Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic

My most urgent TED Talk yet.

Introduction from Jonathan Haidt:

In April I gave my third — and most urgent — TED Talk. It’s about stopping the takeover of childhood by technologies that were not designed with children’s welfare in mind. To change course in democratic nations will require a major change in public opinion as a signal to political leaders that the current course is not acceptable. To that end, I advocate that anyone who cares about children should take a techno-skeptical perspective, and I offer three general principles that would reduce the harm to children from current and future technologies:

1. Protect brain development through puberty.

2. Prioritize people and books in education, not screens.

3. Beware of artificial relationships for minors.

The challenge is enormous, and the first half of the talk sounds dark. But as readers of After Babel know, this is also a time of hope. The two years since the release of The Anxious Generation have shown us that when we work together, we can put some genies back into their bottles; we can reclaim childhood and create a future where our children can grow into flourishing, connected adults.

The team at TED just published the recording, and I’m pleased to share it (along with the transcript if you’d prefer to read) with the After Babel community.

– Jon

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Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic

Photo by Jason Redmond / TED

Transcript

To begin, I invite you to remember a time in your life — a period in your life — when you felt fully integrated into a group. Maybe you were on a sports team, maybe you played in a band, or maybe you just had a great group of friends that loved to hang out together. Or maybe it was at work. Maybe you were part of a team trying to do something big and difficult under time pressure, but you all pulled together.

Whatever it was, my question to you is: Does that memory glow? Do you look back on that as something special and magical, that time in your life?

The great biologist E.O. Wilson says that humans aren’t just social like dogs and chimpanzees, we are ultrasocial, like bees and ants. We have a massive division of labor. And we love to do things that put us in a mindset of “one for all and all for one.”

Yet our hives aren’t made out of wax. They are made out of shared culture and shared experiences.

My talk today isn’t really about bees and ants, it’s actually about technology and childhood. But let’s see what we can see about technology and childhood if we start with this premise that human beings are ultrasocial creatures with deep needs for community and communion.

As a social psychologist who studies the effects of digital tech on young people, what I see from this perspective is very concerning. I think it justifies a general sense of wariness, or skepticism, about the technologies that are pushing their way into childhood today.

So let’s start with social media. In the early 2010s, teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones, and the phone-based childhood began. Their social lives moved on to social media.

At first we thought this would be fine, maybe even better. But quantity pushes out quality and they started spending a lot less time with each other in person.

And that’s a problem for our ultrasocial species because a lot of our evolved bonding mechanisms involve our bodies. So we connect with people — we bond with people — when we eat with them, when we share food with them. When we share laughter. When we move together in synchrony, even if it’s just walking next to each other. And we bond together when we touch.

But when everything moved online, teens across the developed world lost most of those bonding experiences. Levels of loneliness and anxiety began to rise almost immediately, in many countries simultaneously. And this wasn’t just an historical correlation. There are now multiple lines of evidence showing that social media is causing harm at an industrial scale. One line is the dozens of experiments showing that when you randomly assign people (these are usually with young adults) when you randomly assign people to greatly reduce their social media use for at least a week, their levels of anxiety and depression go down. And one of those studies was done by Meta.

But what I’ve learned in the last two years is that I grossly underestimated the damage in The Anxious Generation — because I focused on the mental health outcomes. That’s where we have the best data, that’s where we’re doing the most work.

But I now believe that even larger damage is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay sustained attention.

One third of all American teens say that they are on a social media platform “almost constantly,” throughout the day. And the main thing they’re doing on those social media platforms is watching very short videos. Young people call it “brain rot,” which is a funny term but it might really be true. Because the adolescent brain is always a brain that’s being remodeled. The neural network of a child has to convert itself, has to rewire itself, to become the neural network of an adult. And that rewiring process — the neurons finding each other — that’s shaped by whatever you’re doing every day. And it’s shaped by whatever everyone else says is prestigious.

Which means that puberty is therefore the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media. For our ultrasocial species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction, in the real world, not by TikTok’s algorithm.

So here’s the first principle of what we might call techno-skepticism: Protect brain development through puberty. That’s why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s example: let’s just raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 as Australia did.

Now let’s look at EdTech.

Of course there are good uses of technology in education. My kids have learned a lot from Khan Academy. But I’m very concerned about what happened when we started putting computers and tablets on kids’ desks — this is the so-called “one-to-one” device policies.

Computers and tablets are multifunction entertainment systems. If kids can get to the internet, they will play video games, and watch short videos, watch YouTube Shorts, and even porn. As soon as we brought in one-to-one devices in the 2010s, national test scores began dropping in the USA. And they dropped in many other countries — especially in the countries that most firmly embraced EdTech.

Now I can’t prove that these declines were caused by the screens and apps that we put on their desks. But consider this: Sweden led the world in digitizing education, in the 2010s. They got rid of textbooks, they put a device on every desk, they even mandated that nursery schools had to use tablets. But after years of experience and years of declining test scores, Sweden reversed course. In 2023, they announced that they’re going back to textbooks, they’re pulling out a lot of the devices, they’re going back to books and handwriting, especially in the earlier grades. Their top research institute, the Karolinska Institute, issued a report backing the government’s position, saying: “There is clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair, rather than enhance, student learning.”

And consider this: many of us professors are banishing computers — laptops — from our classrooms. Many of my students say they learn better when people aren’t on devices — when they don’t have a computer and the multitasking staring them in the face. But if college students can’t learn that well when there is a computer in front of them, how do we expect eight-year-olds to do it?

School is an intrinsically social experience. Students are not learning machines. They’re ultrasocial human beings who need to connect with their teachers and their fellow students. They don’t need to connect with more screens.

So here is the second principle of techno-skepticism: Prioritize people and books in education, not screens. We should never have let laptops and tablets spread throughout K–12 education without extensive testing and evidence of safety and efficacy. But we’re about to make the exact same mistake with AI.

Do you see the pattern here? We let social media companies take over our kids’ social lives, and they’ve harmed our kids’ social lives, and their mental health. We let EdTech companies take over our kids’ schools, and they appear to be doing more harm than good.

Now AI companies are coming for their relationships. To be their friends, their therapists, and even their sexual partners. What could go wrong?

We’re already seeing massive cognitive offloading and learning loss. When students have access to AI, they pass the critical thinking over to AI. We’re already seeing young people becoming dependent on ChatGPT to make their personal decisions and draft their texts and their emails.

And we’re seeing a booming AI toy market. Chatbots are being put into dolls and teddy bears. These chatbots are super responsive to the child — they’re always there to offer comfort, to be there for the child. And of course the parents are often busy. But if the chatbot is super responsive while the parents aren’t as responsive, the child’s attachment system — which is looking for “who in my environment is the person who responds to me?” — may well imprint or focus on the chatbot, which is going to compromise the relationship with their own parents.

So here’s the third principle of techno-skepticism: Beware of artificial relationships for minors. Give them nothing that conveys that it understands the child, or that it cares. Because it doesn’t.

There could be a role for AI therapists someday, but how about we require years of testing before we let anyone push it out into childhood?

Now, I’ve just told you that we need to greatly reduce the role of these technologies in our kids’ lives. Some of you may be thinking: “Now hold on a second. I want my child to be successful in the digital future, the digital workplace, so why not give them a head start?”

Two reasons. The first is that these technologies are extremely easy to use. Your kid doesn’t need a 10-year head start to master social media and AI.

Second, because now we know that being a digital native does not confer an advantage. For many kids, it’s a curse because it messes with the kid’s attention systems and their motivational systems. It teaches them that there’s always a little bit of reward — always a little bit of dopamine — available just one swipe away. And that undermines the ability to do difficult or sustained cognitive work, like reading a book.

I teach a course at New York University called “Flourishing,” and two years ago we were talking about attention fragmentation, and one of my students — who’s a very heavy TikTok user — said, “I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.”

So if we want our children to be successful in the digital future, we need to protect them from the damage being done in the digital present.

So let’s return to the hive. What do we see when we look at technology and childhood through this lens? When we start from the premise that humans are ultrasocial.

What we see is that these technologies are being built by people who don’t understand that premise. They think of people as consumers with social needs that can be satisfied by machines. They think that it’s good to free people from dependence on other people.

Let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that they really can give us excellent friends and excellent romantic partners. (In fact just yesterday at lunch, Esther Perel told me she just did her first couples therapy with a mixed couple: a human male and an AI female.) So is this liberation? Do we no longer have to depend on other people to meet our social needs? Would that make us happy — if we no longer have to depend on others?

Absolutely not. Because that would mean that nobody depends on us. Nobody is relying on us. We are not important to anyone.

So is this our fate? Is there any way to stop this lonely digital future?

Yes, there is.

When The Anxious Generation came out two years ago, one of the main objections I got was that I was too late. “The technology is here to stay,” people said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

But in the last few years, humanity has mobilized, and we are putting the genie back in the bottle. Mothers were the first to organize and take action. They were quickly joined by fathers, and by a lot of Gen Z activist organizations. And also by many governors and many heads of state.

Together, we’re getting phones out of schools around the world. Teachers are so thrilled to get their students back. And one of the things that they tell us — it’s the most common thing we hear: “We hear laughter in the hallways again.”

We’re getting the age raised for social media to 16. More than a dozen countries have already committed to following Australia’s bold example.

We’re seeing parents letting go and trusting their children to ride bicycles with their friends and to do errands so that they can feel useful. I’ll give you one example: a mom in Utah gave her seven-year-old son the “Let Grow Challenge” — that’s where you say to the kid, “What’s something that you think you can do on your own?” — and her son said, “I think I can go into a Chick-fil-A restaurant and get us lunch.” So she said OK. And in the video you see the mother sitting in the car and you see the kid coming out of the store, and he’s got the bags and this huge smile and he says, “That was so fun!” And then the mom says, “Were you nervous?” And he says, “Yeah, my legs are still shivering, but I want to do it again!”

These are the stories that most move and most thrill me, because this movement is not primarily about technology. It’s about reclaiming childhood in the real world, with real people.

So what on earth do we do about the robot teachers and all the other future waves of technology that are going to push their way into childhood without adequate safety testing?

It sometimes seems overwhelming. So let me repeat the three rules of techno-skepticism:

1. Protect brain development through puberty.

2. Prioritize people and books in education, not screens.

3. Beware of artificial relationships for minors.

I think techno-skepticism is the right attitude for people today — especially for parents and legislators. Because when it comes to children, these companies have earned our distrust.

Techno-skepticism means that from now on, we put the burden of proof on them. Let them prove that their products are safe. We treat them like any other maker of potentially dangerous consumer products: we make them prove that their products are safe before they push them out into the world. And we hold them responsible for their safety lapses.

In conclusion, human beings are ultrasocial creatures who need to matter to one another in order to flourish. We are so brilliant that we’ve invented technologies that can replace us, that can take us out of each other’s lives.

But human connection is not optional. It’s who we are. So we’re going to have to fight for a future in which our children can grow into flourishing, connected adults.

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