...if you come home from working your second job and are ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for your child and set them up with insightful, interesting media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put them in front of the iPad.
This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets are faster and more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is popular with middle-income American families too, not just poor families where parents work two jobs. The economic explanation is too reductive.
I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now parents can spend less time engaging with children" or that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.
I was there (Apple) at the time. Absolutely did NOT expect this thing that Steve thought was a neat way to see the whole NYT front page at once, was going to be the defining MacGuffin of an entire generation of children.
I mean, that's the thing though. We now have had kids parked in front of iPads for a good amount of time, along with other technical innovations like social media, and we have documented scientific proof of the harms they do to children's self-esteem, focus and mental acuity. I don't think the designers of the iPad or even the engineers at Facebook set out to cause these issues, but. they. did. And now we have a fresh technology in the form of AI that whole swathes of "entrepreneurs" are ready to toss into more children's brains as these previous ones were.
Is it too much to ask for a hint of caution with regard to our most vulnerable populations brains?
As a former iPad (OS) designer, and former Facebook feed engineer, of course we're upset about what happened. Most of us fought valiantly, with awareness, against what became the dark forces and antisocial antipatterns. But the promo-culture performance incentive system instituted by HR being based on growth metrics at all costs made all of us powerless to stop it. Do something good for the world, miss your promo or get fired.
Circa 2020 a huge number of fed-up good-intentioned engineers and designers quit. It had no effect, at all.
I'm genuinely sorry that happened to you. That had to be an absolute nightmare of an experience.
To be clear: I am not saying that engineers need to be better at preventing this stuff. I am saying regulators need to demand that companies be careful, and study how this stuff is going to affect people, not just yeet it into the culture and see what happens.
This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets are faster and more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is popular with middle-income American families too, not just poor families where parents work two jobs. The economic explanation is too reductive.
I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now parents can spend less time engaging with children" or that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.