The Social Dilemma Part 3 - Dr. Rebecca Roache

This week join Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher, and Keith Duggar have a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Roache in the last of our 3-part series on the social dilemma Netflix film. Rebecca is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, university of London and has written extensively about the future of friendship.

People claim that friendships are not what they used to be. People are always staring at their phones, even when in public Social media has turned us into narcissists who are always managing our own PR rather than being present with each other. Anxiety about the negative effects of technology are as old as the written word. Is technology bad for friendships? Can you have friends through screens? Does social media cause polarization? And is that a bad thing? Does it promote quantity over quality? Rebecca thinks that social media and echo chambers are less ominous to friendship on closer inspection.

00:00:32 Teaser clip from Rebecca and her new manuscript on friendship

00:02:52 Introduction

00:04:56 Memorisation vs reasoning / is technology enhancing friendships

00:09:29 Word of warcraft / gaming communities / echo chambers / polarisation

00:12:34 Horizontal vs Vertical social attributes

00:17:18 Exclusion of others opinions

00:20:36 The power to silence others / truth verification

00:23:58 Misinformation

00:27:28 Norms / memes / political terms and co-opting / bullying

00:31:57 Redefinition of political terms i.e. racism

00:36:13 Virtue signalling

00:38:57 How many friends can you have / spread thin / Dunbars 150

00:42:54 Is it morally objectionable to believe or contemplate objectionable ideas, punishment

00:50:52 Is speaking the same thing as acting

00:52:24 Punishment - deterrence vs retribution / historical

00:53:59 Yannic: contemplating is a form of speaking

00:57:32 silencing/blocking is intellectual laziness - what ideas are we allowed to talk about

01:04:53 Corporate AI ethics frameworks

01:09:14 Autonomous Vehicles

01:10:51 the eternal Facebook world / online vs offline friendships

01:14:05 How do we get the best out of our online friendships