I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
I started teaching in the 90s, and left classroom teaching in 2019. This is how I saw it play out in every school I was aware of.
People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.
Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
My school even had a gazebo on the school yard so smokers didn't have to stand in the rain. They literally spent money to accommodate smokers.
Of course by the time I was there smoking on school grounds was prohibited, so smokers had to go just beyond the gate. Which students were not allowed to, but few teachers were willing to enforce that
In the classroom not, but during my youth in Germany, the smokers had their own smoker's corner with an ashtray until smoking age was raised from 16 to 18 and the smokers had to go out of the schoolyard (i.e. they had to walk 5 meters more, lol).
Parents are insane and demand access to their kids at all times.
My son goes to a private school, and I was on the board of trustees when we basically did the same thing the NYS requires three years ago. The drama and insanity was beyond anything I expected. One parent left me a three minute voicemail excoriating me as being no better than a school shooter - in the event of an emergency her son would die alone, because of me. (I introduced the motion and was called out in the minutes)
It’s great that the state passed a pretty sane law on the matter. Crazy people already think the governor is <insert terrible thing>, and the school boards can just nod, point to Albany and get on with their business.
There is leeway as well, our school (and some others that I know of), allow 7th graders and up to email parents via GMail. So little Tommy can keep folks in the loop about scheduling changes or whatever.
Hey, we must have been in high school at the same time. I saw the same thing going through my final years. But when I went back to visit the school a few years after I left... Things were very different.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
This is a huge factor, and heavily influenced by the purveyors of the technologies involved. A factor I hadn't realized that is implicated in this transition is the shift from the Teacher-led classroom to the device-led classroom. The teacher is no longer seen as the expert, the interpreter, the model figure of the subject when the laptop or tablet is the delivery tool. Students learn that the teacher is a facilitator, likely not up to date on the latest changes to the app interface, and not an authority on the subject.
Device-delivery instead of teacher-delivery puts the student first, even when the student knows nothing, and has zero impulse control.
So instead of modelling a productive and enriching data accessing environment, we're actually just tearing down the walls of the school and asking teachers to babysit the mayhem.
Well, in the era of school shootings, some parents argued that a phone could be a literal lifeline to their kids and a way to say their last goodbyes if the worst happened. It doesn’t really stand up when you compare the likelihoods of a school shooting (rare) to phone-induced educational and social regressions (almost certain). But it was an evocative argument and it worked to a large degree.
The pandemic induced the major change. Schools were forced to put everything online, and so screens became the default learning environment. What's the difference between them being on a laptop/chromebook/tablet and a phone? Not really that much. Plus parents allowed their kids get phones at a younger age to keep track of them. Now we are trying to claw it back, but the big problem is that the parents are the ones preventing it. They need to be constantly attached to their kids. Our son is 16 and while he loves screens, he also is enjoying kids spending less time on them at school so he can chat with people more.
If you haven't been to a school recently where >99% of kids all direct >99% percent of their attention during breaks I can see where you are coming from. But I was at a highschool with a lax phone policy (allowed in breaks etc), and I was amazed and appalled. A no-phones policy is really important to me, because there seems to be no middle ground possible.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
> It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
> Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time.
> iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire.
> I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
The facts say you're wrong about this.
The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]
ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012?
> The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]
The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
It's my fault for lumping tools like ChatGPT into the bin of "chatbots" that people - mostly kids - are sexting and forming intimate relationships with. In my mind, the latter are "chat" apps.
ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings.
I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.
I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
"and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it."
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work".
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.
A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
Isn't that actually illegal in most jurisdictions? But the betting companies seem to have effectively bribed legislatures in the past couple of decades.
I think both yours and the GP's points can be simply explained as: it's obvious in hindsight, but not in foresight.
Quite frankly, we (in a collective, general sense) suck at predicting the future. Half will think A, half will think B, and the half that ends up being correct by chance will think they are actually smart rather than lucky.
give me a break. you don't need data to know that a child lacks the self control to not look at their phone when they need to be doing anything else. smartphones are almost 20 years old. There are adults going to university and into the workforce that grew up without knowing a world without smartphones.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.