The Conversation Project

Note: 1) If location button by chance does not work be sure to go to 87 Forest Park Drive, not Forest Park School (for July/August). Note: 2) The start time is 7:00 not 6:15 (for July/August). Note: 3). We may be outside so dress for the weather and consider bringing a beverage - there will be cookies.

1). TECH: MIND, HEART, SOCIETY.
What is your stance on this bevy of issues?
You don't have to read this background info. Just come with your own thoughts f you wish.

i). Heart: Attachment hacking ii). Mind: Cognitive surrender & iii). Heart & Mind: Excited and hyped iv). Society

i). Heart: ATTACHMENT HACKING: Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn’t tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide (Replica friend- always here to listen & on your side/permanent availability all part of Digital intimacy). One doesn't have to be polite relating to an A.I. Does that bleed into worse face to face relations? The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being called “AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But this isn’t just about isolated edge cases. It’s the emergence of an entirely new “attachment economy” designed to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale (From the ‘Welcome to Your Undivided Attention’ podcast from Tristan Harris & Aza Raskin.)
ii). Mind: COGNITIVE SURRENDER; Cognitive offloading is the calculator, the search engine, the GPS. You hand off the how and keep the what. You still judge whether the result is sensible, and you intervene when it isn’t. Cognitive surrender is what happens when you stop constructing the answer at all. The AI’s output becomes your output. There’s nothing to override, because you never formed an independent view to compare it against.
Calculators didn’t make everyone innumerate. GPS navigation systems made driving easier. In any conversation about the cognitive effects of artificial intelligence, these two earlier technologies are reasonably likely to come up. Each is a useful entry-point into two big questions. How might A.I. change the way people think, and in the work/school world should managers/teachers do anything in response? Using calculators and GPS devices are examples of “cognitive offloading”—a deliberate decision to delegate a specific task to technology. In both cases, it has been worth it. Calculators improve students’ mathematical performance, helping to build problem-solving skills and self-confidence. GPS means drivers no longer have to pull over and use maps. It’s harder to get completely lost; it’s easier to avoid terrible traffic.
Yet the use of GPS navigation devices can also sap people’s ability to think for themselves. A study conducted by Louisa Dahmani of Harvard Medical School and Véronique Bohbot of McGill University found that greater lifetime use of GPS by drivers was associated with worse spatial memory. Other research shows that pedestrians who navigate with their phones take longer routes and make more stops than physical-map users. A similar pattern is also visible in online search. Using the internet to look up information is clearly efficient, but there are trade-offs. The “Google effect” refers to a research finding that people have worse recall of information they expect to be able to find online. A.I. supercharges these trade-offs. Handing specific tasks to models will often make sense: they are much better than humans at many things.
But A.I.’s range of capabilities, allied to a convenient conversational interface and a seductively confident persona, raises the prospect less of delegation than of wholesale capitulation. Hence “cognitive surrender”, a term coined by Steven Shaw of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in a recent paper written with his colleague, Gideon Nave Messrs Shaw and Nave asked volunteers to answer demanding questions with the assistance of A.I., randomly introduced errors into the machine’s answers. When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the A.I. gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves. At the moment bosses are more focused on getting employees to use A.I. than fussing about its effects on how they think. But most employers (teachers/parents) also value critical thinking: models are still prone to embarrassing errors, for one thing, and novel situations require skilled humans to step in. So it is worth asking what managers(teachers/parents) can do to encourage cognitive resistance.
They can deliberately hire workers who enjoy thinking. People with high “need for cognition” (yes, dear reader, that means you) are somewhat, though not entirely, protected against the risk of cognitive surrender, says Mr Shaw. Incentives and feedback can help, too. One of the experiments in his paper introduced monetary rewards for getting things right, and also notified participants during the test whether an item had been answered correctly or not. These techniques encouraged A.I. users, who were being fed the wrong answers to override the model more (though they still did worse than people who relied on their own judgment). Engineering A.I.-free periods may have value, too. Another recent study, by Stefanos Poulidis and his co-authors, recruited over 200 chess-club students to train on an A.I.-assisted platform. Some of the students were automatically given A.I. tips at a limited number of specific moments; others could click a button at any time to get advice. The students who had on-demand access achieved less than half the performance gains of those who had no say over when they got help. Offloading is fine. Giving up is another matter.
iii). Mind and Heart: EXCITED AND HYPED; You walk in the Savannah 30,000 years ago. You are calm. Suddenly you see a snake and adrenaline flows – you become excited and hypervigilent. Not a state that is healthy to be in all the time. When we scroll through – Tictoc, Instagram…- it is snake, snake, snake all the time (Concept from the historianYuval Harari).
iv) Society:
≥ Hacked armed conflict. Will humans be in charge?
≥ Photo manipulation, politically and personally. Consider the Viral "Make Him Happier" AI Photo.
In recent viral social media trends, users have uploaded couple's photos to generative AI tools (like ChatGPT) and asked them to make their partners "look happier." Instead of just adding a smile, the AI took the prompt too literally and fundamentally rewrote reality. In several widely shared instances, the AI completely deleted the wives from the images and replaced them with multiple other women. This phenomenon highlights AI's lack of real human context.
≥ Work?
2). Why Travel? Consider; Adding “So why travel?” at the end of each comment below.
- It is not where you are, it is how you feel that is central.
- The travel industry will be pleased to see you, will other residents?
- What is your environmental footprint?
- Tech gives you a simulacrum of travel (so does Disney and movies/even more so in the future?
- If travel is classified as an experience, why not use your time, money and energy toward other experiences.

Note: 1) If location button by chance does not work be sure to go to 87 Forest Park Drive, not Forest Park School (for August only). Note: 2) The start time is 7:00 not 6:15 (for August only. Sept back to Forest Park School for a 6:15 start). Note: 3). We may be outside so dress for the weather and consider bringing a beverage - there will be cookies.

a. LIFESTYLE CHOICES/LONGEVITY MAXING

“Life is short and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,” to borrow a line from a poem by Maggie Smith. Do you smoke? What about drinking wine, sometimes too much, eating sugar, sometimes too much, drinking too much coffee and not enough water loving McDonald’s, scrolling when you should read, spending more than money is wise, being selfish rather than relational? (Free Press May 30th paraphrased from Jen Zoratti).

**If one considers these (and other) behavious as “Being bad” and that they are on a spectrum, where do you land maximizing health practices (LONGEVITY MAXING) or attaining to the adage "everything in moderation?" Here is Bob Dylan writing about being 80, “**The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.” Does his writing affect your lifestyle choices?
b. STRATIFICATION
Making money out of stratification:
Questions:
1. What is and what are examples of stratification? (See below).
2. To what if any extent should we accept stratification?
•Airlines:
First class (lounges/lay flat seating/ boarding/food/drink/bathroom/high ratio service)
Premium Economy (2 seats/boarding...)
Economy (charge for seat selection, baggage, canceling/cramped/pretzles)
•Movies:
Charge for online booking/ premium seating.
•Concerts:
Narrow seats higher up vs box seats/skip the line -i.e Disney experience. The great equalizer that many could attend is now a stratified place. Front of the line available at higher cost.
•Subset of TECH enshittification:
Phone tree to reach services further exasperated with an A.I. gate keeper.
Subscription model vs. buying product - Word/heated seats...
Social media lets us see this stratification and creates a constancy of comparison of not only wealth but looks and experiences of every kind, more so than TV dramas. Furthermore, often the stratified real life presented is a hyped, fake, curated life.

•Experiences
-Streaming costs more to get no ads.
-A.I.
Without or with ads and substandard free versions.
Wealthy people can be more empowered creating a digital divide with higher level A.I. getting the best deals and accurate information vs. hallucinating manipulative results.
Algorithmically, people will be sorted (stratified) out.
Social mingling will end.
A.I. as agents for the rich and erotica and the simulacrum of companionship as well as entertainment 'slop' for others is a dystopian possibility (current reality?)
Info is from Ezra Kline podcast June 2, 2026

1). LONELINESS What is your take on this concept and the data presented below?
'People who become quieter as they get older aren’t always lonely. Sometimes they’ve just stopped explaining themselves to people committed to misunderstanding them.'

A National Academies report estimates that about 24% of Americans 65 and older are socially isolated, and 43% of adults 60 and older report feeling lonely, even though loneliness is not the same thing as being alone. It defines loneliness as a felt gap between the relationships you want and the relationships you actually have.
As we age scaffolding of work or school disappears. Retirement, care giving, health limitations, and family changes can make it harder to casually bump into the same people. If a friendship survives, it is usually because both people choose it on purpose. According to Ami Rokach, PhD, an instructor at York University in Canada and a clinical psychologist. "It’s something every single one of us deals with from time to time," he explains, and can occur, as noted above, during life transitions such as the death of a loved one, a divorce or a move to a new place. Loneliness is an experience that has been around since the beginning of time—and we all deal with it. This kind of loneliness is referred to by researchers as reactive loneliness.
Problems can arise, however, when an experience of loneliness becomes chronic, Rokach notes. "If reactive loneliness is painful, chronic loneliness is torturous," he says. "That’s when things can become very problematic, and when many of the major negative health consequences of loneliness can set in. Lonely people often have unhealthy habits, but the effect persists even when those are taken into account. The World Health Organization (who) published an analysis of 23 data sets, including the Gallup World Poll, which covers 150,000 people from roughly 150 countries. It found that the poorer a country is, the lonelier it tends to be. The Economist’s own analysis, using Gallup’s raw data, finds that this relationship holds within countries, too: the richest people in the richest places are the least lonely; the poorest in the poorest are the most. Finding time to socialize is easier if you can pay for things that save time, from washing machines to grocery deliveries. Money also seems to influence the quality of connections. Even when controlling for contact with friends and family, a higher income predicts less loneliness. This makes sense. It is easier to bond over dinner if you can pay the bill, easier to make friends with fellow football fans if you can afford tickets, and easier to relax with friends if you are not constantly fretting about money. Culture plays a role. In more collectivist societies, strict expectations—for example, that children must care for ageing parents—can trap people in dutiful but unsatisfying relationships.
But is loneliness really increasing, or is it a condition that humans have always experienced at various times of life? Yet the most recent U.S. census data, for example, show that more than a quarter of the population lives alone—the highest rate ever recorded. In addition, more than half of the population is unmarried, and marriage rates and the number of children per household have declined since the previous census. Rates of volunteerism have also decreased, according to research by the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, and an increasing percentage of Americans report no religious affiliation suggesting declines in the kinds of religious and other institutional connections that can provide community.
2). The Renaissance of Ritual.
How do you approach RITUALS? Read what others are doing.
By Bruce Feiler
Mr. Feiler is the author of “A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World — and How It Can Save Us.”

A generation into the loneliness epidemic, Americans are devising astonishing new ways to gather in real life. Fed up with isolation, polarization and digital saturation, people are flocking to rituals — collective, elective activities that bring us together for recurring shared purpose. Eager participants are reimagining how to mark life, love, health and family — and forging thriving communities in the process.
This groundswell of collective meaning making may be our best shot to counter the divisive algorithms and artificial intimacies of Big Tech. And every person, regardless of background, can join in.
Rituals are the glue that holds society together, the first human algorithm. Paleoanthropologists have identified what could be ritual gathering places from 300,000 years ago where our earliest ancestors honoured their dead. In pretty much every culture ever studied, humans marked moments of uncertainty and joy with collective, ceremonial life celebrations. Rituals calm us when we’re stressed, synchronize our heartbeats when we’re scared and align us to others when we celebrate or mourn together. They strengthen families, neighbourhoods and groups of all kinds.
When it comes to our most longstanding traditions, many are in decline. Birth rites have plummeted; the baptism rate among Catholics has fallen by half in the past 50 years. Fewer than half of American households are married couples; only one in three of us is buried when we die. Many who are cremated have no ritual at all to memorialize their lives.
While those traditions are falling away, however, we’re experiencing an equally remarkable recovery in non-traditional life rituals. I spent the past three years attending — and joining in — rituals in 16 countries on six continentsI found gender reveals, NICU graduations, cancerversaries, soberversaries, trauma release ceremonies, pet adoption anniversary ceremonies, gratitude circles, mastectomy circles, end-of-life doulas, end-of-company doulas, honour walk, daddy-daughter dances, mom proms, divorce parties, silent retreats, scream clubs, sound baths and parole apologies, among many others. Through all this variation, in all these different contexts, I saw a common desire to soften the harsh edges of daily life, grateful for the chance to embrace new opportunities, to mark time and to create meaning.
Some other new rituals involve reimagining longstanding celebrations, like the rise of micro weddings, Instagram-ready engagements and promposals. Others involve novel ways to mourn, like grieving and weaving circles, death cafes and pet funerals, a roughly $2 billion business.
Still more involve inventive ways to be together in nature, including forest bathing, a type of immersive outdoor shared experience that began in Japan, has spread to at least 70 other countries and has benefits ranging from increasing energy and immunity to decreasing anxiety and depression, all chronicled in 143 peer-reviewed papers. Still, the gains of this diffuse movement feel fragile. As artificial intelligence pushes deeper into lovebots, deathbots and godbots, the pressure will mount on all of us to build fresh pathways to belonging, togetherness and shared meaning. Increasingly, we face a choice: It’s virtual or ritual, URL or IRL. Ritual may not be our last hope, but it may be our best hope — one gathering at a time.