I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
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.
When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
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.
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.
Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
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 and they haven't.
It's more nudge nudge wink wink age restriction theatre than 1984 total surveillance.
The onus is on platforms (Facebook, Youtube, et al) to adhere to the request to restrict minors.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban...
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).
> 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?
[1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
[2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/
[3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements
The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
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.
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.
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.
You're saying it's not zero sum because to make it zero sum you should include the big profitable corporations that are pumping in money?
True it's not zero sum but that's like saying a casino isn't zero sum because you're playing against the house!
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.
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.
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.
There existed a period of time where handheld communication devices existed and were banned.
Sometime later, someone somewhere made a conscious choice to change policy. It didn’t just happen.
Must have been a powerful person.
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.
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
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
Raw deal.
Funny that we as a society were winning for a while until somebody invented vapes.
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.
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.
Banning smartphones completely (including during breaks / lunch)? A different matter entirely.
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.
I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
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.
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
It seems that they do indeed see what you’re saying…
> If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
I hope you're trolling, because if not...
> 1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
A public school intervenes between the parent and their children to tell the student what is good work and what is not. Parents do not always know best. (Yes, there are policies which let the parent appeal, but the parent does not have final authority.)
Child protective services can take children away from parents who are egregiously poor parents.
I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
If we believe in educating citizens then we set rules to help educate citizens. There is a long history of prohibiting certain electronics at school. At https://archive.org/details/makingvaluejudgm0000elde/page/38... we can read that over 50 years ago some schools prohibited transistor radios.
If the claim is in good faith then it's also saying that laws and rules forbidding smoking in school must be repealed. I certainly want to keep them in place, so I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
Which is an argument that if the child wants to play video games all day and is getting Ds or worse in every class, than teachers should like the child continue to make that mistakes. I don't see this as a good faith argument.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
Having separate spaces works a lot better. Which is why we have alcohol venue licensing. Forbidding kids from phones entirely, at the same time as adults are on them constantly, isn't going to work. But having a phone-free space like a smoke-free space is more viable.
An x-ray device to see if the shoes fit correctly?
Leaded paint for my asbestos shingling?
Can I sell my vote for the next presidential election? (It used to be common!)
Hotel owners are forbidden from discriminating based on race. You want to allow it? Even if not perfect, it still works.
As someone without security clearance, I'm forbidden from a lot of places with secret information.
Even if there is still an underground market for elephant ivory in the US, forbidding its trade greatly reduced the demand.
Seems like on average forbidding things has been pretty effective.
No?
Because it effects others and brings down the overall ability for the learning environment to succeed. Same deal with phones. If it makes the environment toxic to success, there should probably be some prohibition within those grounds. This isn't banning phones across the board, or banning them for kids. It's banning them within a location, like how firearms are banned inside courthouses.
I will not say that some kind of electronic use ban at schools is necessarily bad, but someone proposing such a ban should absolutely have answers at hand to these reasonable counter-arguments.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
Then, it seems only a couple years after my schooling was complete, smart phones came out and they just let them exist, everywhere. It has never made sense to me how that shift happened so suddenly but best theories I’ve heard are 1) parents insisting kids be reachable and 2) educators just gave up the fight against it.
But yeah, it’s sad to me to think a whole generation had lost core social experience and socialization of such a pivotal age in life. When I hear stats about how kids/teens don’t; drive, party, date, sex, etc yet are lonely, anxious, depressed, etc I’m always like “no shit”
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
Schools are generally protected against that, and your only hope is to replace the school board, who is commonly bullies themselves.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
Not everybody’s childhood played out like Lord of the Flies.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.
a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
Grandpa laughed heartily, as I may have hit a bullseye
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
How could they have ever known? /s