The Atlantic – We must prepare now. By Jonathan Haidt and Eric Schmidt “We joined together to write this essay because we each came, by different routes, to share grave concerns about the effects of AI-empowered social media on American society. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has written about the ways in which social media has contributed to mental illness in teen girls, the fragmentation of democracy, and the dissolution of a common reality. Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google, is a co-author of a recent book about AI’s potential impact on human society. Last year, the two of us began to talk about how generative AI—the kind that can chat with you or make pictures you’d like to see—would likely exacerbate social media’s ills, making it more addictive, divisive, and manipulative. As we talked, we converged on four main threats—all of which are imminent—and we began to discuss solutions as well.

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