That poor child in the stock photo getting shown for an article on how children are getting dumber...
That being said, the reason why children are getting 'dumber' is probably because a) education is getting less money every year b) social media is destroying their attention span c) intelligence isn't valued enough by society
At no point is getting a notebook part of the problem. Young people need to learn how to use technology.
I feel bad for the girl in the picture. She turns up every time the "technology makes kids dumbfucks" argument surfaces. Feel like ive seen her about 20 times in the last year.
Imagine being the face of that.
not useful for k-12, but very useful for college students.
It sounds like it's false, but even if it were true, companies like Fortune are working hard to make it true. They want suckers who don't think, who don't remember, who can perform high level labor at almost no cost, so the rich can get richer.
Kids these days
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went "well, young people 'just understand' technology, we don't need to teach it anymore" and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I'm focused on the USA - I doubt "Cooney Horvath" is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are "INHERANTLY DUMBER" (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it's trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
ive seen parents give phones to toddlers watching on the phones, ipads just to shut them up. defunding is mostly done by republicans, underfunding is pretty everywhere else, even in pretty decent blue areas. the money goes to admin/bureaucracy and redtaping teachers. the books, i recently saw students at my former hs, from 10+years ago sitll using the same kind of book( the blue book for chemistry edition), but they need to use newer books with updated info.
moreover, I'm convinced the entire reason my generation (millennials) turned out to be tech-savvy was because adults didn't understand it, were trying to control and curtail our usage, and we were mostly focused on finding ways to circumvent boomer and gen-x meddling in our usage.
Nailed it. This is equally true for many countries beyond the US.
THIS. PREACH. I couldn't say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.
"Technology" is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. "Technology" didn't cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.
Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.
But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely "technology." They're consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.
In 95% of cases, I'll wager, nobody's getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to "replace" standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.
we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.
So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that's open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research...) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than
"Let's copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase."
My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren't working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.
Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it's not 1-step on her iPhone. It's tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.
We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that's how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer smoking and gambling .
If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.
Mainstream technology doesn't connect us, it isolates us. It doesn't educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing "friction" to rob our wallets and personal data.
I'm INFURIATED that most people can't even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the "future" is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.
I feel like we need to start "desktop computer clubs" or something. Seeing this crap like they're trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book...
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: "This has generally been considered a bad idea."
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must've thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
...We were more optimistic about the internet then.
...But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
Yeah thats click bait.
None of tbe cognitive assessment tools we have are reliable in any scientific way. It's all IQ test level of fundamental misunderstanding of human intelligence.
That being said there is 1 truth in the article - we do need to address learning to ways of human actually learn. Laptops or books or whatever it's mostly irrelevant. Grades and exams and class of 20 people is not how humans learn. The entire education industry needs to be fundamentally reshaped.
Unpopular opinion: AI is the right tool for education revolution and many people are already taking advantage of this tool while education institutions close their eyes and push paper tests. LLMs are never going away.
LLMs are never going away.
Are you basing this assumption on the idea that they're free to use? Because that's not sustainable.
The every single time an AI company has tried to actually require compensation for the tokens burned for AI queries, even amounts that would hardly cover a fraction of the operational cost for that 'work', contracts have mass-canceled immediately.
You don't have any control over token churn, either:
First of all, no matter how simple the prompt, LLMs can get stuck in thought loops that can chew through thousands of tokens before an answer can come out.
And second, every prompt you make not only eats a bunch of tokens incorporating the system prompt that can be billions of parameters long, but also includes every PRIOR prompt you put in, AND all their responses for "Context", therefore token use increases geometrically for every next prompt.
The only thing holding its usage aloft is that nobody has had to pay up front. But the bill is racking up more and more every day for the power and cooling and facility upkeep, presently "paid for" by massive debts. When these firms that took out those debts file for bankruptcy, you do realize what's owed doesn't just magically poof into smoke, right? Even if a court literally ordered an injunction that those debts be stricken from the books as if they never happened, there is no financial firm on earth that wouldn't find some backhanded way to balance the loss by shifting the burden to its other clients.
Maybe if any one of these companies posts a net profit, EVER, I might change my tune... but so far, this has been the emperor's new clothes all over again.
Unrelated but I am pretty annoyed articles can refer to age groups as "gen z" or "millenial."
It's not some universally agreed number. They could just say "kids aged 12-24." It's more empirical.
And these generation cutoffs are basically meaningless. The next one starts just because it would be weird for a parent and child to be in the same "generation" not because the specific birth cutoff indicates anything special. Young X'ers and old millennials have way more in common with each other than those on the other side of their generations.
Students aren't being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They're being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?
I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it's just not sticking.
Exactly.
As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!
I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.
They're usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else "fell through."
We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.
It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.
It didn't have to be like this. I'm very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it...
YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.
It would've been so great if for at least once say "We don't have microsoft word tasks today, we don't have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead."
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
I'm 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
That's just not true. People don't learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.
and welcome to 'short attention span theater"
There's no scientific proof of "shortened attention spans".
pay attention... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11236742/
LOL what on earth if FORTUNE of all places doing publishing an article on this?
Fortune:
Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior...after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.
Up next: "These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?"
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