161–170 of 454 posts
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It seems wise to be wary of a salesman who won’t let his family use the product they sell. This seems very common in the modern tech industry.
If I were a billionaire I'd have servants who would use social media for my servants, to be fair. Why have social media when you can have Jeeves "do it" for you?
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this is a problem. we make photos of the pages. i think there should be always a digital option when you have a physical book.
It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home. The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable…
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I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.
I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers. No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
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> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
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I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads. I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media. And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots. What does that tell us?
Are Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman generally seen as experts in childhood development and education?
In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about childhood development and education to get kids addicted early.
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Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads. I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media. And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots. What does that tell us?
It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do. Jobs was literally just parenti…
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I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube. Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc. The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive…
Part of being a parent is saying no when your children pester you for something you know is bad for them.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
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I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play out. Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educa…
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities. The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connecti…
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The sign…
~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation