Social media, mobile phones, video games and now AI are among the crowning jewels of human creation. Infinite libraries of information are in everyone's pocket. Entertaining new formats for instruction and diversion are being created, not by media institutions, but by ordinary people in their spare time. Children are no longer kept apart from each other in classrooms, but have their own virtual worlds in which to create knowledge and share it.
The response from our gerontocracy is predictable: ban it.
As usual, Douglas Adams summed it up:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The truth is that technology is disruptive: it changes societies. In their time, movies, books and even the bicycle all instigated widespread moral panic. Bicycles meant that for the first time, young people could easily meet friends under their own steam, the social network technology of their day.
Today, teachers worry about children in their classrooms "addicted to their phones". So the children aren't paying attention to their lessons, but the truth is many never were. Now instead of sitting at desks like zombies, they're happily engaged in their phones because they have access to something that really interests them.
But disruptive memes are spreading among children! Well why shouldn't children be allowed to create and disseminate knowledge among their peers? Isn't that the essence of education? Or do we think children should be passive, empty vessels into which we pour our approved ideas? If you disagree with the memes children are sharing, you should make an argument for your position, not shut down the debate.
Children are using ChatGPT to write their essays! I'm sorry to tell you, but adults are using ChatGPT to write their emails and reports. Education needs to adapt to the reality that social media is a better way to discover new interests and YouTube is simply a better way to learn basically anything.
There's another sinister undercurrent to the "ban social media and AI" platform. In the case of AI, big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple etc.) thought at first that AI would be a "sustaining technology" - that is, because of their ability to invest billions and hire the best engineers, mastery in AI would help to cement their monopolies. But recently, the CEOs have woken up to a growing realisation that AI might well be a "disruptive technology" - as a commodity, AI gives startup companies the ability to challenge Google in search, Facebook in social media and Apple with the idea that maybe we don't all need to use their phones. Their playbook is the same as any other industry cartel's: lobby the government to regulate their industries, because regulation raises the table stakes to enter the industry so effectively that startups become non-starters. Facebook will happily pay the governments tax to censor their social networks, as the enormous cost of doing so serves to prevent any challengers to their business.
Note that, this isn't an argument against allowing the Chinese ownership of TikTok. I see real geopolitical reasons why we might not want our media companies in foreign hands. We have had similar legislation against foreign ownership of newspapers, for example.
While I may not agree, it's wrong to say that there's no argument for some regulation of AI. First we should admit that most of the scare stories and scenarios presented are already illegal. Why should it be more illegal for a judge to be racially biased if the judge is using AI, for example? The call for regulations over issues already covered by existing legislation is a tell-tale sign of a monopoly campaigning for cartel protection. I'm told that, out of all AI scenarios, politicians are most worried about deepfakes, and that is a genuinely new capability that perhaps needs oversight. However, lawmakers should be aware that it may not be technically possible to ban video or audio that "sounds like Rishi Sunak". More likely, we need to adapt to a world in which all media is suspect, and learn to use technologies for proving provenance of video and audio.
Lawmakers should be very careful of any regulation governing such a fast moving and potentially fruitful technology as AI. If we regulate it out of existence, or make it so that only Google can afford to play, we will never know what possible good we have lost: badly needed medical, educational, military and productivity gains are all to play for.
Ban children from social media and we stultify them, lock them out of the most exciting new technological spaces and prevent them from educating themselves.