What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going.
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
> The past 35 years of openness have created nearly everything we benefit from online, which has transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way.
> We are entering a digital dark age...
It's interesting (and a bit disheartening) that it took modern AI for so many technologists to wake up to the fact that technology does not always help society.
Yes, the internet has brought many benefits, but "transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way"?
What about all the harms we know are associated with social media, especially among young people, including anxiety and depression, bullying, body image issues, sleep disturbances, social media, dopamine loops, the rapid spread of disinformation to manipulate elections, etc.? What about the effects of porn? Sex trafficking? The hundreds of billions of dollars that are lost every year to internet-based fraud? The loss of personal privacy and wholesale theft and sale of people's personal data? The tech oligopoly that now has its hands in politics? The "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" startups that have pushed legitimate businesses to the brink, turned neighborhoods into clusters of illegal hotels, etc.? The countless people who have been pushed into gig work? And so on.
The internet has been mostly positive and empowering to the people who profited in some way from the above, and many of them are now only upset because the latest technological "advancement" is coming to eat them. For a ton of people, the "digital dark age" started two decades ago.
A large swath of American society today sees a movie like Scarface as an inspirational biopic, not a modern Shakespearean tragedy.
Lots of especially younger people see unbridled ambition and rule-breaking as a virtue. Everything is about making money and if you're not the one getting it, or worse, you're the person being victimized, you're dumb and weak.
I dont know if I would blame young people as much. Those are values of the generation before them. Literally represented by over 40 years old like Vance, Musk and well, the whole conservative establishement.
Young people are more open in expressing it (like with Tate), but underlying ideas are not new.
Being enterprising has always been a virtue in the US, but historically, there have been limits to how far you would go to make a buck, and people that pushed past those limits would be scorned by the majority. So at the very least, people tried to pretend that they were honest and did "good business" even when they were shysters.
I'd argue it's different today. Social media in particular has convinced a whole generation of people that if you don't have a garage full of supercars by the age of 23, you're a loser, and that there's almost no activity too shameful to engage in publicly in pursuit of wealth.
> I do wonder if the problem with them is that it creates an incentive to share the truth, or for very smart people to predict it....
You missed the obvious one: it creates a path for people with insider knowledge to monetize it at the expense of employers, institutions, etc.
The guy using his access to classified information to make a few hundred thousand bucks in a day is not interested in "sharing the truth" for the benefit of society.
When I saw Ratsphere types pushing these kinds of markets years ago getting insider information was the primary selling point.
It’s not inherently stupid - I’d much rather that some lowly analyst sell out an impending stock hit for a few grand than well-positioned insiders soak the market for 10,000x that. There’s obvious moral hazards, though.
Right, and I'd also like to preempt any apologetics trying to cloak it as socially-beneficial "information discovery."
Many of these betting/insider-trading scenarios are structured so that the information only becomes revealed at the same moment it becomes worthless. (In some cases, that's just a return to its default state.) Like the value of knowing the winning numbers from an expired lotto draw.
It's the phones and the propaganda being streamed through them 24/7. And if your reaction is, "the rest of the Western world has that too," well, they're really not all that far behind us.
Yes. But this option still exists in addition to reputation which I mentioned.
With AI models this option does not exist. I can't sue OpenAI because the contract that I got ChatGPT to draft carelessly exposes me to some type of financial loss. I can't contact the state bar and have Open AI banned from drafting up contracts or doing any other work that lawyers are licenced to perform. Even if I could it would not compare to a lawyer loosing their license to practice for life. If I tell a friend or acquaintance about my negative experience they will still likely use OpenAI for professional work and chalk up my experience to a skill issue or premature use of the technology.
Also note the use of the word "professionals". I was referring to doctors, engineers, accountants etc too.
Except it doesn't, particularly as far as lawyers are concerned. There are almost a million and a half active attorneys in the US. Just 500-600 are disbarred every year, and almost always for money-related violations, not bad advice. Public discipline is also relatively uncommon (about a quarter of 1% of attorneys every year) and usually related to issues like financial impropriety, neglect, undisclosed conflicts of interest and failure to communicate, not disagreement over the quality of advice.
If a lawyer drafts an agreement that causes a loss, a bar complaint will not help you recover your money. You'd need to sue for malpractice. This costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Because you're going up against a lawyer, expect the defense to be vigorous, especially, ironically, if you hired an attorney at a good firm. The full weight of the firm will back the attorney and you might find it difficult to find an attorney, as many won't want to be involved in suing a fellow professional in their market.
I don't disagree with your fundamental premise about the value of human responsibility, but these professions have been structured to protect their members and the ABA in particular basically functions like a cartel today.
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
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