Jonathan Haidt

speaker

5,062 appearances 20 recordings 18 series first heard Mar 2024 last heard 26 Jun

Jonathan Haidt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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TED Talks Daily · How screens stole childhood — and how to get it back | Jonathan Haidt · 29 May 2026 podcast

Chatbots are being put into dolls and teddy bears.

And 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 their relationship with their own parents.

So here's the third principle of techno-skepticism.

Just 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?

All right, now I've just told you that we need to greatly reduce the role of these technologies in our kids' lives.

And some of you may be thinking, now hold on a second, I want my child to be successful in the digital future, in 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.

And 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 kids' 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 NYU called Flourishing, and two years ago, we were talking about attention fragmentation, and one of my students, who's a very heavy TikTok user, she said, yeah, 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.

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