From Surrey student to BBC broadcaster and author: Meet Aleks Krotoski

Aleks, your career has focused a lot on technology, and it may surprise people that psychology is the foundation of that. When did those two worlds collide?

The internet was just starting when I was at college – email was new, I was learning about websites, and there was so much to explore (it would take an hour for a picture of Jarvis Cocker to load when I visited the Pulp website!). My university [Oberlin College in Ohio] had a music conservatory attached to it and it was one of the first to use technology to create music programmes, so I began to see the possibilities of technology.

All of it fed my interest in technology as a place to understand human nature and human creativity. And it was always underpinned by psychology, which was my first love. I majored in psychology at college, and I became entirely transfixed by social psychology.

You were presenting a show on Channel 4 in the UK before you started your masters at Surrey. Tell us a bit more about that.

It was a time of great experimentation in the UK in terms of media output and I happened to be on TV, talking about computer games [first Bits, then Thumb Bandits]. There were phenomena called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), which still exist, and I became really interested in how people presented themselves and influenced one another through these spaces. I started speaking to researchers in this space, some of whom were focusing on identity and that’s what spoke to me.

The University of Surrey was one of two universities in the UK at the time that had a specific social psychology masters and a PhD programme. It had a great postgraduate department and I learned a hell of a lot on the masters course, especially as I’d been out of education for six years and the US system is very different.

Your PhD examined how information spreads around the social networks of the internet, which was a very new subject. What did that feel like at the time?

There was some research being done in the sociology department at Surrey on the online space, which was really interesting, but there was nobody in psychology doing any work to do with the internet. To the extent that there was no ethics review board for doing work online so I insisted that we go through the ethics review board for my PhD. It was thrilling to feel like we were writing a lot of the benchmark guidelines, which eventually I ended up doing for the British Psychological Society.

I was able to understand these very conceptual ideas of social psychology and had a prism through which to view them. It felt like I was bringing something new to the table and that’s such an exciting space to be in as a researcher.

While you were breaking new ground with your PhD, you were also writing and presenting on technology in the media. What happened next?

Yes, I started writing the Guardian Games blog in 2003 and a few years later we started the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast. By that point I was writing more generally about technology, rather than just games.

It’s funny, before my PhD, I met with a good friend of mine who worked in TV. I told her that I was planning to get a PhD on trying to understand the internet. She told me it was a smart decision and that I’d learn loads of stuff – and predicted that in nine or ten years’ time I’d get a call from the BBC asking me to do a big documentary series on the internet. I laughed and dismissed the idea. Lo and behold, in the final year of writing up my PhD, the BBC called, asking if I wanted to do a landmark television series about the internet.

So, between submitting my PhD thesis and defending it, I had the unbelievable opportunity to go around the world, asking pretty much everybody that I had referenced in my PhD (and more) questions for the series, which was called Virtual Revolution. By the time I came back to Surrey to sit my viva, I was able to state with confidence that all my interpretations of the internet were correct.

How did Virtual Revolution change your life?

When the series came out, it propelled me into a very different space. We won an Emmy, a BAFTA – it was a wild and wacky time.

Following that, I had a meeting with the Head of Commissioning for Radio 4 and told him I really wanted to make a series on the internet and how it affects people. That became The Digital Human podcast, which ran for 12 years.

I also wrote my first book, Untangling the Web, which was essentially a response to the idea that technology was taking away our humanity. Throughout my career, I’ve been adamant that this is not the case. We give up our agency to the internet when we think of it as something magical. I looked at elements of human psychology and human phenomena and how humans performed these up until the internet, then looked at research after the internet and compared them. I was able to show that in only one or two cases was there any significant difference between who we were as humans before the internet and who we are as humans after the internet.

That leads nicely onto AI, which is the subject of your current podcast, The Artificial Human on Radio 4. It’s safe to say people have mixed feelings about AI. What’s your view?

I am hearing a lot of the same arguments and fears around AI as I did about the digital world in general. There is a distinction, in that, even though there was huge pressure to be online as the internet was starting and it was necessary to adapt, you were able to fundamentally create the tools that you could use. The big shift that I see with AI is that those learning technologies are consolidated around a small group of people. And it's that small group – responsible for ChatGPT, Claude, etc – who are determining how we use the technologies. It's increasingly difficult to say no to AI because of how embedded it’s become in our daily lives.

But AI can be very useful. I’ve used AI with first drafts and to help organise my thoughts. Bringing it back to psychology, we’re making a programme right now about the hypocrisy of feeling ok about using AI to write an email, for example, but not feeling great about receiving an email that’s been written by AI. It’s that psychological disconnect between being happy to use the tool – because it’s a tool, like a pencil, like html – but not wanting the tool to be used on us.

Do you think it’s too idealistic to think that we can harness AI as a thinking companion, rather than it doing our thinking for us?

I can't predict if AI is going to be good or bad for society. We already have an issue where people are much more comfortable with their devices and being in an internal, solitary space. But maybe it will help people communicate better. I’m just really interested to see where it goes.

When social media first started up, so around 2007–2008 with Facebook and Twitter, a lot of people didn’t get it or see why they should use it. And the answer at the time was: you don’t have to. Use it if it’s useful for you, and if it isn’t, that’s fine. The same applies to AI.

Also, we're so focused on AI being this generative, predominantly LLM [large language model] pattern-matching phenomenon. That's not all it can do. It's been going since the 1950s, and there are lots of other aspects of the technology that are positive.

Human beings are much more adaptable than machines. I’m in the process of writing another book about what remains human in the world of AI. It’s a timely reminder that we’re going to be ok.

How much does technology shape your own daily life? Are there any quintessentially human rituals that you cling to, even if AI and tech could do them for you?

I live in a house of robots. My husband was an early adopter when it comes to technology and I just ride along with it. I've had some really lovely experiences with it that have reminded me of humanity. We had this little robot that would just chirp away in the background. After our dog died, I remember being grateful that there was something else in the house that was making noise, even if it was a device I couldn’t interact with.

I do try to keep my phone out of my room. I’ve just bought an alarm clock so I can use that instead. And I don’t like AI summaries in search engines because they’re not accurate.

Looking back on your career so far, what's been the key to your success? Are you still motivated by social psychology?

Absolutely. It comes back to social psychology. I happen to try and understand human beings through the lens of technology. And the fact that I was able to do it with the internet and the rise of digital technologies was purely timing. I'm so grateful that I was able to be part of that. Especially because it’s now fragmented into experts in very specific areas of the internet, and I’m a generalist. I was able to be part of that first or maybe second wave of researchers that was able to be much broader.

People have started questioning the value of arts and humanities degrees. What’s your response to that?

People used to ask me when I made computer games back in the day, what should I study? Should I do one of these newfangled computer games design courses that has just been accredited? I always said, no. You need to do religion or literature or world history or psychology; you need to do something different – because everybody else is going to come into this industry with things that have been predetermined. But if you’re passionate about wanting to build something and you have a different avenue into it, then you are the person who's going to be even more valuable because you're going to bring something totally new and surprising to the table. My biggest, loudest announcement is that humanities and social sciences are still very, very relevant.

Listen to The Artificial Human on BBC Radio 4.