The motivating premise of my New Yorker article is the belief that this cycle of increasing concern is being fueled, in part, by a lack of a deep understanding about how this latest generation of chatbots actually operate. What started as bemused wonder about ChatGPT’s clever answers to esoteric questions moved to fears about how it could be used to cheat on tests or eliminate jobs before finally landing on calls, in the pages of the New York Times, for world leaders to “respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents,” buying us time to “learn to master AI before it masters us.” If you’ve been following the online discussion about these new tools you might have noticed that the rhetoric about their impact has been intensifying. Earlier today, my article was finally published, so now I’m free to share my thoughts. I remained quiet on this topic, however, as I was writing a big New Yorker piece on this technology and didn’t want to scoop my own work. In recent months, I’ve received quite a few emails from readers expressing concerns about ChatGPT.
In the meantime, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of the more interesting observations that I uncovered: If you’re concerned, or even just interested, in what researchers currently believe to be true about the dangers involved in giving a phone to a kid before they’re ready, I humbly suggest watching my presentation.
Earlier today, I also released it as a standalone video. In my talk, I ended up not only summarizing the current state-of-the-art thinking about kids and phones, but also diving into the history of this literature, including how it got started, evolved, adjusted to criticism, and, over the last handful of years, ultimately coalesced around a rough consensus.Īssuming that other people might find this story interesting, I recorded a version of this talk for Episode 246 of my podcast, Deep Questions.
This invited lecture therefore provided me a great opportunity to bring myself up to speed on the research relevant to this topic. I’ve written extensively on the intersection of technology and society in both my books and New Yorker articles, but the specific issue of young people and phones is one I’ve only tackled on a small number of occasions (e.g., here and here). Not long ago, my kids’ school asked me to give a talk to middle school students and their parents about smartphones.
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