7 ms·

I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rar

I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back. I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.

echelon 11mo ago
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. Next let's ban kids from social media. Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing. They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself. > I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could. Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time. iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
- iknowstuff 11mo ago
  ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.
  - Dusseldorf 11mo ago
    It absolutely did not. ChatGPT is free to use and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it. When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      “most people I know” argument always wins :) most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
    - hunter-gatherer 11mo ago
      Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work". Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
      - iknowstuff 11mo ago
        the ipod touch was released after the iphone fyi
    - lukan 11mo ago
      "and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it." Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school? I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
    - oarsinsync 11mo ago
      https://futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework https://futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
  - echelon 11mo ago
    I assumed the OP meant chat agents like Character.ai, not ChatGPT.
- someNameIG 11mo ago
  > Next let's ban kids from social media. We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
  - SchemaLoad 11mo ago
    I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs. I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
    - immibis 11mo ago
      They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
      - defrost 11mo ago
        > They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID They didn't and they haven't. It's more nudge nudge wink wink age restriction theatre than 1984 total surveillance. The onus is on platforms (Facebook, Youtube, et al) to adhere to the request to restrict minors. https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci... https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-will-work-are-finally-becoming-clear-265323 https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban-explained/105590990 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban...
- drivebyhooting 11mo ago
  I agree but you have to tone down the rhetoric otherwise you won’t persuade anyone who isn’t already convinced. It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
  - JuniperMesos 11mo ago
    > It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares. This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life. I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
  - gverrilla 11mo ago
    Most tech CEOs I know couldn't care less about their children.
- bigmealbigmeal 11mo ago
  > Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time. > iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. > I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population. The facts say you're wrong about this. The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2] ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012? [1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-and-telecom/annual-sales-of-apples-iphone/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a... [2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ [3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements
  - yunwal 11mo ago
    > The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2] The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
  - echelon 11mo ago
    It's my fault for lumping tools like ChatGPT into the bin of "chatbots" that people - mostly kids - are sexting and forming intimate relationships with. In my mind, the latter are "chat" apps. ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings. I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.
dghlsakjg 11mo ago
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
- fn-mote 11mo ago
  > prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SchemaLoad 11mo ago
    There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment. Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
  - contravariant 11mo ago
    ...What? You're saying it's not zero sum because to make it zero sum you should include the big profitable corporations that are pumping in money? True it's not zero sum but that's like saying a casino isn't zero sum because you're playing against the house!
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- pjc50 11mo ago
  Isn't that actually illegal in most jurisdictions? But the betting companies seem to have effectively bribed legislatures in the past couple of decades.
thatfrenchguy 11mo ago
I mean, "cigarettes are the devil", especially for teenagers also have stuck.
hamdingers 11mo ago
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back. This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom. I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.) After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years. edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
  - thelock85 11mo ago
    This. Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes. Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
  - p00dles 11mo ago
    Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct
  - japhyr 11mo ago
    I started teaching in the 90s, and left classroom teaching in 2019. This is how I saw it play out in every school I was aware of. People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.
Melatonic 11mo ago
I think it will eventually settle into a net positive - we're just in the Wild West of smartphones still. I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
- SchemaLoad 11mo ago
  I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
  - im3w1l 11mo ago
    More cynically, I think some people will need to actively work towards it, and then other people will say "see it happened automatically".
arianjm 11mo ago
A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"
- Yeul 11mo ago
  I remember when I first saw little girls with Blackberries. It was quite strange.
immibis 11mo ago
Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.
mnky9800n 11mo ago
give me a break. you don't need data to know that a child lacks the self control to not look at their phone when they need to be doing anything else. smartphones are almost 20 years old. There are adults going to university and into the workforce that grew up without knowing a world without smartphones.
Ferret7446 11mo ago
I think both yours and the GP's points can be simply explained as: it's obvious in hindsight, but not in foresight. Quite frankly, we (in a collective, general sense) suck at predicting the future. Half will think A, half will think B, and the half that ends up being correct by chance will think they are actually smart rather than lucky.

echelon 11mo ago

> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. Next let's ban kids from social media. Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing. They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself. > I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could. Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time. iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.

iknowstuff 11mo ago
ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.
- Dusseldorf 11mo ago
  It absolutely did not. ChatGPT is free to use and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it. When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
  - bdangubic 11mo ago
    “most people I know” argument always wins :) most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
  - hunter-gatherer 11mo ago
    Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work". Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
    - iknowstuff 11mo ago
      the ipod touch was released after the iphone fyi
  - lukan 11mo ago
    "and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it." Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school? I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
  - oarsinsync 11mo ago
    https://futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework https://futurism.com/openai-use-cheating-homework Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
- echelon 11mo ago
  I assumed the OP meant chat agents like Character.ai, not ChatGPT.
someNameIG 11mo ago
> Next let's ban kids from social media. We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
- SchemaLoad 11mo ago
  I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs. I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
    - defrost 11mo ago
      > They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID They didn't and they haven't. It's more nudge nudge wink wink age restriction theatre than 1984 total surveillance. The onus is on platforms (Facebook, Youtube, et al) to adhere to the request to restrict minors. https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci... https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-will-work-are-finally-becoming-clear-265323 https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban-explained/105590990 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban...
drivebyhooting 11mo ago
I agree but you have to tone down the rhetoric otherwise you won’t persuade anyone who isn’t already convinced. It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
- JuniperMesos 11mo ago
  > It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares. This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life. I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
- gverrilla 11mo ago
  Most tech CEOs I know couldn't care less about their children.
bigmealbigmeal 11mo ago
> Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time. > iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. > I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population. The facts say you're wrong about this. The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2] ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012? [1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-and-telecom/annual-sales-of-apples-iphone/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a... [2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ [3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements
- yunwal 11mo ago
  > The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2] The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
- echelon 11mo ago
  It's my fault for lumping tools like ChatGPT into the bin of "chatbots" that people - mostly kids - are sexting and forming intimate relationships with. In my mind, the latter are "chat" apps. ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings. I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.

dghlsakjg 11mo ago

Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.

fn-mote 11mo ago
> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- SchemaLoad 11mo ago
  There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment. Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
- contravariant 11mo ago
  ...What? You're saying it's not zero sum because to make it zero sum you should include the big profitable corporations that are pumping in money? True it's not zero sum but that's like saying a casino isn't zero sum because you're playing against the house!
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
pjc50 11mo ago
Isn't that actually illegal in most jurisdictions? But the betting companies seem to have effectively bribed legislatures in the past couple of decades.

thatfrenchguy 11mo ago

I mean, "cigarettes are the devil", especially for teenagers also have stuck.

hamdingers 11mo ago

> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back. This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom. I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.

pessimizer 11mo ago
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.) After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years. edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
- thelock85 11mo ago
  This. Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes. Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
- p00dles 11mo ago
  Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct
- japhyr 11mo ago
  I started teaching in the 90s, and left classroom teaching in 2019. This is how I saw it play out in every school I was aware of. People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.

Melatonic 11mo ago

I think it will eventually settle into a net positive - we're just in the Wild West of smartphones still. I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.

SchemaLoad 11mo ago
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
- im3w1l 11mo ago
  More cynically, I think some people will need to actively work towards it, and then other people will say "see it happened automatically".

arianjm 11mo ago

A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"

Yeul 11mo ago
I remember when I first saw little girls with Blackberries. It was quite strange.

immibis 11mo ago

Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.

mnky9800n 11mo ago

give me a break. you don't need data to know that a child lacks the self control to not look at their phone when they need to be doing anything else. smartphones are almost 20 years old. There are adults going to university and into the workforce that grew up without knowing a world without smartphones.

Ferret7446 11mo ago

I think both yours and the GP's points can be simply explained as: it's obvious in hindsight, but not in foresight. Quite frankly, we (in a collective, general sense) suck at predicting the future. Half will think A, half will think B, and the half that ends up being correct by chance will think they are actually smart rather than lucky.