I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.