Prince Ea's "Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?" Explained

Prince Ea’s Spoken-Word Video About Phones and Connection

"Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?" is a short spoken-word video by Prince Ea that asks viewers to look up from their phones and pay attention to the people around them. Its central line plays on a simple irony: the same "touch" screens that connect us can make us lose touch. The video became the most-watched on his YouTube channel, and its message still lands years later. Watch it below, then read on for who Prince Ea is, what the poem says and what research actually shows about phones and connection.

Who is Prince Ea?

Prince Ea is the stage name of Richard Williams, born on 16 September 1988 in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated magna cum laude in anthropology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and started out as a rapper, releasing a free mixtape online. He later moved away from music towards spoken-word films, motivational speaking and activism.

His videos cover environmentalism, race, education, work-life balance and spirituality, and together they have drawn hundreds of millions of views. SUCCESS magazine, which named him to its 30-under-30 list, reported that "Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?" is his most-watched YouTube video, a roughly three-and-a-half-minute poem with more than 22 million views on that platform alone.

What the poem is about

The video was circulating widely by late 2014; the Catholic news site Aleteia shared it in November of that year as an invitation to examine our screen-time habits. In it, Prince Ea urges viewers to set aside smartphones, earbuds and other gadgets more often and to pay real attention to each other. He uses tech vocabulary, auto-correct, touch screens, connection, as wordplay to turn the language of devices back on their users.

The title asks whether we can "auto-correct" humanity the way a phone corrects a typo. His answer is that the correction has to come from us: putting the phone down, looking up and being present with the people in the room. The poem followed an earlier Prince Ea spoken-word video, Why This World Should End, which criticised materialism and consumer culture.

Does the science back him up?

Partly, and with caveats. Researchers have studied heavy smartphone use for years, but "smartphone addiction" is not a formal diagnosis: the DSM, the main psychiatric diagnostic manual in the US, has not codified problematic smartphone use as a condition. What studies do report are associations rather than proven causes.

Sleep: Studies such as Thomée and colleagues' 2011 work with young adults in Sweden have linked heavy mobile phone use with sleep disturbances and stress.
Attention: A 2019 review of reviews by Viner and Stiglic found an association between screen time and inattention in children and adolescents, though the evidence was mostly of low to moderate quality.
Well-being: Analyses of teen survey data have found that young people who spend more time than average on screens are more likely to report being unhappy. Researchers such as Peter Etchells point out that the arrow may also run the other way, with unhappy teens turning to their phones more.

So the poem's broad worry about attention and connection has real support, but its message works best as a reflection, not a statistic. One widely shared claim from the time, that the average person spends about four years of their life looking down at a phone, came without a clear method or sample and should not be treated as an established figure.

Practical ways to "auto-correct" your own phone habits

The research on interventions points to simple, practical changes rather than giving up phones altogether:

Use the built-in tools. Apple added Screen Time in iOS 12 in 2018, and Android offers Digital Wellbeing; both show how much time you spend and let you set app limits.
Turn off non-essential notifications, or switch them to vibration only.
Try grayscale mode, which makes colourful apps less tempting.
Set phone-free times, such as meals, the first hour after waking or the last hour before bed.
Decide in advance what you will do instead: call a friend, read, take a walk.

A small 2016 study of an app called MyTime, which combined usage information, reminders and limits, found users cut the time they spent on apps they considered a problem by 21%, without reducing apps they found worthwhile. That is the spirit of Prince Ea's message: not rejecting technology, but choosing what it is for.

Why the message lasts

A screen is not the enemy. Video calls keep families together across continents, and online communities can be a lifeline. The question the poem raises is simpler: in this moment, is the phone helping you connect or pulling you away from the person beside you? Asking that once a day may be the most useful "auto-correct" of all.

Sources: Video by Prince Ea, originally shared via True Activist; Wikipedia: Prince Ea; SUCCESS: Prince Ea; Aleteia (November 2014); Wikipedia: Problematic smartphone use.

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