The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.
This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.
My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.
Schlagwort: Society
Kafka in the Age of AI and the Futility of Privacy as Control (2024)
I’m very pleased to post a draft of my forthcoming essay with Professor Woodrow Hartzog (BU Law), Kafka in the Age of AI and the Futility of Privacy as
Quelle: Kafka in the Age of AI and the Futility of Privacy as Control
To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation
“[Elon] Musk is kind of an unsubtle example of the problem with Tech Bros,” says Cory Doctorow.
If we want to push back against the dystopian dynamics of the tech world, we have to understand how we got here. We need to know what we’re dealing with and what changes might upend the dynamics that currently define our experience of the internet.
We need to seize the means of computation, because while the internet isn’t the most important thing that we have to worry about right now, all the things that are more important, gender and racial justice, inequality, the climate emergency, those are struggles that we’re going to win or lose by organizing on the internet.
And the internet has these foundational characteristics, the interoperability, the universality, working encryption that lets us keep secrets, that allow us to organize mass movements in ways that our forebears could only have dreamt of. And it’s up to us to take control of that technology and make it work for us.
Quelle: To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation
An ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ For The Progenitors Of AI | NOEMA
Governing a technology that could shatter societies.
The movie director Christopher Nolan says he has spoken to AI scientists who are having an “Oppenheimer moment,” fearing the destructive potential of their creation. “I’m telling the Oppenheimer story,” he reflected on his biopic of the man, “because I think it’s an important story, but also because it’s absolutely a cautionary tale.” Indeed, some are already comparing OpenAI’s Sam Altman to the father of the atomic bomb.
Quelle: An ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ For The Progenitors Of AI | NOEMA
For further reading:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/ai-oppenheimer-moment-regulation/
The Social Dilemma (2020)
Quelle: The Social Dilemma
Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, The Social Dilemma fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides-search engines, networks, instant information, etc.-are merely the candy that lures us to bite. Once we’re hooked and coming back for more, the real commodity they sell is their prowess to influence and manipulate us.
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks – so why do we lose so much time to online distraction?
Silicon Valley makes billions by stealing your attention. No wonder it’s so hard to focus…
How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms
(without ditching your friends)
Edward Snowden’s comment to Ai Wei-Wei’s biography „1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows“
Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
Quelle: Cultural Revolutions
„I was most recently enlivened by a book, so I can’t think of anything more fitting for my return to this format than an account of it: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by the great Chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei.“ (Edward Snowden)
Ai Wei-Wei writes:
„Under the pressure to conform, everyone sank into an ideological swamp of “criticism” and “self-criticism.” My father repeatedly wrote self-critiques, and when controls on thought and expression rose to the level of threatening his very survival, he, like others, wrote an essay denouncing Wang Shiwei, the author of “Wild Lilies,” taking a public stand that went against his inner convictions.
Situations such as this occurred in Yan’an in the 1940s, occurred in China after 1949, and still occur in the present day. Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is also present, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans.“
„Another Round“ by Thomas Vinterberg
The Danish director’s new Oscar-winning film Another Round is about a group of teachers who dedicate themselves to getting drunk. He talks about losing control, patching up his friendship with Lars von Trier and the death of his daughter
Quelle: Thomas Vinterberg: ‘There is a great need for the uncontrollable – but little room for it today’
„The internet is not broken. People are.“ (Manuel Moreale)
That magical place that is Hacker News managed to fish up this piece of content today, from the depths of the web. And I am very grateful for that. …