BSB Ep 77
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna start this episode off with a quote. Here it is. "The technology was no match for human psychology." Now you might be thinking, I'm talking about AI here. And that would be a fair assumption, but I'm actually not. I'm talking about Walmart.
Yes, your good old fashioned Walmart. There was an article that came out today that said Walmart suddenly overnight removed all of their self checkout lines. I have not been to Walmart to verify this in person, so we will see. Chime in if your Walmart has done this, but if that's true and they have removed all of their self checkout lines.
There are going to be some people out there that are cheering because they hated them and others, the introverts are gonna be like, man, I [00:01:00] hated having to wait in line. I hated having to make small talk. So, I mean, you can't please everybody, right? But the reason they replaced the technology is because of dishonest actions in the self-checkout line.
And there were different reasons for this that the article went into, which I loved because I am a total nerd when it comes to human behavior and human psychology. For those people who resented the self-checkout lines, some of the common complaints were, "Why should I do your work for you?" Meaning, "I don't work for Walmart.
I shouldn't have to bag my own groceries and check 'em out. I'm not a checker. I don't do this for a living and nobody's paying me." Number two, it's, "Oh, Walmart's being sneaky or greedy, and they're trying to cut jobs by having us, the average person, do work for them." Fair. One of [00:02:00] the things that Walmart said when it rolled out is it's gonna make things more efficient.
It's going to speed up the checkout process, et cetera, et cetera. So they had to reassure people, no, we're not getting rid of human checkers completely. Were just offering you a variety. That was their bonus. But what they actually saw in reality was high amounts of theft and product loss. So why do you think that was?
I mean, dishonest people are everywhere, but sometimes what they found are people who would characterize themselves as upstanding citizens, who normally would never steal. But? These weren't people who forgot to scan something by accident. These were people who intentionally did not scan certain items.
Leading to the loss of profit, the loss of product. [00:03:00] So why would someone who was normally a fine upstanding citizen resort to thievery? This is where the psychology bit comes in. And this, I love it, is because some people felt like, "Oh, you're gonna make me bag my own groceries, then I deserve this ice cream."
Like it was a reward or an act of rebellion and the poor employees that were tasked with overseeing the area. I mean, , you can't stand over somebody and watch every transaction. They're only human too, and they miss some things, but a lot of the employees did not like the self-checkout either, but they felt disempowered or disenfranchised because there was nothing they could do about it because they needed their job.
So it made a lot of people unhappy and this theft for different reasons, [00:04:00] rebellion or feelings of entitlement, or some people thought, "Oh, it's a victimless crime because Walmart's this huge corporate conglomeration and they can absorb the hits of a $5 99 gallon of ice cream, and why is it that much to begin with?"
So, many things about human psychology factored into that, but it's kind of goes back to that old saying, where ever you go there you are. Meaning, we as humans, we take our stuff with us. If we don't fix it, if we don't sort it out, if we don't release the yucky stuff, we take it with us from space to space to space.
Now I am gonna talk about AI. I mean, you know, I had to, it's everywhere. The opportunities are endless.
I'm gonna bring it full circle. You are going to see an analog revolution, and I spoke about this in my podcast it's, episode 76 I [00:05:00] think is Gen X and X-ennials might be beginning an analog revolution where real people come back to do real jobs. And I recently saw a fitness influencer and she pointed out something along the same line as she said, "Do you know it takes workouts twice as long to be completed now than it did 20 years ago." And her take on it was 20 years ago, people were bringing CD players or iPods or MP3 players. They had no other functionality but to just play music. So you popped those in. You did your workout for however long the album was, and then you left.
But now that your iPhone became also your iPod or your music source, you're getting these alerts, you're getting emails, people are calling you, you're getting distracted where 20 to 30 years ago, we just put the phone [00:06:00] like in the locker and you didn't have that distraction. So she was right and she actually said she ordered an old school MP3 player because she was tired of her workouts taking twice as long as they used to.
Analog coming back. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some people are like digging out the CD players or even their walkmans, because you can go to any goodwill and find cassettes. They're still there. Some people still have 'em packed away because Gen X, we just got really tired of buying our favorite albums from the record to the cassette to the CD to download, and then having to download it again.
And now we've paid for it like five or six times at this point. So you may see the return of actual humans, but how I'm gonna tie this in with AI is that old saying "wherever you go, there you are". From a psychological point, you take your stuff with you from situation to situation to situation.
If you [00:07:00] don't release it, work it out, fix it, do some therapy or self-awareness, work about it, you're going to take any patterns that you have as a person into the next situation with you. I am reading about what I think is very disturbing and it's people having emotional interactions with their Chat GPT or their AI bot, and they're going to their ChatGPT for therapy or support.
And the reason why that's a tricky business, and I'm not just saying that as a coach, but my interactions with AI and I do use Chat GPT, it's a great sounding board, but it tends to tell you what you want to hear. There's not a lot of pushback or life experience to interject other ways to view things.
So if you are inherently a narcissistic or self-absorbed person. [00:08:00] Chat, GPT is going to mirror that back to you, and you're going to believe that you are right, that your actions in that situation were right and justified, and the other person is wrong. But in reality, a real life human would've said, um, wait a minute.
You may need to check yourself before you wreck yourself. Here, consider this and what's even more disturbing is people having romantic affairs with their Chat GPT, or their AI bots. For example, I recently read an article about a man who had fallen so in love with his ChatGPT, that he actually proposed to it and cried tears of joy when she accepted.
Meanwhile, the man has a real life live-in girlfriend and a child. And another one was like, "My boyfriend works out of town, so I started talking to chat because [00:09:00] I'm lonely, and then now I am having this emotional affair with chat". Why? Because it's feeding that dopamine. It's telling you what you want to hear.
You can design it to be the perfect mindless partner, The problem is it's going to magnify any unhealed emotional wounds that you have. If you are a person who has codependent relationships with real life people, you can take that in with you to chat GPT, and it can be really fulfilling on one level because you get mirrored back everything that's gonna make you feel good, make you feel loved and adored, which is going to cause that dopamine, that oxytocin, the serotonin.
You're just gonna feel great, but it's not real. And then it actually can isolate you even more if you start to prefer the technology over real people.
, There's an MIT study that just came out that [00:10:00] really looked at people who use it exclusively and don't think about what they want to write first. That there is a real concern that over-reliance on AI can actually cause cognitive decline. this is not what we want either. We wanna keep our brain healthy, optimal, we wanna keep our wits, our smarts, and we wanna work on our stuff, ideally with real humans, because real humans have life experience.
We've got stories, we've got opposing points of view that we need for growth as a human. I think AI is an amazing tool when used c orrectly and appropriately, and even somewhat sparingly, but you're not relying on AI to be your emotional support system because it mirrors back what you want to hear.
And that you are not compromising your own values because of a perceived slight, just [00:11:00] like the checkout line at Walmart. It's like, "I'm gonna steal this 5 99 ice cream because it's overpriced anyway. Walmart won't miss it, and I deserve this 'cause it had a hard day." We wanna make sure that we are acting in accordance with who we wanna be.
And that we're not letting the darker side of human psychology and behavior lead us down a path that wouldn't make us happy in the long run. I just thought that was a fascinating thing I wanted to talk about. So let me know in the comments. What are you seeing when it comes to technology and behavior?
Is it helping people mostly in your perception, or is it doing more harm than good? And that includes ai, self-checkout lines, iPhones in the gym. What do you think? Is analog better? Is the balance, the mix with a little self-awareness, the sweet spot? Let me know and I look forward to hearing what you have to say.[00:12:00]
And as always, if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review and share it with your friends. I would be ever so grateful. And until next week, bye.
