Adam Greenwood – “Many advantages to augmented humans.”
Warren Munson
3 minutes
What is the future of artificial intelligence? Can it alleviate loneliness? Will it make us less human? How far could our relationship with a device go? Adam Greenwood of tech agency Greenwood Campbell, answers these questions and more. See below for some outtakes from the podcast. Listen on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and TuneIn
“The big tech companies real role is to get you in front of a screen for as long as humanly possible. The average screen time for a teenager in the UK is six and a half hours a day. The tech companies want to keep us there so they can sell our screen time to advertisers.”
“We’re living in a world that is supposedly more connected than ever before, and yet loneliness, anxiety and depression are at all time highs. And I think part of this is due to the fact that AI and software is isolating us.”
“Alexa and Google Home are run by two of the biggest tech companies in the world, and they know a lot about us. These devices that are constantly listening—they could know us better than we know ourselves, so they could become our best friends.”
“There are so many advantages to truly augmented humans, and we’re effectively augmented now—very few people leave the house without their smartphone; it’s not physically attached to us, but it might as well be.”
“Imagine if the only companies in the world who understood the depth of problems of oil pollution were BP and Esso. And then imagine that we trusted them and tasked them to fix it. It’s not really in those companies interests to fix those problems because they’ve done very, very well out of their business; that’s effectively what we’re doing with tech companies.”
“It’s not in YouTube’s interest to fix an algorithm that gets people to spend more and more time on their platform, even if it means that they are watching content which is really bad and damaging.”
“We call ourselves ‘the human tech agency’. The idea is that if you can create a better connection with people, then you’ve got a better way of getting your message out there.”
“When you’re saying to your developers, ‘Stop thinking about designing with pixels and start thinking about designing conversations’ it is quite a seismic shift, but it’s really exciting.”
