Category Archives: Evolutionary Psychology

When Herding Animals Go Solo with AI

Humans were built to operate in groups. Pretty much everything that makes us human operates more effectively when we are surrounded by others. We have exquisitely evolved social management and response mechanisms that come from our history as herders: we conform to the opinions of others, we are sensitive to rejection, we care about our reputation and we practice reciprocity, giving to others with the hope that they’ll be there for us when needed. Most of all, we care deeply about what is fair.

All these things have no benefit if you’re a lone wolf, but they are vitally important when you’re in a herd of sheep, or the human equivalent.

Even the way we determine what is real relies on others. If you hear or see something that falls outside the ordinary, the first thing you do is turn to others to see if they also saw or heard it. We want to make sure our own senses are not tricking us. Things verified by others have a good chance of being real. Things that only we can see or hear could be a symptom of psychosis.

This need to backstop the feedback of our own senses with the corroboration of others was a useful safety check in our evolutionary past. But today, AI technology is throwing us a curveball. As a recent essay suggests, when we turn to AI chatbots for confirmation, we can start following a downward spiral into a new affliction: AI psychosis.

The challenge comes with the very sociability of new AI models – they speak to us as a friend would. Actually, that’s not quite true. They speak to us as someone who desperately wants to become our friend would.

Chats with AI are typically sycophantic and sometimes downright smarmy. They are constantly congratulating us and primping our egos. For this reason, many of us are foregoing socializing with other humans in favor of chatting with our favorite AI client. This is especially true with sensitive subjects. In a recent U.S. study from Common Sense Media, one in three teens used AI for social interaction and relationships. Of those, almost half used AI for emotional or mental health support. And often, this is a closed loop. Many teens never tell another human about their chats with an AI confidant.

This makes sense. AI won’t judge us. We aren’t risking ending our friendship with our confessions. And AI is unfailing supportive. There are no mixed signals through contradictory body language, no fear of the other person shutting down the conversation and walking away. Small wonder that one-third of the teens surveyed said that AI conversations were as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to a human. By the way, that percentage rises every year a similar study is done.

But if our goal is to corroborate reality, then we run into an issue when we turn to AI. This turns us into an echo chamber of one. In its algorithmic need to please us, AI agents can take us further and further from reality. In another study, three of five AI models happily led participants down a delusional path without any type of pushback and, in some cases, active encouragement of the delusion. One experiment saw Grok 4.1 confirming the presence of a “malevolent mirror entity” and suggested the person “drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards”.

That said, this does seem to be improving. More recent models are more apt to intervene with a suggestion that the person should perhaps seek professional guidance.

But the problem may be much larger than just the encouragement of clinical psychosis. Increasingly, we humans are replacing human interaction with AI chats as a critical criterion in our efforts to make sense of reality. And that leaves a large part of our ability to accurately sense at what’s real in the hands of a few AI tech companies, all with quarterly profit targets to hit.

What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

Where Does Marketing Education Go From Here?

For the past decade I have served on the program advisory council for a local post-secondary business school. Just this past year, we met so the marketing profs could present their proposed course changes to us for our feedback.

I, for the first time in one of these meetings, didn’t know what to say. It was nothing about the proposed changes themselves. It was because I honestly didn’t know what role humans would play in marketing in the future.

Some of the course changes were for first year students who would still have 4 or 5 years of the program ahead of them. That means they’d be looking for their first job in marketing in 2030 or 2031. I assume that would be an entry level job. So what, I wondered, would you teach marketing students today to make them a wanted commodity in the marketing job market 5 years hence?

Given this question that has been lodged in my brain ever since, I read with interest fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda’s post last week on “Humans in the Loop” in the marketing platform stack. In it, he said, “For decades, advertising relied on a strict human-in-the-loop chain with clear approval protocols. In today’s world, that has become optional and comes at a cost.”

The new advertising ecosystem is being built by AI technicians to eliminate friction, ensuring higher profitability generated by self-scaling programs without restraints. In that world, humans are nothing more than profit-sapping friction and therefore should be eliminated. I’m not sure what openings that leaves for new marketers trying to enter the business 5 years from now. What should we be teaching them to give them a fighting chance to avoid becoming both redundant and irrelevant?

Supposedly, the reason to keep a human “in the loop” is so they can step in when something unexpected arises that AI doesn’t have the operating parameters to cope with. These are called “edge cases.” The thinking is that with a human somewhere in the mix, we can all rest easy knowing that when these “edge cases” arise, expert judgement can hit the stop button and keep us all from being sent to AI Armageddon.

There are several things wrong with that comforting assumption.

First, who or what flags these “edge cases?” If it’s AI, we’re assuming that it can recognize when something is above its pay grade and call in a human. But even if it does do that, what about all the other edge cases that AI didn’t recognize as such, assuming that these tasks fit within its normal operating procedures?

Secondly, even if exceptions are properly identified as an edge case and a human is called in to oversee, the places where human intervention is required is a constantly moving target. AI is light years ahead of where it was just a year or two ago, which means today’s edge case is tomorrow’s routine.

One example of this constantly expanding AI horizon comes from self-driving cars. Waymo self-driving taxis are coming to Toronto. One of the reasons they haven’t come to Canada sooner was because our notorious winter driving conditions represented an “edge case” for self-driving AI. But Waymo feels that they have now collected enough data from northern US cities to allow it to reliably model what is required to stay on an icy street during a Canadian winter storm. In this case, what was an “edge case” has now been incorporated into a “business-as-usual” data set.

Finally, to bring us back to our marketing students, the only reason to have a human in the loop is to allow the human to use their expertise and intuition to keep AI from going off-track. But this intuition only comes from thousands and thousands of hours of experience. And, as I have said before, as we off load more and more cognitive drudge work to AI, we don’t build that expertise because we haven’t immersed ourselves in the work required to gain it. Will a brand-new marketing student ever become an expert when 99% of the day-to-day work required to put a campaign together is now handled by AI?

These are just some of the reasons why I didn’t have a ready answer when the question came in that PAC meeting, “What should we be including in our marketing programs?” Someone else in the group quickly said, “Teach them how to work with AI.” And while I didn’t say anything out loud, the thought that thundered through my head was this, “Yeah. Good luck with that!”

Fragments of Reality seen through Media’s Mirror

Colorful paper fragments radiating from scientific diagrams against a dark cosmic background

We live in a real world, with real issues, trying to make real decisions that will have real consequences. The problem with all that is that it’s getting difficult to determine what is actually real.

For the past three centuries, science has been the driver of reality. It was a systematic quest to discover objective truth, beyond refute. As such, it overturned old beliefs that were formed over millennia based on religion and tribal affiliation. Before science, beliefs were how we dealt with things we could not understand. The problem with that was there was no way to debate belief. I had what I believed, and you had what you believed. As such, our collective perceived reality was fractured along the fault lines of what we believed. There was no universal understanding of what was “real.” Many wars were fought and many people died because of incompatible beliefs.

Beliefs are the default way we make sense of the world. It takes a lot less of the brain’s processing power to simply believe something than to question it and seek to verify it in some provable way. The enlightenment and the adoption of science represented a huge leap forward in human development by moving our understanding of the world from the lowest levels of cognition, based solely on what we could see or hear, to a more rational, mutually agreed upon, perspective. It allowed us to rise above beliefs and start to create a common sense of reality based on verifiable facts. It also unleashed our ability to innovate by building on a solid base defined by scientific discoveries.

Most of the last 300 years has been marked by science slowly replacing beliefs as the lens through which we view the world. But that progress has been systematically eroded over the past 3 decades and I suspect that the biggest culprit in this has been media. Yes, the same media most of us work in, write about and analyze. The very same media we both create and consume. If we are looking for someone to blame for the current state of the world, perhaps we should look in the mirror.

It’s media – our media – that has reversed the tide from embracing science back to building a bulwark of our beliefs. Today, our understanding of what is real has not only become fragmented, it has been split asunder, with a yawning chasm in the middle. Science used to supply the middle ground of reality. Today, many ignore science as an inconvenient truth.

Here’s the most frightening thing about that. Those ignorant of science are in charge of consequential things, like healthcare, social programs, environmental protection agencies and national defense. As astrophysicist Adam Frank said in a recent essay, “Now we live in a time when science denial inhabits the highest levels of power and receives broad acceptance.”

But for those who choose to ignore science, an alternate reality has to be presented. If that reality happens to align with pre-existing beliefs, it’s a much easier sell. And it’s exactly that human foible that has been seized upon by all types of media because, as it turns out, polarizing for profit is a pretty sweet gig. It has massively driven up advertising revenues for media companies. Some – admirably – still try to cling to the journalistic standard of trying to tell the truth. Others have rushed headlong into making a business of portraying alternate realities based not on science, or the truth, but on profit projections. If you were to look for the single biggest factor leading to the sorry state of the world today, it would not be Donald Trump, or MAGA, or any political movement. It would be media’s deliberate abdication of its responsibility to tell the truth because there are other – more profitable – alternatives.

We have to do better than this. Maybe – just maybe this week’s show of solidarity from all the major networks, including Fox News, in protest of the banning of CNN, MSNow and Politico from the White House because of their reporting of events that challenged Trump’s Alternate Reality will – finally – be a step in a more truthful direction.

Our Digital World is No Place for the Elderly

My family is discovering – firsthand – just how the world could care less about the elderly.

My stepfather just passed away. He was just a few months shy of his 91st birthday. For the past 10 years, my sister has been looking after the official side of Dad’s life – things like his income tax, pension, healthcare and other related needs. All these things have rushed online as local service counters and real, live humans whose job it was to assist their customers have virtually disappeared. The inner workings of these programs lie on the other side of either a website or a call centre. Neither of these things are designed for the elderly. They are barely functional for any of us, including those much younger than my stepdad.

For the past decade, as Dad has aged, it has become increasingly apparent that our world is not designed for the superannuated. In the last few years, his loss of hearing made it impossible for him to understand someone talking at a normal volume in the same room, let alone someone on a telephone call. This led to him being unable to follow the gist of most conversations. My sister, who has the patience of Job, acted as translator and guide for Dad but was constantly flummoxed by bureaucratic rules and privacy regulations that left no wiggle room for the elderly. A typical phone interaction (usually after waiting over an hour on hold) would go something like this:

My sister: “Hi, I’d like to ask about my father’s income tax return for 2025.”

Phone Agent: “I’m sorry, we can only give information to the person who files the return.”

“He’s here with me. I have his permission.”

“I’m sorry, I have to speak to him.”

“He can’t hear you. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I need to hear it from him. Can you hand him the phone?”

“He won’t hear you, but sure, knock yourself out.”

(Dad puts the phone to his ear, having no idea what’s going on. You can hear the person talking but Dad just looks at us blankly. My sister takes the phone back.)

“Your dad was unable to answer the security question I asked him to verify his identity.”

“As I said – repeatedly – Dad can’t hear. Can you ask me the question and I’ll ask him?”

“I need to hear the answer from him.”

“Is there an office we can go to and talk to someone in person?”

“No, all our support functions have moved online. You can use our website. Does your dad have an online account?”

“My dad has never touched a computer in his life. How would he have an online account?”

You get the gist. These scenarios always played out along the same lines but were typically spaced out so my sister had time to regain her incredible patience before the next episode. But when a person passes, suddenly all these things must be dealt with right away. Her days have been filled with circuitous phone calls trying to tie up Dad’s loose ends, stymied at every turn by the fact that while the system didn’t support him when he was alive, it’s doubly difficult now that he’s gone. Much as I’d like to help, I live in a different province and don’t have the legal authority to deal with these issues.

My Dad was caught on the far side of the grey digital divide. For the past few decades, technology has enabled companies and government services to offload the effort required to deliver their services or products from themselves to us, their customers. We now pump our own gas, do our own banking, configure our own phone plans, administer our own insurance policies and monitor our own pensions and income tax accounts. Programs and companies have gleefully eliminated physical locations and laid off customer support people to cut costs by transferring those functions to us. The only contact we have is either through a woefully designed website (I can tell you the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website is a usability nightmare) or a call center where one-hour waits are considered the norm.

Most of us, given no alternative, grudgingly jump through the hoops required to do what we have to do, which is what these agencies and companies used to do for us as part of their job. We struggle through archaic interfaces, learn new platforms every few years, constantly have to reset passwords and scramble through our various devices and authentication apps to sneak past the impenetrable security hurdles of two step verification. J.R.R. Tolkien made gaining access to Mordor look easy in comparison.

I understand that online fraud and identity theft is a real concern, but at some point, typically north of the age of 70, it gets harder for us to keep up. As our brains age, they tend to rely more on remembered strategies and routines because learning something new gets harder and harder. The world used to reward this accumulation of knowledge with age. Now it just kicks it to the curb like last week’s trash.

There are exceptions, of course. The elderly who are familiar with computers and technology can push the grey digital divide back substantially. But this was not my dad. In his life, he was a farmer, a sawmill worker and a chimney sweep. None of those things – especially in a time several decades past – required learning how to use a computer. The world literally passed Dad by. Just how far he was left behind has become acutely apparent to us in the last few weeks.

Through this all, we keep asking ourselves one very frightening question – If it was this hard for Dad, what is it like for those elderly who don’t have a person like my sister to help them?

What happens to them?

A Short History of the Long Legacy of Literacy

A man reading an old book with a quill pen and ink in a large, wooden library

Literacy has had a good run as a definer of social status. But after over 5,000 years, from ancient Mesopotamia to today, the ability to read and write and its role as a signifier of class power might finally be passé.

This is predictable, I guess. Once something becomes universal – or nearly so – it ceases to be special.

In the earliest days of days of scratching something down on paper (or papyrus) writing was the crucial link between royalty and common folk. Rulers issued edicts that required some type of record keeping. One of the first examples we have of this is from 3100 BCE and is a clay tablet that tracked beer allocation with symbols and tally marks. This type of record keeping was entrusted to scribes and priests, making them both the messengers and recorders of gods and kings.

For the next 4500 years, literacy remained a gift restricted to the few. In 1440 AD, fewer than 10% of the population in Europe could both read and write. But then, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany was about to change the course of literacy. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first commercially practical system of mass printing using moveable type. The first mass medium was born. But it’s impact on literacy would take a while.

In perhaps the first example of media technology being well ahead of its market, the first books mass printed tended to be aimed at the same audience as before the printing press. Books were expensive, tended to be either religious or legal and were intended for clergy, universities and wealthy household. Printing would take a few centuries before it would bring literacy to the commoner.

The way this happened is fascinating to consider when we look at the impact of mass media on society. Literacy was always a way to maintain control and was historically concentrated with the church, universities and government. But the advent of mass printing began to loosen that chokehold. It began to put pamphlets and other printed forms in more and more hands, providing a printed communication infrastructure that allowed – for the first time – the questioning of authority rather than the preservation of it.

Between the Protestant Reform movement (1500 – 1600s), the Scientific Revolution (1600 – 1700s) and the Enlightenment (1700s – 1800s), the traditional seats of power were held up for scrutiny. These interlocking movements that transformed western society were all powered by the printed word. Eventually, the Republic of Letters emerged; an international society of thinkers, scientists and philosophers that reshaped how we looked at the world. And this free-form exchange of revolutionary ideas was all communicated through the written word. Literacy began to trickle down to the common people.

In the 1800’s, we began to strive for universal literacy. Public education instilled basic reading and writing skills in much of the youth of Northern Europe but was spotty in the rest of the world. Reading for leisure began to take off, now that there was a market for newspapers, magazines and novels. Writers like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jane Austin and the Brontë sisters became household names. Finally – it seemed – literacy’s day had come!

But now, after waiting in the wings for thousands of years, after two short centuries, literacy seems to be waning. In a recent Atlantic essay, Rose Horowitch cites some sobering stats from recent surveys: fewer than half of all adults read a book of any kind in 2022 (from the National Endowment for the Arts). And, according to the American Time Use Survey, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

It’s not just that we’re reading less. We’re also reading dumber. Books are simpler, sentences are shorter and vocabularies are shrinking. Books are following the leads of movies, TV shows and video games – more sensation, less intellectualization. Many of the books that do end up on the best seller charts are actually written for young adults – aimed at those with a grade 9 reading level.

Reading anything in long form is in danger of disappearing. What has happened in this market is that the middle of the market has been squeezed out to both ends. There has been an explosion of short form content, designed to be scanned quickly and digested in bite sized pieces, ala social media. But in a weird counter to this general trend, there is still a market for long-form essays in prestigious publications. In this market driven development, numbers might be down, but engagement is up, with readers spending significantly more time with longer pieces, giving more opportunity for publishers to push ads to them.

What is generally true across the board, however, is that the golden age of the printed word appears to be over. As I myself have seen in looking at the results of hundreds of eye tracking studies, we are instinctively drawn to content that instantly piques our senses: images, sounds, moving pictures. From there it’s a coin toss where we might go next – on to the next bright shiny object or to partake in that drudgery called reading, where we actually have to think about what we’re looking at.

The Joy of Truly Playing

Mars rover with four wheels and red wiry appendages on a rocky reddish terrain.

Meet Joe McGillicudy. Joe lives on Mars and has an upside-down nose, which is fine on Mars, because it doesn’t rain there but it is dusty. Upside down noses work pretty well on Mars.

Joe doesn’t have feet, instead he has tires. That makes him fast and very quiet, which is important because Joe likes to sneak up on you and playfully grab your ankle and has been known to slip in a quick tickle now and then.

Joe McGillicudy is a game I play with my four-year-old grandson. We have both contributed to the description above. The upside-down nose was my idea. The tires instead of feet was his. And if you think this all sounds ridiculous and is a waste of valuable time – well – that’s really the point. Playing is ridiculous, especially if you’re an adult. But we should do it more.

For the past half dozen centuries, humans have been focusing on optimizing our lives. This is especially true in the past century or so. Our singular goal is to do things faster, be more focused, maximize our efficiency and strip every scrap of waste from our lives. Unstructured play has been the victim in all this. Kids barely do it anymore. And adults certainly don’t do it.

But playing – of a certain kind – is important. It creates room for surprise. It engages our imagination in a low-stress environment. It allows us to fail without fatal consequences. Playing is a real-life sandbox where we learn how to be better people: more creative, more cooperative, more understanding and more resilient. Most of all, it reintroduces serendipity into our lives. It gives us the capacity to savor the unexpected.

But play of this kind has some specific requirements. It can’t come with preset goals or pre-made rules. You have to make it up as you go along. This type of play pries open our imagination and sets our minds loose to wander and free-associate.

In the case of children, it’s the type of play that used to fill our days: building a fort with left over lumber from your dad’s workshop and no plan, turning a mound of snow in a parking lot into a kingdom to be conquered, launching a safari in your back yard or creating an interstellar spaceship from a large cardboard box.

This type of play is incredibly important for childhood development. But many of the moments children used to spend doing these things are being replaced by time in front of a screen playing a game that has been predesigned and prepackaged by a corporation, often with a for-profit agenda. The child is no longer making the rules, they are just following a path that has been set out for them. And often, they are doing so alone.

In our obsessive quest for an optimized life, adults are even less likely to spend time in unstructured “play.” One of the best ways to do this is to really play with your kids or grandkids and try seeing the world through their eyes. Try taking them to a hardware store  or thrift shop where there is no intended purchase and let them be the guide. See what you both discover.

But there are other ways: just wandering with no set destination, making something without plans or a blueprint, doing some creative improvisation through music or art, trying experimental cooking, playing a sport you’re really bad at (I admit I still have childhood trauma about this one), popping into a store at random just to see what’s on the shelves, skipping stones on a lake or turning a shovelful of dirt over in your garden and seeing what crawls out. 

Even better, find ways to “play” with others: role playing games, telling jokes and stories, going dancing, tossing a ball around or having a snowball fight.

I know – all of this sounds like a complete waste of time. And again I say – that’s the point.

The goal is to engage your mind in a way it rarely gets to do any more. As we rush to be productive, our brain gets over-trained for task accomplishment.  If you looked at a brain “at play” it would look very different than one playing a video game or scrolling a social media feed. Completely different areas would be engaged. Many of the ways we currently choose to spend time with a screen “light up” the same areas of the brain that are engaged when we’re gambling or engaging in other addictive behaviors. Some “free time” screen activities have even been shown to trigger anxiety and depression.

The biggest difference between unstructured play and many of our current past times comes in the way we’re rewarded. With unstructured play, the rewards come from inside us. We are not collecting points, climbing to the next level or competing for a bonus determined by some external party. We are just doing whatever we’re doing for fun.

You might just find that wasting time is the best way you can spend time.

My Tentative Embrace of AI

Hybrid brain model with organic roots and glowing digital network

I have dipped my toes a little further into the deep, deep waters of AI (which this week promises to get deeper with the recently announced OpenAI IPO). Here, then, are my updated thoughts on Artificial Intelligence.

For the past few months, I have been doing post-production on a documentary. The footage has been shot over the past 6 or 7 years and I have been wading through hours of interviews and other footage, writing the script, building edit sheets and – for the past month – actually doing the edits. In the process, I have tried to use AI judiciously. My rule of thumb has been this:  If I’m going to use AI, don’t be obvious about it.

Because I use Adobe tools for things like editing and some special effects, AI assistance is now built into almost everything I do. It lurks beneath the hood on pretty much every menu item and tool selection that Adobe offers. This is not the type of AI I am referring too. This built-in AI is what I call covert artificial intelligence.

I am referring to overt AI, where I have made a deliberate decision not to use the limited processing power of my own brain and have unleashed the AI Kraken to do my bidding. In my case, that has involved gathering information for the script, creating soundtracks, some video special effects and some other technical aspects.

I will say I did stop short of using AI for some special video effects which – upon viewing an example – created an uneasy feeling in my gut. Something told me I had stepped over the threshold into the realm of excessive creepiness.  When you’re dealing with people’s memories, especially of loved ones since departed, you have to tread carefully. Just because AI lets you do something, doesn’t mean you should.

But here’s my point. AI couldn’t have made that call. It couldn’t replicate my intuitive understanding of my audience, even to the point of anticipating reactions from specific individuals who I knew would be watching. AI can’t make gut calls about human consequences.

In that, it bears a resemblance to Phineas Gage.

Unless you’re a neuroscience geek, you may never have heard of poor Phineas, but it’s one of the most famous case studies in science. On September 13, 1848, Gage was working with a railway blasting crew in Vermont. Due to unexpected explosion of blasting powder, an iron crowbar was driven through the left side of his frontal brain. Miraculously, Gage retained much of his memory, language and reasoning ability. What was impaired was ability to make gut decisions, using something famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio called “somatic markers.”  

It’s exactly these instincts, these abilities to predict the responses of others, that AI lacks. While it may be “intelligent” it is not necessarily “wise,” as wisdom requires judgement. It requires the ability to foresee reactions and to adjust your decisions accordingly.

When we look at the intersection of creativity and AI, it’s this human aspect that we should not be too quick to surrender to technology.

Take the writing of this post, for example. I did use AI to help me gather my thoughts. But the writing itself is – for better or worse – all me.  

I have been writing for pretty much all of my life. I have – I think – a human voice. My grammar isn’t perfect. I am Canadian, so my editor (the incredibly patient Phyllis Fine at MediaPost) has to “Americanize” my spellings. I started my career writing for radio, so my sentence structure can sometimes kindly be described as rambling. But all of this accurately reflects who I am. If I used AI to actually craft my words, I would have removed myself “from the loop.” Even as I write this text, my computer screen is littered with blue dotted underlines suggesting there may be better ways to word things.  I’m ignoring almost all of them.

I don’t know where the right AI-Human balance is. Even if I did know, it would be a moving target. The things AI can do today are a quantum leap ahead of what it could do even a year or two ago. But I don’t see AI gaining the ability to actually feel anything any time soon.

Asking Advice for a Friend

Diverse group of people sitting on wooden chairs in a circle in a room with wooden floors

I have a question for you, “Do you ask people for advice as often as you used to?”

It’s an important question, because the ability to exchange information is one of the most human of capabilities. It was that, probably more than any other factor, that sparked “The Great Leap” 50,000 years ago. Suddenly humans became more than slightly advanced primates and we started creating art, building advanced tools, forging long distance trade alliances and practicing religion. It was this cognitive revolution that started us on the path that led to where we are today.

Most anthropologists agree that while there could have been many factors that lead to the “Great Leap”, the most likely candidate was our ability – through the creation of symbolic language – to communicate abstract ideas and transfer complex skills. All the things that make us human came from this new ability to talk to each other: we could manage living in large groups, we could transfer knowledge from one person to the other, and – more importantly – we could pass information and skills from one generation to the next, ensuring our knowledge didn’t die with us.

So, yes, it’s important to ask if we still ask other people for advice. Because if we don’t, are we losing the ability to be human?

Now, I have a confession to make. All the stuff I just told you about the Great Leap came from A.I. I had the tiniest kernel of an idea and rather than share it with someone else, I typed the question into ChatGPT. I did reword its answer in my own words, but the above 3 paragraphs aren’t my ideas, nor do they come from any other human that I talked to. They were distilled from an algorithm. And here we have two intrinsically human strategies battling each other: the need to communicate, and the instinct to forage efficiently.

We humans are born communicators, but we are also natural foragers. We have an internal effort vs reward calculator that drives us down the most efficient path to get what we’re looking for. One of the dusty old UX concepts I used to drag around with me on the speaking circuit was Pirolli and Card’s Information Foraging Theory, which was formulated in 1999 at Xerox’s PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center, where I happened to have a wonderful visit with Peter Pirolli).

The theory may be long-in-the-tooth, but it’s still the single most elegant theory I’ve ever found to explain human behavior online. Simply put, we will expend the least amount of energy required to gain the information we’re looking for. That basic human tendency takes on new implications in our world of A.I.

If we’re looking for information, we will take the shortest path that will get us there. If the shortest path is asking ChatGPT, or, increasingly, using Gemini’s AI Mode in Google, then that’s what we’ll do.

So, I was just being human when I asked AI about the Great Leap. It took me 5 seconds to structure my query and 2 seconds later, I had my answer, impeccably reasoned and laid out in structured language. It did – in 7 seconds – what it would have taken at least a few hours to do the old way, by searching through words written by another human.

And heaven forbid asking another living, breathing human. That would have taken days, at least.

But if we stop asking each other for advice or information, we also have to ask ourselves, “what are we giving up?”  In our previous quest for information, we had to exercise two critical regions of our brain, our language centers (commonly called Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area), used to communicate with other humans, and the prefrontal cortex, where we synthesize information into a viable framework for action. If we were looking for the two areas of the brain that make us distinctly human, these would be two excellent candidates.

If we start using A.I. not just to gather information, but also to structure it into pre-made “thoughts”, we will inevitably use these areas of our brain less. And one of the features of our brain is that it automatically housecleans the least used parts of itself. It’s called synaptic pruning. Through it, the brain continually rewires itself to be best adapted to the tasks it does all the time.

If we stop doing the things that are instinctively human, like sharing knowledge, will our brain start trimming the very parts that make us human?

I’m asking for a friend.

A Silver Lining from Northern Places

Journalist Thomas Friedman had a pretty stark open for his recent New York Times opinion piece: “The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist”

But if you got past that – he soon presented a silver lining:  “But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbour’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.”

I don’t think it’s happenstance that this emerged in Minnesota, one of the most northernly states in the US. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area on business. On those trips, I found something very familiar there, a sense of – for lack of a better word – “Canadianism.”  Minnesota “Nice” felt very close to Canadian “Polite.”

In the piece, Friedman wrestled with a verb that was also new to him – “neighbouring.” He described it as “a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbours and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.”

I think there’s a correlation between neighbouring and living in the North. When you live in a place where the weather can kill you, you’d better be able to count on the people who live next door to you. As Friedman said, “Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighbourliness”

The same is true – I would say – from coast to coast to coast (we have three) in Canada. I have written about this before. When almost half the year is a matter of survival, you tend to huddle together to fight the common foe.

Northerly = Neighbourly

Weather has a way of tying you to your geography.  It forces you to define community – at least in part – by those who live in the same area as you. You naturally bond with the people who will help you shovel your driveway, loan you six eggs if you’re snowed in or invite you in on a frosty morning for a cup of hot coffee (and, in Canada, a shot of rye). It is the great common denominator. For many months every year, weather is the number one topic for everyone that lives in the North.

Canada and the Northern states are not unique in this regard. The same is true for the Nordic Countries in Europe. And this translates into many good things in terms of civic engagement. The World Happiness Report has consistently found the same pattern, commenting in their 2020 report: “No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.”

Neighbouring and Systemic Trust

But there is not a one-to-one correlation between the Northern parts of North America and Northern Europe. In my example of the connection between distance from the equator and civic cohesion, you could rightly say there are anomalies. For example, the politics in the Canadian province of Alberta and states south of the border in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas bear little similarity to the politics of British Columbia, Washington, Minnesota or Maine. Yet all of those lie in the North. And what about Alaska, which is solidly “Red?” You can’t get much further north than Alaska.

“Neighbouring” isn’t about politics. It can be misleading to conflate the two. Being a good neighbour isn’t unique to the right or left. I grew up in rural Alberta and I can tell you from experience that if you need help from your neighbour, Alberta is a pretty damned good place to be.

But there is something else happening in those places – the remnants of a “cowboy” ethic and a feeling of distrust breed by generations of alienation from the power bases thousands miles away in the eastern regions of the country. This is true both in Canada and the U.S. In this case, geography is our enemy. Big, spread-out countries have a tough time keeping everyone happy at the same time. This leads to distrust of the system and the federal government. Chances are your neighbours feel the same way as you do.

But what Minnesota did show us is the basic human dyad – the relationship between two people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. – is still very much alive and well. We still band together when threatened from the outside. But these social connections are like muscles – the more they’re exercised the stronger they get. It just happens that in places where winter is more severe, we are more used to relying on our neighbours to overcome a common threat. That is why Minnesota taught us a timely lesson in what it means to be “neighbourly.”

Walk with Me, Talk with Me

In Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed series, The West Wing, there was a recurring plot device. Characters, when faced with a thorny problem, often went for a walk and talked it out. The camera would capture it all in a long tracking shot.

Sorkin, who penned most of these scenes, used them to highlight the frenetic energy and pace of the White House. The characters exchanged rapid-fire, Sorkinesque dialogue while moving through spaces crammed with busy people buzzing in the background. The technique was – at the same time – both expository and transitional. It would move the story from location to location, often introduce additional characters as they joined the walk, then would veer off to do something important while it also furthered the story line with new details. It was the physical embodiment of multi-tasking, adding urgency to the pace, “There is so much to do and so little time to do it in.”

While Aaron Sorkin might not have intended it, there is also some solid neuroscience backing up the practice of walking and talking. And, as it turns out, you don’t even need to be walking with someone else to realize the cognitive benefits of a good stroll around the block.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Nietzche seemed to be on to something. To come up with something new, the brain must do two different types of thinking: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking could be defined as “thinking outside of the box.” Convergent thinking would be gathering up all those divergent thoughts and stuffing them “back in the box” to analyze the best option. According to a 2014 study from Stanford University, walking gives a significantly positive boost to divergent thinking but is less effective with convergent thinking.

Walking appears to open up the brain to new ideas. There is a positive “mind-body” effect that comes from just being active while you’re thinking, but walking also puts you in a different environment with varying stimuli. In the Stanford experiment, some participants walked outside and some just walked on a treadmill. Those that were outside realized the greatest creative boosts. 

But what if you’re walking with someone else? That’s where the benefits of walking really kick into high gear for certain kinds of brain activities. First of all, both the walkers are benefiting from the creative boost that walking gives you. But it also appears that walking allows you to connect with your fellow walker on both a physical and psychological level that operates at the subconscious level. 

Another study (Cheng, Kato, Saunders, Tseng, 2020) found that walkers soon synchronize their walking and this creates a physical bond between them. Those that walked together each evaluated the other person more highly after the walk than those that simply sat in the same room together. And, in case you’re wondering, the two didn’t even need to talk to each other. In the case of this study, both walkers were specifically instructed to stay silent during their walk.

That’s the “walk” part. But what about the “talk” part? As it turns out, walking brings its own benefits to that as well, and it’s not just the multi-tasking saving of time that Aaron Sorkin showed in the West Wing. 

Think about where you’re looking when you walk. The person you’re walking with is beside you but you’re looking ahead. You’re not looking them in the eye. For some types of communication, eye-to-eye might be the optimal mode, but for divergent thinking, this combination of being physically “in step” with the other person but also being free to let your eyes and mind wander a bit, enticed by what’s happening around you, turns out to be a very effective creative incubator. Your flow of fresh thoughts are not restricted by picking up negative micro-expressions from the other person. You’re not picking up any body language that may cause you to repress any creative ideas for fear of rejection. Soon, you’ll start to riff off each other’s ideas, adding to the idea generation process. 

There’s one more thing about walking. If you do need to just think for a while to process a new idea, those silences are a lot less awkward if you’re walking than if you’re across from each other at a boardroom table.