Tech Firms Hate Your Kids

I have been thinking a lot about imitative AI, power, and education lately, spurred in part by articles like this one. The teacher in question is, based on all the evidence that we have, absolutely correct to take the steps outlined in the article. But I am afraid that this means the end or the curtailment of accessible education.

For those that did not read the article, the teacher banned not only imitative AI, he banned all screens. The results were encouraging. His students grasp of the material went up, they were more engaged with the material and with each other, and they completed more of their assignments. He hasn’t done this long enough for the gains to be measured on standardized tests, but the results he, a professional teacher report, are encouraging. And they should not be surprising.

Screens harm us. We all know this, we all see this, we all understand this, unless we have a reason for not understanding this. Screens are at least part of the reason that kids academic and emotional lives have worsened over the last couple of decades. Removing them from educational settings and activities at least mitigates some of those effects. And imitative AI is even worse. It encourages kids to not do the work, meaning that they don’t actually learn how to think, and it feeds them bullshit for answers. Kids, obviously, are not capable of picking up the bullshit since they don’t know anything. This combination is deadly — the tools retard the very skills that people need to be able to use the tools at all. They should be banned from all classrooms at all levels. And no, learning to prompt is not an esoteric practice needing deep training. Bluntly, if you cannot learn to prompt these things effectively you are too dumb to be allowed near them. Too dumb, in fact, to be allowed near anything more dangerous than a short piece of string. And I’d probably keep the string away from Sam Altman.

But.

But technology has helped some kids learn. Kids that are not neurotypical, kids with mental health disorders, kids who have physical differences that make learning difficult, like hearing or vision or learning impairments, have all benefited from technology. I am related to several non-neurotypical kids, and the phones in their pockets are part of how they made it through school. They provided them with tools that helped keep them calm and focused enough to do their work. Banning screens, obviously, affects them. And I don’t think there are simple solutions.

We ask more of teachers, especially public school teachers who must teach all kids, unlike their private and charter school peers who are allowed to throw away kids they find too hard to teach. We ask them not only to look after kids in class and their educational needs, but to ensure their social, emotional, and sometimes even physical needs are being met, inside and outside the classroom. We ask them to help overcome the losses COVID forced upon kids, both educationally and emotionally. We ask them to shepherd them through the age of school shootings instead of doing anything about those school shootings. And we ask all of this while largely giving them less money and less time. Now, add extra work to monitor the special needs of a small group of kids and things can easily fall apart.

In places where screens are banned, we will require teachers to deal with the exceptions. Handling those exceptions, and the fallout from those exceptions, will take time away from their normal duties and the other kids. There has always been a tendency to warehouse kids with special needs — I know this still exists from personal experience. How much will that pressure build in an environment when the tools that help these kids are the very same tools that hurt the majority of kids? Especially in an era when public education is under attack and when government officials seem to question the very value of the lives of these kids? It is not a problem schools can solve by themselves.

There are solutions, of course. We need more teachers and better pay to attract and keep teachers in their jobs. We also need to stop pretending that tech firms are benevolent, especially when it comes to our kids. Firms that deliberately set out to addict kids to their products, regardless of the damage done, are not firms whose survival we should care about. We should ban algorithmic social media. We should ban algorithmic personalized advertisements. We should ban addiction-fueling patterns in design. We should shame the CEOs of these firms, drive them from public life until they atone for the damage done. We should, in short, force these technologies to bend around the needs of our kids rather than forcing our kids — our entire society — around the need of these firms to make money.

All kids deserve an education. If tech firms stand in the way of that goal — and they do— then it must be tech firms that suffer and change, not our kids.