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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What's all that screen time actually doing to your child's ability to pay attention and connect with others? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the impact of digital technology on children, and he says that social media and AI aren't just distractions.
They're rewiring developing brains, fragmenting attention, and crowding out the real-world connection children need in order to flourish.
Let's see what we can see about technology and childhood if we start with this premise that human beings are ultra-social creatures with deep needs for community and communion.
Jonathan's work has helped spark one of the most urgent and contested debates in public health. Now he's here to share three principles of techno-skepticism to help parents and policymakers protect growing minds. Because the task, he says, is to apply the same skepticism that many have about social media to AI.
Not by rejecting technology, but by demanding that tech companies show their proof their products are safe before we hand them to our kids.
So what on earth do we do about the robot teachers and all of the other future waves of technology that are going to push their way into childhood without adequate safety testing?
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Chapter 2: What impact does screen time have on children's attention and social connections?
Technoskepticism means that from now on, we put the burden of proof on them. We make them prove that their products are safe before they push them out into the world.
And stick around after his talk for a brief Q&A with Sal Khan, Ted's vision steward and the CEO of Khan Academy. That's all coming up right after a short break.
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And now, our TED Talk of the day.
So to begin, I invite you all to remember a time in your life, a period in your life when you felt fully integrated into a group. Maybe you were on a sports team, maybe you played in a band, or maybe you just had a great group of friends that loved to hang out together.
Or maybe it was at work, maybe you were part of a team trying to do something big and difficult under time pressure, but you all pulled together. Whatever it was, my question to you is, does that memory glow? Do you look back on that as something special and magical, that time in your life? The great biologist E.O. Wilson says that humans aren't just social, like dogs and chimpanzees.
We are ultra-social, like bees and ants. We have a massive division of labor, and we love to do things that put us in a mindset of one for all, all for one. Yet our hives aren't made out of wax. They're made out of shared culture and shared experiences. My talk today isn't really about bees and ants. It's actually about technology and childhood.
But let's see what we can see about technology and childhood if we start with this premise that human beings are ultra-social creatures with deep needs for community and communion. As a social psychologist who studies the effects of digital tech on young people, what I see from this perspective is very concerning.
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Chapter 3: What are the three principles of technoskepticism proposed by Jonathan Haidt?
But quantity pushes out quality, and they started spending a lot less time with each other in person. And that's a problem for our ultra-social species, because a lot of our evolved bonding mechanisms involve our bodies.
So we connect with people, we bond with people when we eat with them, when we share food with them, when we share laughter, when we move together in synchrony, even if it's just walking next to each other. And we bond together when we touch. But when everything moved online, teens across the developed world lost most of those bonding experiences.
Levels of loneliness and anxiety began to rise almost immediately in many countries simultaneously. And this wasn't just an historical correlation. There are now multiple lines of evidence showing that social media is causing harm at an industrial scale.
One line is the dozens of experiments showing that when you randomly assign people, these are usually with adults, young adults, when you randomly assign people to greatly reduce their social media use for at least a week, their levels of anxiety and depression go down. And one of those studies was done by Meta.
But what I've learned in the last two years is that I grossly understated the damage in the anxious generation, because I focused on the mental health outcomes. That's where we have the best data, that's where we're doing the most work. But I now believe that an even larger damage is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay sustained attention.
One third of all American teens say that they're on a social media platform almost constantly, just throughout the day. And the main thing they're doing on those social media platforms is watching very short videos. Young people call it brain rot, which is a funny term, but it might really be true, because the adolescent brain is always a brain that's being remodeled.
the neural network of a child has to convert itself, has to rewire itself to become the neural network of an adult. And that rewiring process, the neurons finding each other, that's shaped by whatever you're doing every day. And it's shaped by whatever everyone else says is prestigious. Which means that puberty is the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media.
For our ultra-social species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction in the real world, not by TikTok's algorithm. I imagine there's a lot of parents in the audience. So here's the first principle of what we might call techno-skepticism. Protect brain development through puberty. That's why it's so important for countries to follow Australia's example.
Let's just raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16, as Australia did. All right, now let's look at EdTech. Of course, there are good uses of technology in education. My kids have learned a lot from Khan Academy. But I'm very concerned about what happened when we started putting computers and tablets on kids' desks. This is the so-called one-to-one device policies.
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