It is becoming more and more clear that while the internet has provided enormous benefit to human society, there have also been some bad outcomes, most notably the negative impact of social media platforms on the critical thinking and interpersonal and communication skills of our children. This troubling trend is accelerating as social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok use AI to better profile their users to become even more addictive to the young brains of our children.
Our democracy requires leaders with strong critical thinking skills combined with strong values and a benevolent moral compass, and a conscious appreciation for the values and morals that were infused into our Constitution and its unique three-branch governing structure. The ability of our children to become this type of values/morals-based Conscious Critical Thinker is being stolen from them by social media platforms that are becoming even more powerful with AI.
This is creating a dangerous spiral where, several generations from now, there will not be enough CCTs in our society to lead and sustain our democracy, and it will slowly be replaced by authoritarianism, a future we all fear. In fact, many would argue that we are already on that path.
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Based on recent studies, teenagers ages 13 to 18 currently spend an average of five hours per day, or over 1,800 hours per year on social media, with over a third saying they spend more time than the average. At the same time, children are in school 6 1/2 to 7 hours per day or approximately 35 hours per week. Assuming the federally mandated 36 weeks, children are spending 1,260 hours in school per year. Even before considering the lunch and other free periods that take up some of the school day, our children are currently on social media 40% more each year than they are in school.
With AI making social media platforms even more powerful and addictive, the time spent on social media versus school will continue to increase. This will leave even less time for children after school and on weekends to read and write and develop logic and problem-solving skills, and to do all the extracurricular things that build strong social, emotional, communication, and other EQ skills required to be a CCT citizen and a strong CCT leader.
It takes many skills to be a great CCT leader, many of which AI can already do better than humans. At the same time, there are many skills that a human has that an AI-enhanced social media platform will never possess. The binary computer system of 1s and 0s used by AI systems can only make decisions using the data and facts they are fed to them during “training” and a set of values and morals and priorities its programmers provide. This AI-driven process of decision-making prioritizes efficiency or financial gain but doesn’t have the ability to infuse values and a moral compass the way a CCT human does to make decisions.
AI-powered social media platforms struggle to determine good from bad, in some cases leading to unintended outcomes, including encouraging a teenager to commit suicide. The AI-enhanced social media platforms also lack other innate human abilities used to make decisions, such as intuition, which is a part of our EQ. As Malcolm Gladwell argued in his 2005 book Blink, the unconscious human mind is incredibly powerful, and the product of the teaching received and experiences throughout a person’s life.
The fact is that a computer system has never actually lived and experienced or felt anything firsthand. AI-enhanced social media platforms have only lived vicariously through the data they are fed during their training. A human CCT is the product of all of their life experiences, including the teachings of their families, school teachers, mentors, religious leaders, and friends. Most importantly, a CCT human is shaped by their successes and failures and the related consequences associated with every decision they have ever made. While every experience of every human that has been digitally recorded can be fed into an AI system, it will, in all cases, be missing many important related facts and consequences, most importantly, how a person felt during those experiences. The feelings these life experiences create build a set of uniquely human decision-making skills that an AI-enhanced social media platform will never have.
The path we are on, where children’s brains are being consumed and formed by AI-enhanced social media, will result in fewer CCTs across our society. Future corporate and governmental leaders will blindly use AI to make every decision that the non-CCT electorate will blindly follow without the ability to think and reason for themselves, considering human values, morals, and emotions that are so critical to Democratic governing. This type of machine-driven decision-making is actually more consistent with rules-based autocratic governing. While our laws may look like rules on the surface, they are actually infused with a strong set of human values and a moral compass and enforced by CCTs who populate our judicial system. Autocracies, on the other hand, are governed and enforced by a set of rules that are based on the values and morals of their authoritarian leader.
To stop this slide toward this rules-based authoritarian future, we must do everything we can to ensure that AI-enhanced social media doesn’t stop our children from becoming the CCT leaders and electorate required to sustain our democracy. This will take the combined effort of parents, schools, government, and the tech companies developing AI and operating social media platforms.
For their part, teachers are beginning to adjust their teaching strategies by requiring that reading and writing assignments be completed in class (with a pencil and paper) to ensure that AI is not doing their work and students are thinking and writing for themselves. Many studies have found a strong correlation between writing and critical thinking skills, and while these new teaching strategies are a good start, less homework allows for more time to be spent on social media. A new MIT Lab study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” found that less writing reduces cognitive brain function and the development of cognitive abilities so important to the development of strong critical thinking skills. More oral presentations and debates between students within the classroom are also becoming a part of the new tech-fighting curriculum, providing person-to-person speaking and communication that does not exist during the time our children are on social media, where the spoken word is replaced by keystrokes or an interaction with an AI-powered computer bot.
School administrators and teachers are also getting some help from state governments as “bell-to-bell” laws have been enacted in 26 states that restrict the use of cellphones for the entire school day, and another eight states have less restrictive classroom-only bans. Many school districts (including ours) have also extended that ban to personal laptops that have been replaced by school-issued laptops that control access to the internet. All of these new technology restrictions have significantly improved the effectiveness of our teachers, and we should consider making them federal law in all 50 states. Not only does it create a more effective teaching/learning environment, but students also seem to prefer it, as it improves the quality of their overall experience in school, which is so important to the development of strong interpersonal, communication, and other EQ-related skills. These, along with some very effective AI-assisted teaching tools, are all great trends that are making our schools more effective, but they cannot offset the negative impact of less social human interaction and writing and reading outside of the classroom due to the time spent on social media.
Technology has already reduced our children’s (and adults’) ability to spell and do arithmetic in their heads. Is reading and writing, and even the ability to interact with other humans, next?
Since the mid-1990s, several years before social media platforms and today’s AI even existed, our government has generally taken a hands-off approach toward the internet and technology that uses it, like social media apps. While creating a regulation framework that does not stifle AI innovation and development is an important national security consideration, I can think of no similar societal benefit that AI-enhanced social media platforms provide our children.
A recent executive order by President Donald Trump has created a “Working Group” to study what kind of government oversight procedures are needed to mitigate the negative impact of AI on society. While creating some reasonable government guardrails on AI is a good start, the scope of that working group should be expanded to include the overall internet, and specifically, the long-term negative impact of AI-enhanced social media on our children.
As part of a broader review by the working group, it should also consider updating certain laws and internet antitrust enforcement theory and policy. The most important law related to the internet, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, was enacted long before anyone knew the power the internet would give certain companies, including those that operate social media platforms. The liability exception that Section 230 provides social media and other internet-related tech companies needs to be brought into line with the way other content distributors of print media and broadcast and cable TV networks are responsible for and held accountable for the content they distribute. While I am no fan of antitrust enforcement, having once been sued by the Department of Justice to block a merger the company I ran was pursuing, the ways those antitrust laws regulate the “network power” of the internet must be examined.
Without some updates to our communication regulation laws and changes to how the antitrust laws are enforced, the increasing power (and wealth) of social media and other tech companies will make it increasingly difficult for the government or the courts to force the tech companies to make changes before it is too late for our children. In this respect, the White House should not succumb to Big Tech pressure to disband the new working group over fears of stifling innovation and creating increased national security risk. Rather, the level of involvement of the social media and other tech executives in the new working group should be carefully managed so as to mitigate the potential for any financial and other conflicts. I understand that AI technology development is moving so fast that it will be beneficial and even necessary to have the same people who are on the cutting edge of AI development be part of the working group. However, the work product and changes resulting from the working group’s work must be driven in all respects by AI and social media experts who are government employees or unconflicted consultants. Otherwise, the whole working group process starts to feel a little like the fox guarding the henhouse.
While the social media companies are finally starting to be held accountable for the damage their products are doing to our children, aggressive litigation should never be the first line of defense. While recent lawsuits have resulted in social media companies being held accountable for the addictive nature of their platforms, and over 1,200 suits have been filed by school districts against social media companies, unpredictable and lengthy litigation processes will not create tangible and lasting changes in the behavior of the social media platforms quickly enough to save our children. There is also the risk that their huge cash flow will allow them to settle out of court without making substantive changes to their platforms. This appears to be the outcome of a recent case that several social media companies settled with a Kentucky school district.
The government must also do more to force the social media companies to make their products safer for our children and restrict access until a certain age. Over 15 countries, including most recently Britain, are creating laws that have age restrictions on the use of social media apps by children. The United States should follow the same path up to age 16, the same age driver’s licenses are issued.
Why should we allow children to spend so much time “driving” social media apps before their critical thinking skills and judgment have developed enough to drive a car? The social media companies should also be required to develop AI-powered controls to ensure that their apps cannot be downloaded onto the phones of underage children and provide more robust tools for parents to monitor the social media activity of their older teenagers. There should also be more effective apps developed that help children self-regulate their time on social media platforms and begin to cure the social media addiction that so many of them suffer from. Tech companies should also start to make voluntary or mandated (by law) contributions to not-for-profit foundations that are being formed to create media campaigns to bring more awareness to the dangers of AI-enhanced social media to our children, the way a similar campaign launched in 1998 called the Truth Initiative significantly reduced teenage and adult cigarette smoking, and in recent years, teenage vaping.
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Leaders and an electorate with strong critical thinking, communication, and reasoning skills, combined with a strong set of benevolent values and morals, is what created our unique democracy and has sustained it for 250 years. Social media has its place for adults as a communication tool to keep family and friends connected, or as a resource for learning new skills or finding jobs. But if we don’t reverse the negative impact that AI-enhanced social media platforms are having on our children’s ability to grow into adults with the same combination of uniquely human qualities possessed by the electorate and great leaders of our past and present, there will one day be too few CCT leaders and CCT citizens within the electorate to hold back the move toward an AI-led rules-based authoritarian society we all fear.
While some may say that we already don’t have enough CCTs in our government and that shift toward authoritarianism is already happening, imagine how much worse it could become many generations from now, with even fewer CCTs in our society. It was human CCTs throughout our history that made the U.S. the “shining city upon a hill” that Ronald Reagan spoke of, and we need to make sure that “beacon of freedom and hope” will never dim.