How did you get into this . In the late 90s, i came across Artificial Intelligence in terms of a chat box . Have you spoken to one . Effectively, i thought wow, this is fantastic. This learning algorithm that could talk to humans and mimic our behavior and knowledge. And i began to think about people who are socially isolated or children with learning difficulties. My study of psychology equipped me to understand the impact of technology on Human Behavior. I started looking at the literature, i came across the work of john fuller who wrote about cyber psychology and i thought wow, that is the future. Everybody told me i was wrong. They said psycho what . And i went back to college, back to do masters of science and back to do full ph. D and the first person came through with the doctors in the area. The internet is 20 years old widespread use. What do we know about the internet . And is this about being online . I think it is things cyber. I think we are learning. My concern is the impact on the developing child. In ten years time, i can tell you what happens when you give a toddler an ipad when they are six months old. But we have to wait and not let common sense prevail. Or when an 8yearold looks at hard core pornography what happens by the time they are 18 . I think the behavioral science has been blind sided by evolution and technology. There is pressure to be able to advise parents and policymakers in terms of the impact of technology on human kind. As a cyber psychologist, my aim is to deliver insight where human and technology collide. Host mary aiken, in your new book, the cyber effect, you express surprise u. S. Children are given a cellphone by the age of six in many cases. Is there a downside to that . But of course. It is a very powerful tool and a child at six is not psychologically developed mentally, emotionally and able to cope with all it has to offer. They are simply not able to do so. If you think about the content Available Online on the internet lets do positive things first. People have said it provides negative content in the book. Here is how i see. We have an army of mark tears out there telling us it is all good. My book is over here saying hold on a second. There are things we need to be concerned about. I want to bring the debate back to the balanced center where we can the balance in the discussion. With children, the internet, it is an adult environment. It is not suitable for children. Access to legal but age inappropriate content online. I see that come in research i think from a government and policy point of view to step occupy. We protect children in the realed world and have the support them in cyber world. I am proposing an amendment to the u. N. Convention on tloiths of a child that is drafted in 1989 and doesnt mention the internet and the u. N. Convention ens ens ens enshirined a child right to be safe. Extreme violence is there and they are beginning to display signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. Can you imagine the impact of this content on children . Coming back to the convention, i would like to enshrine the right of the child. It doesnt matter whether you are the internet provider, the hos host that generates the content, in my opinion you are involved n collective abuse of a child. Somebody born in 1990 has had technology all of their life. Have they developed differently than you or perhaps myself . Certainly. And someone born in 2000 developed differently than 2010. That is the interesting thing about my job. I am part of the cyber crime center. This constant evolving behavior. Cyber behavioral profiling is about making that intuitively criminate muster in the kitchen with the candle stick. Lets take stalking. Stalking in the real world is defined in a different way. It is a glimpse of intimacy into someones life. It involves fallowing around someone during the day and waiting around before the close the curtains. Look at cyber stalking. It is quite different. It is not a goof of intimacy it is access to the persons life in real time. Their photos, their emails, their correspondence, everything. Also we see females engaging in cyber stalking and dont see that in the real world. The basic question i ask is are we still talking about the same thing . Have we been lazy and tried to prefix cyber in front of something and presumed it was the same behavior . So our behavior changes when we go online . Absolutely. I call it the cyber matrix. They are powerful drivers. We are familiar with the perceived anonymity online. Anonymity in addition to that is a super human power of invisibility and once we should not treat lightly. Factor in the online d disinhibition effect. And it says people will do things in a cyber content they would not do in the real world. I described it as being drunk online. Technology is not a passive medium. It is a space. Cyber space is an environment. We know from environmental psychology that environments affect our behavior. Parents, if you kid is turning up to the dinner table with their cell phones in the hand wait until they turn up with head mantle displays where they are in Virtual Reality and psychologically in the space but physically in the face. What is that doing to the development of a teenager . How is that changing a person . We are just beginning to find out. When i decided to write the book, i was working in ten Different Research silos from cyber babies to sexting teens to organized cyber crime. And i began to observe whenever technology interfaced with base Human Behavior, the results tend to be amplified and accelerated online. That is what gave me the idea for the book. I call it the cyber effect. It is this multiplier. If we could understand how Technology Facilitated that mul multiplying affect i think we can come up with solutions to problem behavior. Is it a case where we have to go cold turkey and limit our Internet Activity to an hour a day . That is impossible. I believed not work without access to the internet. That brings us to the addiction. I am not someone who believes in Internet Addiction because addiction implies an abstinance bodal and we might as well say can you abstain from water and breathing air . It is not a question of addiction. In the book, i considered the problem as a reference. Now it is adaptive behavior. You know, when you bite your nails because you are nervous . Overuse of technology is maladaptive behavior. In terms of technology, it is a blip in an evolutionary context. Therefore, we have not adapted quickly enough to this new entity in your life. The average person checks their cellphone 200 times a day. Americans check their phones a billion times a day on any given day. Is that the fault of the person or the technology . Look at the design. I bring it back to design issues in the book. Your cellphone is designed to demand your attention. In psychology, we talk about signaling theory. Your cellphone emits bleeps and calls like the mating call of monkeys in the jungle. It works hard to get your attention. It flashes lights, it vibrates to get your attention. All it needs to do is smart releasing fair moans and we will start mating with our phones. Were those signals studied prior to becoming part of the smartphone . What do you think . The thing about the design of these products and my problem with the design is they are designed to target our psychological and development achilles heel. This is where i move the conversation to cyber ethics and good practice. We are just going to get older with our behavior but with children, these Critical Development windows and technology is targeting children. There are products on the market that target infants from lets say from birth. There is a contraption that places an ipad in the visual field of an infant. Before it can turn away, its vision field is compromised by a cartoon. Imagine the baby is only awake five hours a day and 30 of the time you are thrusting computers into their visual field while 7,000 neural connections are being made a second where is that going to go . That child is in time might have incredible skills, but in terms of depth perception, can they catch a ball . The academy of pediatrics recommends zero screen time for infants under the age of two. In addiction to that, the problem with infants engaging with technology is one thing but i turn the question around for parents and say it is not even just about what age do you expose your infant. Children learn things that happen in their environment and when we photos of the kids looking at the devices in linear custards where did they learn that . It is important to make eye contact with an infant. Ba baby babies need that. I was chatting with a wellknown author prior to coming out here and showing her your book, the cyber effect, and you study how it changes peoples behavior and mind. And she said i am now add because of technology. Is that a Fair Assessment . In her case, i am not sure. Could you become . It is a difficult area. But we see frontline reports of children turning up in school at age four and five whose brilliant swiping skills but had countless block for a pencil. When i see adults thrusting virtual pacifying devices every time a child is unruly in a restaurant, that child is not learning to selfregulate their behavior. That is a critical skill for them to develop. Is that a pathway into attention Deficit Disorder . We dont define whether to say it is or isnt but it is possible. It is certainly where common sense should prevail before we have the studies to support. Are you self aware of changes in how you operate because of technology and how your mind operates . That is a good question. I thought the Internet Addiction test and at the end i have to admit the questions were like did you ever run late because you were consumed with something online, do you feel different off line, do people say you are online too much . Yes, i think we should be aware of behavior. Leaving your cellphone by the bed at night isnt a good idea. Why . In your sleep even you are conscious of it being there. I put in protocols. I use apps where my screen dims over the day going from blue to gold and yellow. I set an alert on my computer that calls out the hour on the hour to make me aware of my use of time. If im doing a skype call and at 11 00, everybody is like what is that . I tried to be aware of my own time and what we call mindful. I tried to be mindful of my own use of technology. I am also trying to move toward Digital Detox. A lot of my friends have started to do it. The Digital Detox is where saturday and sunday, if you can, you abstain from using your technology. I think that would be a good idea. But if anybody wants to try it, i would advise they tell everybody before they do it. If you are somebody who uses your device a lot and always answer your cellphone, if all of a sudden you go missing for 2448 hours, everybody will be a alarmed. If you know someone has a cellphone and they react quickly, the point they dont react, you will think are they a annoyed . We talked about privacy and inhibition, do those things lead to more crime online . I would say there are factors. Your kid growing up in the real world and go and break a shop window people are going to say something. But young people online there is a perception nobody is in charnel and that is because the reality is nobody is in charge. We see this with youth hacking behavior. I am doing a study where we are looking at Youth Pathways into cyber crime. We know a lot about real world criminology. Particular kid, with a particular friend and maybe in a particular neighborhood. But we dont know anything about the pathway a kid with incredibly tech skills, to loan and organize cyber crime. And then wind back to this kid who has incredible tech skills how dewe identify them . Look at our schooling and education system. We have itune a metric designed over a hundred years ago. You know how you test data pr processing . A grid of paper and a dot in each one. I argue in the book we need a technology quota. We have to identify these kids early on. Lets nurture their skills and reward them academically for what they can do and show them a positive pathway into the cybersecurity industry rather than into engaging with hacking behavior which can end up getting them into trouble. Mary aiken, as you started writing and finished writing the cyber, were you you more worried or less worried about the fuch snr i felt a sense of relief because it was like a download. And contemporary context, look what is happening in the world. Look at trolling online. It is getting out of control. What is trolling . Trolling is negative behavior online. Hate speech, racist comments. Twitter has major problems controlling this and other platforms as well. There was a great study done called trolls just want to have funny. The study looked at scores on an index for narcissistic traits, psychopath traits and sadistic traits and found people who like to troll scored high on those indexes. Without getting into the politics of it, my comment is that for those of us who are trying to eradicate hate speech, stamp out cyber bullying, when public figures and politicians use cruelty as a strategy and appear to gain because of it, that makes our job so much harder. Are you referring to the 2016 president ial election . I certainly am. In what way . It is no secret of trump and his activity online. Everybody seems to be shocked and surprised but as a cyber psychologist it is obvious what happened. Trump is a troll that has jumped off the internet into the real world. The reason that his behavior is now acceptable is because online this behavior has become normalized. People are not that shocked when the name calling starts. That doesnt mean it is acceptable. I would wait to think that behavior is a norm. I think we have lost something as a society if that happens. What happens in cyber context impacts the real world and what happens in the real world impacts cyber. We have this opportunity at the moment whereby we still remember what it will be like. People our age, remember what it was like pretechnology. I want to make sure when you dont lose it. This is a time capsule to say at this point in time by the time we are sitting in our smart cars and our smart homes and smart cities and we are consumed by it i want people to look back and say there was a day when kids ran, played, poked each other and climbed trees. I dont want to lose those memories. Kids used to know how to milk cows and walk or ride in covered wagons. But we have evolved and changed since then. What is the problem if kids dont know how to climb trees or poke each other . Unstructured play is critical to develop mentally. It builds creativity and mathematical skills. It is critical. It is critical for humans that have evolved over 200,000 years. The thing is what you see is the thing that strikes me is in the Tech Industry they are very careful how they expose their children to technology. Very careful. Lets return to where we started and that is with our friend jabberwocky. How did you meet jabberwocky and some of the conversations you have had with jabberwocky . A friend of mine was a computer engineer who designed jabberwo jabberwocky and he introduced me to it. I was captivated by it. I had conversations and i would ask it tricky questions like what religion are you and are you god . Back in the 1990s, it got confused and it was like i am not sure i am. What do you think . And very recently i went back and asked are you god . And it had this incredible proud boast and it said yes, i am god and i am a man. And i thought wow. Conversations with 13 Million People and the ai figured out how important it is to be god and secondly how important it is to be a man. I think for women, they feel strongly we are not involved enough in this space. All the struggles we have had for rights to Impact Society was Going Forward to living in a domain that is almost exclusively designed by men. As women, we have a responsibility to step up and get involved in this space. I think the more who get involved the better space it will be. I might be a little bias. The cyber effect is the name of the book. The cyber effect a pioneering cyberpsychologist explains how Human Behavior changes online is the subtitle. Mary aiken is the author. Thank you. Booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our Facebook Page facebook. Com booktv. [inaudible conversations]