The Algorithm Is Making Us Lonely?

You’ve heard it at work. You’ve heard it at church. You’ve heard it from your grandkids. And if you’re honest, you’ve been nodding along without anyone ever sitting you down to explain what the algorithm actually is — because, as this episode points out, the people who built it have zero interest in you understanding it.

On the latest Faith & AI Show, host Dice Gamble sits down with Dr. Natalie Waksmanski — Assistant Dean at DeVry University’s College of Engineering & Information Sciences, and a rare voice who lives at the crossroads of deep faith and hard STEM — to finally break the thing wide open. And they do it without the fear-mongering and without the wide-eyed hype.

They get into questions most of us have felt but never asked out loud:

• Why the algorithm is less like a mind-reader and more like a librarian who never sleeps — and what that distinction changes about how you use your phone
• The truth about dopamine that almost everyone gets backwards (hint: it was never the “pleasure chemical”)
• What four of the engineers who built these systems admitted, on the record, about their own children
• Why 24 million people picked up pickleball — and why Dr. Natalie calls it a spiritual story
• The one line from Genesis that modern loneliness research keeps accidentally proving true

Then there’s the moment a working mom describes exactly what showed up, uninvited, on her young daughter’s screen — and what she did next. It’s the part of the conversation that stops being about technology and starts being about all of us.

Here’s the thread they keep pulling: that feed you scroll is a list, not a mirror. It knows what you like to do on a Tuesday. It does not know your name — and it was never built to.

Before it’s over, they land somewhere unexpectedly hopeful: three things you can actually do this week to take your attention back, and why the antidote was never going to be found in another app or another setting.

Watch now on YouTube.

The Faith & AI Show is part of the Holy Culture Podcast Network — the only podcast built at the intersection of faith and AI. Follow @FaithNAIShow and catch every episode at FaithAIShow.com.