Lauren Goode: I'm so glad we brought you on today. No, I'm genuinely glad, though. Here's my thing, is that I think we've become beta testers. There's this promise right now from the purveyors of technology that agentic AI is going to start doing some of these tasks for us. I won't spend an hour shopping because I'm going to put in a prompt what I need, and then it's going to order it for me. In the meantime, that requires so much babysitting and so much hand holding and so much authentication and all these handshakes between apps and stuff. It's going to be that way for a while. It's still just sucking us in further with this promise that it's going to make our lives easier. In the meantime, we're mired in it.
Jason Kehe: AI will eventually kill the phone or at least our understanding of what a phone is right now.
Lauren Goode: Tell us about that, then. What does that future look like?
Jason Kehe: Well, if you look around at the ways people are engaging with AI now, I'm noticing that when I'm with friends, and someone wants to ask ChatGPT a question, for instance, they hit the side button on their iPhone, which is reprogrammed to launch Chat's voice, and then they talk to it directly. You kind of want to have a conversation that's faster than you can type it. I just think that's going to come for everything.
Michael Calore: That's an interesting observation because what we're talking about is all of the companies that are trying to get us away from technology by introducing barriers between us and the technology. This thing you put on your fridge. These apps that shut down your apps after a certain period of time. These are all things that are barriers to the technology that's harming you. But what you're talking about, Jason, is a complete erosion of the barrier. Just take the phone out of the equation, and all of a sudden it just becomes you and the cloud.
Jason Kehe: Yes. It's amazing to me that people speak of phones as if they are permanent. They will come and go, as all technology does. The promise of tech, if it is a kind of seamlessness. The phone is all kinds of barriers. Maybe I'm kind of going back on my original position that friction benefits us in some ways because the phone, I do think, provides some degree of it.
Michael Calore: Well, we do need to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the internet. We're going to expand beyond just phones, and we're going to talk about how bad the internet is for us.
Jason Kehe: Fun.
Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today, we're talking about brain rot. In the first half of the show, we talked about how terrible our phones are for us and why they're probably all going away very, very soon and being replaced by AI, as Jason outlined. In the second half, we're going to talk about the internet at large because parts of the internet are amazing, of course, but there is still just so much toxicity online, and fixing it feels like a tall order, but it has not stopped some tech leaders from trying. One of those tech leaders is Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit. Earlier this year, he announced that he was partnering with his former competitor, Kevin Rose, to relaunch Digg. That's D-I-G-G with two Gs. It's a social media platform from the early 2000s that was very similar to Reddit. Our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond recently spoke with Ohanian for the first big interview episode of this Uncanny Valley podcast, which you should all listen to. It's in your feeds. Alexis shared that he wanted this new version of Digg to be way less toxic compared to the other social media platforms. Lauren, I know you have thoughts about this.