The phrase that stuck with me was "nobody depends on us."
A lot of discussions about AI focus on what machines can do for people. Less attention is paid to the fact that human flourishing may depend just as much on people needing us.
That really strikes a nerve for me, too. As of late, I've come through deep reflection to find that we're not in service to the racoons - all that we're doing must trace back to us. Just thinking about "respect", where a shovel should be respected, causes me to inquire and find that the reason why respect is such a peopley word, is because of the size and importance of people, particularly when compared to shovels. Learning about us also learns about respect. ('spect' is to look at; 'respect' is to look back at, presumably, then, to look at what we know.) I could go on. We should come to find that we are what it's all about.
i think we MUST organize ourselves rn. The fight might be impossible because we are few and the technocracy is bigger than any group or activist, but we have the obligation to fight to at least change OUR world (friends, siblings, parents) for the better.
We have lost much of our human organization in modern times. Robert Putnam found that the first big contributor to this loss was widespread TV. I most recently wrote about this on my 'stack. A long list of metrics trace back to loss at the community level. I think this is like the people being cut off at the knees. Perhaps those of us who feel like sharing a human response to the present state of affairs have a reason to get together. Cheers.
I like the three tenets of techno-skepticism. I do not want my grandchild living in the false embrace of digital intrusions. But I extend techno-skepticism to digital ID. I do not want my grandchild living in the manacles of state control, like the poor kids of Australia, Great Britain, etc. The same dark incentives for control & manipulation exist at this level, that exist in the tech/AI space.
It’s summer break, and we’re struggling with our 10 year old and the iPad. Unless he has a new toy, all he wants to do is be on the iPad. We try really hard to limit his use, and he has no social media, but there’s an incessant draw from the device. Even at 10, he knows this. My high school students know this. Yet, they find it really hard to turn away. Kids need our help to limit the temptation.
I taught without screens until COVID. Then, I moved completely to an LMS. Next year, I’m going back to pen/pencil and paper. You’re absolutely right; if a student has an Internet-connected device, they’re going to be distracted.
I have found it works better to show how you will say yes often to other things even though you usually say no to screens more than other parents. New sketchbook? Yes! Go to the library? Yes! Go to the zoo? Yes! Learn an instrument? Yes! Show that you consistently say yes to books, music, art supplies, etc. and the “no” of strict screen limits gets easier for kids. I have tried to make sure my kids grow up knowing I will usually say yes to even some of the most random hobby tangents as long as it is affordable enough and keeps them busy offline.
These yes items don’t even need to be very expensive. It is better when they are inexpensive because an inexpensive hobby has so much less pressure to be mastered. We have a lot of clay in our soil. My child got bored and curious so he learned how to refine it and make pots. That did require YouTube videos but I think YouTube for instructional videos is an entirely different situation than browsing viral videos. My child got a saxophone and a guitar through estate sales. Garage and estate sales are great places to say yes to hobby items that a child may just be testing out. I bought a small kayak at a garage sale recently and one of my kids just tried kayaking this last weekend. He also caught a fish and learned how to cook it for dinner. These things are VERY cheap second-hand. I have spent more on fast food than on some of those things. We have also checked out a disc golf kit at the library. Library hobby kits are excellent for saying “yes” more because those are free and they can’t clutter up the house because they go back to the library in a few weeks.
When you get a chance, start making a list of free or inexpensive things you will say yes to consistently and tell your kids why. Keep track of local library or rec center events for ideas. Follow local online estate sales/auctions for hobby equipment. That will turn the screen conversations into, “No, and let’s try _____ instead of sitting on a screen.”
He already knows, and that's the part worth sitting with. Ten years old, and he can name the pull is there even while he's caught in it. That's not a knowledge gap. Every reply here is about managing the device, removing it, replacing it, setting limits, all good, practical moves. None of it touches what he'd actually need to feel the difference himself, in his own body, between an hour on the iPad and an hour at the zoo.
That difference is felt, not explained. A kid who can actually notice it, this feels flat, that felt alive, has something no screen-time setting gives him: his own internal reason to put it down, not just a rule telling him to.
I made something aimed at exactly that, a comic book for kids his age and up, and for the parents helping them learn to notice what's actually happening in the body in moments like this. Thought it might be useful to you specifically, given what he's already telling you: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-game-nobody-told-you-about
You won't lose a lot by just getting rid of the iPad. But if you want to keep it for now, you can set boundaries. Use Screen Time to set the time limit so you don't have to be the bad guy. It will just automatically stop working after the limit. To lock it in, make sure the iPad has a child iCloud account which is connected to yours via Apple Family.
We often ask whether machines can become more human. Perhaps the more urgent question is whether humans can remain human while delegating more and more of life to machines.
I'm so old, I remember when people objected to students using those new-fangled calculators in math class. Indeed, if a calculator does your calculating you can lose (or fail to develop) the ability to process information empirically. Understanding the process is every bit as important as getting the right answer. More so, really.
Back in the day, I would traverse unfamiliar places by asking directions. I would study a map and find the best route. Now, we have GPS. These are wonderful conveniences, but they do not expand our minds, they cause them to atrophy.
Just bought a new 2026 car. Just like my 2008, which I traded, I don't plan on using GPS, and when I have used it, at home, where I live, it is often WRONG. I make it a point to call places I need specific directions for, like a hotel. This way, I speak to a person and get landmark indicators so I don't get lost. It works.
Recently, Fareed Zakaria spoke to graduates about the importance of what he called Human Intelligence (HI) in an age increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
His point was clear: if unchecked AI is transforming the world, humanity must cultivate unique HI qualities that machines cannot replicate.
The question is: How?
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein suggested that humanity would someday need a new language if it hoped to survive its greatest challenges. Whether he meant that literally or metaphorically, the challenge remains the same. If AI is powered by Large Language Models, what is the human equivalent? Without going into a solution--and there is one--the point is this: The conventional classroom is a moonscape--a barren, play-deprived terrain that is now being "developed" for the fun and profit of oligarchs. That space is ripe for the taking by parents, educators and kids who haven't yet learned that the precious natural resource of play energy lies waiting to be tapped and harnessed. A learning culture thriving on sustained play-centric energy in the form of an analog, bio-engineered language will repel the anemic, non-human language machines that are being used to invade the learning culture. The solution is play, INSIDE the classroom. In the playground of children's minds, play is energy that can pressurize and immunize the learning culture, and repel the toxic influence of Big Tech. I know that plenty of skepticism will erupt at this proposition because the belief in play as a powerful pedagogical force can't match the larger than life innate presence of play in children of all ages. Classroom real estate is too freely handed off to the developers. We have to believe that classrooms can become play-propelled learning habitats that can effectively be defended against the poachers.
This is the right question, and I think the answer is closer than "a new language we need to invent." We already have one, we've just stopped reading it.
Body signal, what's felt before a word forms, isn't just another activity alongside play. It's an actual language, the one channel that was never built from words in the first place, which is exactly why nothing running on language can replicate it. I wrote about the mechanism behind this here: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-missing-layer-in-every-ai-conversation
You are right that play is the lever, and it is stronger than the energy framing suggests, because play is the mechanism, not the fuel.
For a child, free social play is the practice ground for the social nervous system: reading faces in real time, taking turns, getting left out, negotiating back in, syncing body to body. Those are the exact inputs the developing brain expects, and they only exist with real children present, at real stakes. A screen cannot deliver them, because those channels do not transmit through glass.
So the case is firmer than repelling Big Tech. Play in the classroom is the developmental input the classroom removed when it filled the same hours with devices. Bring play back and you are not defeating the machines. You are giving children the thing the machines displaced.
Jonathan Haidt has identified something important. Children are spending less time with friends, less time outdoors, and more time interacting with screens. His concern about social media, EdTech, and now AI deserves to be taken seriously.
But I believe he is still asking the wrong question.
Social scientists are often excellent at identifying patterns. They observe anxiety, loneliness, declining autonomy, rising diagnoses, and changing social behaviour. They then construct narratives to explain what they see.
We have seen this before.
John Money offered one story about gender.
The neurodiversity movement offers another story about cognition.
Critical race theory offers another story about social outcomes.
Whether one agrees with these frameworks or not, they share a common feature: they begin with the outcome and work backwards.
As an immunologist and developmental theorist, I am interested in a different question.
What is the mechanism?
Why is this generation susceptible to social media?
Why are artificial relationships becoming attractive?
Why are children increasingly vulnerable to algorithmic influence?
Why now?
The experience-expectant brain does not develop around ideals. It develops around patterns.
The real question is not what social media is doing to children.
The real question is what kind of developmental environment has produced children who are so susceptible to it.
Haidt sees the fever.
I want to know what is causing it.
Where philosophy gets into trouble, language has gone on holiday.
Where sociology gets into trouble, science has gone on holiday.
I think you and Haidt are closer than it sounds, and the gap is the good part. He is documenting the fever precisely enough that we can ask your question, which is the better one: what made the child susceptible in the first place.
Experience-expectant systems develop toward whatever pattern shows up, on the assumption of the ancestral one: steady in-person contact, faces, voices, touch, co-regulation. When that expected input thins, the brain is under-supplied with the real thing and primed to over-respond to an engineered substitute. The screen does not create the vulnerability. It finds a gap that was already open.
That is your why now. The technology only had to become more compelling than the diminished contact these children were actually getting.
I just worked on a really cool project with a grade 10 Applied Design class where each of the students was asked to make a board game. They could use any medium [wood, metal, plastic] but could only use digital tools for the fabrication of the project.
What was so cool was that many of the students made analog versions of their favorite digital games, and they were often better! The laser-cut balsa wood version of Wordle turns out to work better than the digital version because you can see all the letters physically in front of you while you play and you play with a partner. Fully conceptualized, tested and built by a student.
It was a great reminder that, when prompted, kids will innovate and get their minds free from the devices. They want freedom and connection too.
Thanks for posting your TED Talk. I wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise. All three points you make are critically important given our current situation with the invasive nature of social media and AI. Yes, we can put that genie back into the bottle by engaging children and teens in thoughtful and creative relationships with other people especially family.
We have our nine year old grandnephew staying with us this summer. He is from a single parent family but with an extensive extended family and he gets to interact with a wide variety of people and it shows. He also has a smart phone! Ugh. However, he doesn’t use it much to our surprise and delight. He prefers to be with people or be creative. He’ll immediately say yes to do anything we ask of him and he goes into our small backyard and plays around with the stones and stuff we have there. He already built a little fortress and a stone oven 😳. This is all to say that tech allure doesn’t capture every kid but the defense against it is clearly real human relationships.
Wow. This is so powerful. As for the desire to have a device with only Khan Academy (or whatever the intended use is), that is totally 100% possible today, for free. From a consumer iPad perspective, you can do it with Apple Family, Screen Time settings and a free app called Gertrude to plug the remaining gaps. From an enterprise (school) perspective, you can do it via MDM with a supervised device profile. We've learned a lot about this through our work on the LivingRoom app and would be happy to brainstorm solutions with you. I think this is what school IT should have been doing all along.
The phrase that stuck with me was "nobody depends on us."
A lot of discussions about AI focus on what machines can do for people. Less attention is paid to the fact that human flourishing may depend just as much on people needing us.
That really strikes a nerve for me, too. As of late, I've come through deep reflection to find that we're not in service to the racoons - all that we're doing must trace back to us. Just thinking about "respect", where a shovel should be respected, causes me to inquire and find that the reason why respect is such a peopley word, is because of the size and importance of people, particularly when compared to shovels. Learning about us also learns about respect. ('spect' is to look at; 'respect' is to look back at, presumably, then, to look at what we know.) I could go on. We should come to find that we are what it's all about.
i think we MUST organize ourselves rn. The fight might be impossible because we are few and the technocracy is bigger than any group or activist, but we have the obligation to fight to at least change OUR world (friends, siblings, parents) for the better.
That post only made me subscribe to your Substack. The new technofeudalism is here to stay unless we address the elephant in the room.
We have lost much of our human organization in modern times. Robert Putnam found that the first big contributor to this loss was widespread TV. I most recently wrote about this on my 'stack. A long list of metrics trace back to loss at the community level. I think this is like the people being cut off at the knees. Perhaps those of us who feel like sharing a human response to the present state of affairs have a reason to get together. Cheers.
I like the three tenets of techno-skepticism. I do not want my grandchild living in the false embrace of digital intrusions. But I extend techno-skepticism to digital ID. I do not want my grandchild living in the manacles of state control, like the poor kids of Australia, Great Britain, etc. The same dark incentives for control & manipulation exist at this level, that exist in the tech/AI space.
It’s summer break, and we’re struggling with our 10 year old and the iPad. Unless he has a new toy, all he wants to do is be on the iPad. We try really hard to limit his use, and he has no social media, but there’s an incessant draw from the device. Even at 10, he knows this. My high school students know this. Yet, they find it really hard to turn away. Kids need our help to limit the temptation.
I taught without screens until COVID. Then, I moved completely to an LMS. Next year, I’m going back to pen/pencil and paper. You’re absolutely right; if a student has an Internet-connected device, they’re going to be distracted.
It's hard, but just get rid of the iPad. Replace it with real-world stuff -- books, paints, clay, whatever.
I have found it works better to show how you will say yes often to other things even though you usually say no to screens more than other parents. New sketchbook? Yes! Go to the library? Yes! Go to the zoo? Yes! Learn an instrument? Yes! Show that you consistently say yes to books, music, art supplies, etc. and the “no” of strict screen limits gets easier for kids. I have tried to make sure my kids grow up knowing I will usually say yes to even some of the most random hobby tangents as long as it is affordable enough and keeps them busy offline.
These yes items don’t even need to be very expensive. It is better when they are inexpensive because an inexpensive hobby has so much less pressure to be mastered. We have a lot of clay in our soil. My child got bored and curious so he learned how to refine it and make pots. That did require YouTube videos but I think YouTube for instructional videos is an entirely different situation than browsing viral videos. My child got a saxophone and a guitar through estate sales. Garage and estate sales are great places to say yes to hobby items that a child may just be testing out. I bought a small kayak at a garage sale recently and one of my kids just tried kayaking this last weekend. He also caught a fish and learned how to cook it for dinner. These things are VERY cheap second-hand. I have spent more on fast food than on some of those things. We have also checked out a disc golf kit at the library. Library hobby kits are excellent for saying “yes” more because those are free and they can’t clutter up the house because they go back to the library in a few weeks.
When you get a chance, start making a list of free or inexpensive things you will say yes to consistently and tell your kids why. Keep track of local library or rec center events for ideas. Follow local online estate sales/auctions for hobby equipment. That will turn the screen conversations into, “No, and let’s try _____ instead of sitting on a screen.”
Stay with it--iPads aren't the answer to his "boredom."
Oh, no. It’s the cause.
He already knows, and that's the part worth sitting with. Ten years old, and he can name the pull is there even while he's caught in it. That's not a knowledge gap. Every reply here is about managing the device, removing it, replacing it, setting limits, all good, practical moves. None of it touches what he'd actually need to feel the difference himself, in his own body, between an hour on the iPad and an hour at the zoo.
That difference is felt, not explained. A kid who can actually notice it, this feels flat, that felt alive, has something no screen-time setting gives him: his own internal reason to put it down, not just a rule telling him to.
I made something aimed at exactly that, a comic book for kids his age and up, and for the parents helping them learn to notice what's actually happening in the body in moments like this. Thought it might be useful to you specifically, given what he's already telling you: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-game-nobody-told-you-about
You won't lose a lot by just getting rid of the iPad. But if you want to keep it for now, you can set boundaries. Use Screen Time to set the time limit so you don't have to be the bad guy. It will just automatically stop working after the limit. To lock it in, make sure the iPad has a child iCloud account which is connected to yours via Apple Family.
We often ask whether machines can become more human. Perhaps the more urgent question is whether humans can remain human while delegating more and more of life to machines.
I'm so old, I remember when people objected to students using those new-fangled calculators in math class. Indeed, if a calculator does your calculating you can lose (or fail to develop) the ability to process information empirically. Understanding the process is every bit as important as getting the right answer. More so, really.
Back in the day, I would traverse unfamiliar places by asking directions. I would study a map and find the best route. Now, we have GPS. These are wonderful conveniences, but they do not expand our minds, they cause them to atrophy.
Just bought a new 2026 car. Just like my 2008, which I traded, I don't plan on using GPS, and when I have used it, at home, where I live, it is often WRONG. I make it a point to call places I need specific directions for, like a hotel. This way, I speak to a person and get landmark indicators so I don't get lost. It works.
Recently, Fareed Zakaria spoke to graduates about the importance of what he called Human Intelligence (HI) in an age increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
His point was clear: if unchecked AI is transforming the world, humanity must cultivate unique HI qualities that machines cannot replicate.
The question is: How?
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein suggested that humanity would someday need a new language if it hoped to survive its greatest challenges. Whether he meant that literally or metaphorically, the challenge remains the same. If AI is powered by Large Language Models, what is the human equivalent? Without going into a solution--and there is one--the point is this: The conventional classroom is a moonscape--a barren, play-deprived terrain that is now being "developed" for the fun and profit of oligarchs. That space is ripe for the taking by parents, educators and kids who haven't yet learned that the precious natural resource of play energy lies waiting to be tapped and harnessed. A learning culture thriving on sustained play-centric energy in the form of an analog, bio-engineered language will repel the anemic, non-human language machines that are being used to invade the learning culture. The solution is play, INSIDE the classroom. In the playground of children's minds, play is energy that can pressurize and immunize the learning culture, and repel the toxic influence of Big Tech. I know that plenty of skepticism will erupt at this proposition because the belief in play as a powerful pedagogical force can't match the larger than life innate presence of play in children of all ages. Classroom real estate is too freely handed off to the developers. We have to believe that classrooms can become play-propelled learning habitats that can effectively be defended against the poachers.
This is the right question, and I think the answer is closer than "a new language we need to invent." We already have one, we've just stopped reading it.
Body signal, what's felt before a word forms, isn't just another activity alongside play. It's an actual language, the one channel that was never built from words in the first place, which is exactly why nothing running on language can replicate it. I wrote about the mechanism behind this here: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-missing-layer-in-every-ai-conversation
You are right that play is the lever, and it is stronger than the energy framing suggests, because play is the mechanism, not the fuel.
For a child, free social play is the practice ground for the social nervous system: reading faces in real time, taking turns, getting left out, negotiating back in, syncing body to body. Those are the exact inputs the developing brain expects, and they only exist with real children present, at real stakes. A screen cannot deliver them, because those channels do not transmit through glass.
So the case is firmer than repelling Big Tech. Play in the classroom is the developmental input the classroom removed when it filled the same hours with devices. Bring play back and you are not defeating the machines. You are giving children the thing the machines displaced.
Jonathan Haidt has identified something important. Children are spending less time with friends, less time outdoors, and more time interacting with screens. His concern about social media, EdTech, and now AI deserves to be taken seriously.
But I believe he is still asking the wrong question.
Social scientists are often excellent at identifying patterns. They observe anxiety, loneliness, declining autonomy, rising diagnoses, and changing social behaviour. They then construct narratives to explain what they see.
We have seen this before.
John Money offered one story about gender.
The neurodiversity movement offers another story about cognition.
Critical race theory offers another story about social outcomes.
Whether one agrees with these frameworks or not, they share a common feature: they begin with the outcome and work backwards.
As an immunologist and developmental theorist, I am interested in a different question.
What is the mechanism?
Why is this generation susceptible to social media?
Why are artificial relationships becoming attractive?
Why are children increasingly vulnerable to algorithmic influence?
Why now?
The experience-expectant brain does not develop around ideals. It develops around patterns.
The real question is not what social media is doing to children.
The real question is what kind of developmental environment has produced children who are so susceptible to it.
Haidt sees the fever.
I want to know what is causing it.
Where philosophy gets into trouble, language has gone on holiday.
Where sociology gets into trouble, science has gone on holiday.
I think you and Haidt are closer than it sounds, and the gap is the good part. He is documenting the fever precisely enough that we can ask your question, which is the better one: what made the child susceptible in the first place.
Experience-expectant systems develop toward whatever pattern shows up, on the assumption of the ancestral one: steady in-person contact, faces, voices, touch, co-regulation. When that expected input thins, the brain is under-supplied with the real thing and primed to over-respond to an engineered substitute. The screen does not create the vulnerability. It finds a gap that was already open.
That is your why now. The technology only had to become more compelling than the diminished contact these children were actually getting.
I just worked on a really cool project with a grade 10 Applied Design class where each of the students was asked to make a board game. They could use any medium [wood, metal, plastic] but could only use digital tools for the fabrication of the project.
What was so cool was that many of the students made analog versions of their favorite digital games, and they were often better! The laser-cut balsa wood version of Wordle turns out to work better than the digital version because you can see all the letters physically in front of you while you play and you play with a partner. Fully conceptualized, tested and built by a student.
It was a great reminder that, when prompted, kids will innovate and get their minds free from the devices. They want freedom and connection too.
Thanks for posting your TED Talk. I wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise. All three points you make are critically important given our current situation with the invasive nature of social media and AI. Yes, we can put that genie back into the bottle by engaging children and teens in thoughtful and creative relationships with other people especially family.
We have our nine year old grandnephew staying with us this summer. He is from a single parent family but with an extensive extended family and he gets to interact with a wide variety of people and it shows. He also has a smart phone! Ugh. However, he doesn’t use it much to our surprise and delight. He prefers to be with people or be creative. He’ll immediately say yes to do anything we ask of him and he goes into our small backyard and plays around with the stones and stuff we have there. He already built a little fortress and a stone oven 😳. This is all to say that tech allure doesn’t capture every kid but the defense against it is clearly real human relationships.
Wow. This is so powerful. As for the desire to have a device with only Khan Academy (or whatever the intended use is), that is totally 100% possible today, for free. From a consumer iPad perspective, you can do it with Apple Family, Screen Time settings and a free app called Gertrude to plug the remaining gaps. From an enterprise (school) perspective, you can do it via MDM with a supervised device profile. We've learned a lot about this through our work on the LivingRoom app and would be happy to brainstorm solutions with you. I think this is what school IT should have been doing all along.
Can you imagine what a world-opener this will be at home, school & work?
https://doubletaponair.com/why-quill-is-changing-text-editing-for-blind-users-2/
https://www.amazon.com/Valley-Microsoft-Trillion-Dollar-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0063347490
https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/ai-series/navigating-toward-ai?emci=f698e70b-ec6f-f111-ac9c-000d3a54bed0&emdi=6bdd8efb-8b74-f111-ac9c-000d3a54bed0&ceid=8256661
https://theanthonycorona.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-meta-make-accessibility?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=5075291&post_id=204171916&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=5jkqj0&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
https://aaif.io/blog/native-speakers-why-ais-most-powerful-users-are-blind/