Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have written a joint article in The Atlantic. Haidt has long warned against the growing evidence that social media is directly responsible for the high number of mental problems among young people, especially among young women. As a CEO for years, Schmidt focused on the latest technical developments and wrote a book about AI with Henry Kissinger.


In their essay, they identify four acute threats
1. AI-supported social media will wash ever larger streams of garbage into our public conversation
2.Personalized super influencers will make it much easier for companies, criminals and foreign agents to influence us to carry out their bids via social media platforms.
3. AI will make social media much more addictive for children, accelerating the ongoing epidemic of mental illness among teens.
4. AI will change social media in ways that strengthen authoritarian regimes (particularly China) and weaken liberal democracies, particularly polarized ones, such as the US.

It's time for artificial intelligence seat belts. It is striking that the EU has recently been at the forefront of this. This week, it was announced that the EU is working on a new set of regulations for AI, including rules on data transparency, a ban on AI facial recognition in public spaces and new copyright rules for AI that generates its own texts and images.

The solutions proposed by Haidt and Schmidt are quite in line with what the EU wants. Their proposals are mainly about building trust between users, social media algorithms and the content that people find there.

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