You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
The challenge is that enforcing a ban would presumably require strict incursions into personal freedoms organized at a scale where AI-based solutions would be particularly effective and thus tempting, paradoxically.
On the other hand, assuming the dangers are real, you lose by default if you do nothing.
One cannot (in most of the planet) go to the supermarket and buy an M16 and a box of hand grenades, or get a hold of a couple of kg of plutonium cause they want some free energy at home.
We also have rules in place of what one individual/company can and cannot do from the point of view of the greater good. I cannot go and kill my neighbour for my benefit (or purposefully destroy his life) without consequences. A myriad of things are not allowed, and I don't see people complaining about any incursion into personal freedoms.
The reason people have accepted these is that we have already proven that having access to those things could be catastrophic. We haven't proven hat yet with AI.
But I don't see much difference between those established and well accepted rules, and a rule that says: A company cannot release or use for its benefit a technology that will impact the need of humans at scale, because of the impact (again at scale) that it would have in society.
In other words, if you are a company and have the potential to release a product, or buy a product from a provider that would cause mass unemployment, should you be legally allowed to do so? I do not think so.
That’s a fair objection. Having ruminated on it some more, I’ll admit it might be tenable.
As for achieving an effective ban, occupational collapse might be the stronger motivator once workplace adoption broadens and accelerates, but risk of epistemic collapse might register sooner among the general public, already broadly suffering slop.
Like Bill Gates, I wonder why it’s not yet become a theme in mainstream politics.
That's interpreting a failure to fight to preserve ethics as an internal rejection when it could be explained by a lack of fighting spirit, either because the fight seems impossible or the given hill not worth dying on. Another interpretation would be a comfort-oriented, avoidant, and possibly cynical culture facing a power imbalance.
As one of the top level comments say, the images are all from https://randomuser.me/ which is suspect. If you don't have a profile picture of them, then I'd suggest not using it. Or link to actual sources of feedback (Google Workspace reviews, LinkedIn posts, tweets etc)
Officials have made announcements that tie the alleged drone sightings to “capable” (e.g., foreign state) actors. How would stricter laws address that?
It’s also already illegal to fly drones above airports.
If this comment is an indication of how you approached the conversation, maybe you failed to convince your colleague due to a lack of specific arguments and an abundance of scornful conceit.
It's interesting you mention that because I'm being quite charitable to my colleague, who was actually dismissively stubborn, and who ignored my personal experiences about living in a non-wood house.
The context is that I was shopping around for houses, doing inspections and such, and was merely curious about why homes were constructed in such a way. My home country primarily makes homes out of concrete and brick for heat insulation and it works well, compared to what I have to put up with a Texas heat wave in a wooden house currently.
I'm not entirely sure why you're assuming that I had no specific arguments though - I certainly wouldn't put a whole conversation verbatim onto an internet forum.
You just might be in the right place. Asking same question, wait until someone will make a directory website to sell access to you to find those forums.
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