This week join Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher, and Keith Duggar have a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Roache in the last of our 3-part series on the social dilemma Netflix film. Rebecca is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, university of London and has written extensively about the future of friendship. 

People claim that friendships are not what they used to be. People are always staring at their phones, even when in public  Social media has turned us into narcissists who are always managing our own PR rather than being present with each other. Anxiety about the negative effects of technology are as old as the written word. Is technology bad for friendships? Can you have friends through screens? Does social media cause polarization? And is that a bad thing? Does it promote quantity over quality? Rebecca thinks that social media and echo chambers are less ominous to friendship on closer inspection. 

00:00:32 Teaser clip from Rebecca and her new manuscript on friendship

00:02:52 Introduction 

00:04:56 Memorisation vs reasoning / is technology enhancing friendships 

00:09:29 Word of warcraft / gaming communities / echo chambers / polarisation 

00:12:34 Horizontal vs Vertical social attributes 

00:17:18 Exclusion of others opinions 

00:20:36 The power to silence others / truth verification 

00:23:58 Misinformation 

00:27:28 Norms / memes / political terms and co-opting / bullying 

00:31:57 Redefinition of political terms i.e. racism 

00:36:13 Virtue signalling 

00:38:57 How many friends can you have / spread thin / Dunbars 150 

00:42:54 Is it morally objectionable to believe or contemplate objectionable ideas, punishment 

00:50:52 Is speaking the same thing as acting  

00:52:24 Punishment - deterrence vs retribution / historical 

00:53:59 Yannic: contemplating is a form of speaking 

00:57:32 silencing/blocking is intellectual laziness - what ideas are we allowed to talk about 

01:04:53 Corporate AI ethics frameworks 

01:09:14 Autonomous Vehicles 

01:10:51 the eternal Facebook world / online vs offline friendships 

01:14:05 How do we get the best out of our online friendships