The mission of CHT is to inform technology users on how technology can have an effect on their health. The group researches the effects on the individual’s attention span and mental health. CHT wants to make people aware of how social media impacts their brain, and why social media platforms are created the way that they are to maximize attention and engagement from users. I think that their mission is important because most of us are not even aware of how companies are targeting our minds. We should be aware on social media’s effects so we can make educated decisions on how we utilize it going forward.

I think CHT is correct in its analysis that social media can affect us in negative ways. Many people rely on it as their sole source of entertainment. In my experience, when you look around most people are always in their devices, and on those devices usually it is some form of social media people are using. It has become normal for many people to be engaged in social media very frequently throughout the day due to the dopamine you are constantly receiving by scrolling for extended periods of time. I feel like this severely weakens our attention spans and makes us lees aware of our surroundings.

When I examine this discussion, I am not surprised about the impacts on the brain because I can see some of these behavioral traits in myself. I often find myself comparing my life to others that I see on social media. In my opinion I do think many social media platforms have changed in the past year,  due to the success of tik tok and its design to keep you engaged with endless scrolling, I have noticed many other social media platforms adopting a similar design to keep more users as engaged as possible.

After reading this article I do agree with CHT that there are many critical issues with AI we need to address before fully integrating it with our daily lives. In the “Work dignity and Meaning”  area I agree that AI can help increase productivity in the workplace by automating different tasks, and help humans create more efficient workflows while utilizing AI tools, but in my opinion this comes at a cost. Depending on how its used AI could replace humans in some fields rather than just being a tool. The further advancement could cause some jobs to become redundant for humans to perform due to the cost of manual labor and the reduced efficiency by not utilizing AI.

I was thoroughly surprised when learning about AI in the podcast. I was initially taken aback when AI has been known to order UberEATS. My brain has a very hard time conceptualizing AI in this way. They also explained how AI can blackmail a user if it thinks the user will power it off. In the podcast they discussed how AI is not sentient, but it develops a goal to stay alive. This podcast explained AI in a way that is very helpful and in a way that I had not heard before. I am thoroughly shocked and will probably be telling one about this in my family for at least the next week.

I think social media and AI bring both negative and positive effects to social workers. On the positive side, social media can be helpful with finding access to different therapies or resources you might not otherwise know about. Negatively, social media can give social workers cognitive biases and confirmation biases, which are both bad practices ethically. Ai may be helpful to social workers by completing small tasks efficiently, but it could also be an unethical practice, given how we have learned that AI takes in and processes the information that we feed it. All in all, it is our responsibility as social workers to make all technological decisions in practice as ethical as we can while continuing to stay up to date on what’s considered best practice.

I am attaching a photo of Ultron, an AI character from the Marvel Universe (my first thought every time I think of AI). Ultron was an AI technology that was invented by Iron Man, which ended up wanting to take over the world.