
all of those things in the past and certainly the past can't
predict the future. They have no concept of self and
therefore they have no real concept of the reality that
they're in. It's not to say that at some
point in the future they might, but they don't.
Yeah, I was just I. Was just thinking that like how
how far off do you reckon we aretill they they get sophisticated
(33:15):
enough to be aware of their own shortcomings and kind of address
that at. The moment the nuclear powered
data centres they've got plannedin order to get enough
processing power is, is on a trajectory where you know,
climate change is, is going to be a real problem, more of a
problem than it currently is. But every six months
(33:37):
approximately, there's there's something new happening.
And you, you can't predict, there's this thing called
general intelligence. You can't, can't predict when it
might happen. But I'm of the view that
actually real intelligence is biological and it's about
testing in in, in this world. And you mentioned it, the great
(33:57):
thing about what humans can do, we can make a decision based on
no information at all. In this world.
We'll go with something because we have to.
That's the way we're designed. We can think about things that
don't exist. We can think about future
things. Now, it's all influenced by what
we already know. But there are some marvellous
(34:18):
thinkers who think that step beyond.
And so as humans, the hope is that because we're in the real
world and because that other world is facsimile, then it's
missing out. And I know a lot of the AI
companies are now thinking aboutgetting AI down into the robotic
level. So if they can re experience the
real world, because they've run out of the Internet data, human
(34:41):
data to work on, and that data has been polluted by robotic
data. Yes, of course.
So. Future generations of large
language models, you know, soon,as soon as you train yourself on
yourself for previous versions of yourself, it all rains up in
a mess some way. So yeah, so there's a robotic
shift in order to try and experience this world.
(35:02):
So there's a little bit of Pope and time for Yeah, look.
We'll definitely keep that, thathopeful mindset.
I think and he kind of alluded to something there, which was
what sets us apart is that ability to take previous data
sets and information, recognise patterns, put it all together
essentially and imagine something that may not exist.
(35:23):
Now, as you've also said, and, and we've seen around these kind
of AI tools, LLMS, whatever theyare, they're just aggregating
what exists. Potentially one day it gets to
the point where it can imagine in a, in I guess a biological
way. I don't know, that will be a bit
scary because then where does that leave humans?
But I guess the hopeful part of it as well is we do eventually
(35:45):
get some sort of guardrails thatrein this in a little bit and
corral it into certain avenues, as you said, around medical and
things like that, that could have much better positive
outcomes for humanity. Yeah, I'm.
I'm going to have to be an optimist because the alternative
is not not as good. No, it's, it's definitely,
(36:05):
definitely not as good as we could become, you know, literal
cyborgs with, you know, tools inour minds and in our bodies and
things like, what will a human identity look like into the
future if that's the case? So, so let's look at the
positives first. There are, there are a lot of
people who through no fault of their own, their bodies don't
(36:26):
function in the same way that they would like them to.
And the ability to have an implant, and this is the way
it's being proposed, gives them the ability to, let's say, walk
again to, to do lots of wonderful things.
And, and they're really, really great.
This idea though, and that's relatively simple because it
uses the motor part of the brain, we have no idea what
(36:48):
consciousness is, or to be fair,how the brain works properly.
Now. We've got more idea than we had
10 years ago and 20 years ago, and in 10 years time we'll have
more idea than than now. But it's incredibly complex.
The human brain takes about a millionth of the power of a
(37:08):
supercomputer with roughly the same processing power.
So. A biological brain and all
animals brains are doing something slightly different,
but they're all potentially conscious that conscious beings,
even down to the tiniest animals.
So there isn't any way that thatwill happen in a sort of a
Cyborg sense anytime soon. I always relate it to I'm still
(37:32):
waiting for self driving cars and that's been about for what,
20 years? I can try.
And do something really complicated.
Yeah, I tell you what, it's funny, I remember, I remember
being a kid and I don't know if they had it in the UK or not,
but we had this show here. It's called Beyond 2000.
And obviously it was before 2000came, right.
And like it was hypothesising what would happen after the year
(37:53):
2000. And I remember the intro because
I look it up on YouTube every now and again and it will have
like a a robot. I think it's pushing a kid on a
swing, you know, so it's like the parents are now giving their
play time to a robot. But then there was like, yeah,
the flying car and, and some of the technology is like long
surpassed by now. But yeah, I think flying cars
have been, you know, kind of imagined forever, haven't they?
(38:16):
Yeah. But flying taxis are just
starting to get licences now. Really.
Yeah, MIT in in the US has got robots to run, which is quite,
it's quite complex. And there's that dog.
Are we talking like, you know, the Boston Dynamics?
Yeah. The Boston Dynamics Dog.
(38:37):
That's very scary as. As time goes on, the robotic
things are are happening, but the great thing about the future
is that predicting time scales, as you say from you know flying
cars and all that sort of thing is incredibly difficult.
But in the Internet, because it's an artificial construct, A
relatively simple one, then things can appear to move much
(38:57):
faster because it's a almost a controlled environment as
whereas in, in, in the real world, who knows what's really
happening. I mean, we, we haven't even got
to the bottom of quantum theory yet and how it shapes the
physical world that we know. I grew up learning about
electricity. Now I have to comprehend the
fact that electrons probably exist within the outer shells of
(39:21):
atoms, atoms. But we're using it so we don't
have to know everything and there's tonnes of stuff that we
don't know. Yeah, look that that's a little
bit above my, my mental capacityto understand that stuff, but it
sounds, it sounds quite serious.But yeah, look, a lot, lot to
think about there on on how our identity started, how they've
(39:43):
been changed and and affected through technology and where
they could potentially go. And I think I'm going to be on
the same campus. You, I want to be hopeful about
this because as you said, the alternative is is too, too bad
to think about just to finish upthen Colin, what's coming up for
you and, and where can people follow what you're up to?
So. As a digital detox coach, I'm
(40:05):
going to say the Internet because we all have to be online
to live in the in this world. So the the website is
www.thedigitaldetoxcoach.com. If, if people would like have a
look at the Ted X talk, because the introduction of the Ted X
talk is about imagine a possiblefuture.
And it was done a couple of years ago, but I, I was already
(40:27):
familiar with AI before it sort of hit.
And so you imagine the future and then we end up is that
actually it's about human sanctuaries at the end.
So have a look at the Ted eggs, but all the other information's
on on the website. Awesome, Colin, you've given us
quite a lot to think about. Thank you so much for joining
us. Thank.
You for having me? For more info on what we've
(40:48):
discussed today, check out the show notes.
If you enjoyed this one, you cansubscribe to Ruined by the
Internet on your favourite podcast app and help spread the
word by sharing this episode or leaving a review.
I'm Gareth King, see you next time.
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