Hacking Human Attachment: The Loneliness Crisis, Cognitive Atrophy and other Personal Dangers of AI | RR 20
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence tend to center around the technology's economic and large-scale impacts. Yet it's at the individual level where we're seeing AI's most potent effects, and they may not be what you think. Even in the limited time that AI chatbots have been publicly available (like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.), studies show that our increasing reliance on them wears down our ability to think and communicate effectively, and even erodes our capacity to nurture healthy attachments to others. In essence, AI is atrophying the skills that sit at the core of what it means to be human. Can we as a society pause to consider the risks this technology poses to our well-being, or will we keep barreling forward with its development until it's too late?
In this episode, Nate is joined by Nora Bateson and Zak Stein to explore the multifaceted ways that AI is designed to exploit our deepest social vulnerabilities, and the risks this poses to human relationships, cognition, and society. They emphasize the need for careful consideration of how technology shapes our lives and what it means for the future of human connection. Ultimately, they advocate for a deeper engagement with the embodied aspects of living alongside other people and nature as a way to counteract our increasingly digital world.
What can we learn from past mass adaptation of technologies such as the invention of the world wide web or GPS when it comes to AI's increasing presence in our lives? How does artificial intelligence expose and intensify the ways our culture is already eroding our mental health and capacity for human connection? And lastly, how might we imagine futures where technology magnifies the best sides of humanity – like creativity, cooperation, and care – rather than accelerating our most destructive instincts?
(Conversation recorded on October 14th, 2025)
About Nora Bateson:
Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question "How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?"
An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.
About Zak Stein:
Dr. Zak Stein is a philosopher of education, as well as a Co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He is also the Co-founder of Civilization Research Institute, the Consilience Project, and Lectica, Inc. He is the author of dozens of published papers and two books, including Education in a Time Between Worlds. Zak received his EdD from Harvard University.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I remember sitting around tables in 1992 in Silicon Valley and wondering, |
| 0:07.2 | do you think we're going to be able to make money on the internet? |
| 0:10.9 | What we weren't asking in that moment was how many decades till the billionaires take over |
| 0:17.6 | the government that are running the internet. |
| 0:20.6 | So we weren't asking the right questions then. |
| 0:23.7 | Is there any chance that we could ask some of the right questions now? |
| 0:28.1 | If we could look back on the other forms of technology and say, |
| 0:32.7 | oh my God, I wish we had asked this question. |
| 0:37.3 | I wish we had gone slower. I wish we had been more careful. |
| 0:44.3 | You're listening to the Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might |
| 0:56.1 | mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire |
| 1:02.2 | more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. |
| 1:19.2 | On today's reality roundtable episode, Nora Bateson and Zach Stein returned to the podcast to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our cognitive health, on our ability |
| 1:26.3 | to form healthy relationships and attachments. |
| 1:30.4 | Zach Stein is the co-founder of the Civilization Research Institute, as well as the |
| 1:36.0 | Consilience Project. |
| 1:37.7 | Zach has a doctoral degree in human development and education from Harvard University and |
| 1:42.9 | specializes in the relationship between technology and |
| 1:46.3 | education. Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, and educator, |
| 1:53.7 | as well as president of the International Bateson Institute and the founder of Warm Data Labs. |
| 1:59.9 | In this quite freestyle episode, since they're my friends, Nora and Zach explore from two |
| 2:07.3 | very different disciplines how artificial intelligence chat bots like chat GPT and other similar |
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