Ridiculous Opinions #263
As a teacher, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about AI recently and I still hold firm to my belief that AI is simply a pyramid scheme designed to prop up a tech industry that has nothing noteworthy to offer aside from incremental upgrades and cameras with even more pixels. I’ve installed Apple Intelligence on my phone and it’s already getting on my nerves with its “text message summaries” and “email summaries” and “suggestions”. AI is just auto-complete in a brand new package and I’m over it.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today, I would like to talk about the most insidious thing that I have seen a company do that completely snuck up on me as a tech enthusiast. That company? Apple, of course.
When Apple announced their Sequoia operating system in June, they added a feature to their Macs that mirrored your iPhone to your desktop. The program basically gives you a window on your desktop that shows the screen of your phone, so that you have a full iPhone just sitting there on your laptop or computer. You can use it in the same way that you use the phone in your hand. I thought, “That’s neat” and moved on.
The horrors of this did not register with me.
I spend a great deal of time in my classroom ensuring that phones are not in my kids’ hands when they are with me. The rule is that the minute that one walks into my classroom, I don’t want to see your phone out at all. And if a student needs to film with their iPhone, they have to ask me (I am a film teacher, after all).
I do this because I have a personal belief that phones are addictive. Look around our school at lunch or in the hallway. Our high schoolers are glued to their phones, their heads constantly bent over, avoiding eye contact, reflexively reaching for their devices whenever they have idle time, and numbing their brains from actual thinking when they should be interacting or daydreaming.
When I prevent phones from being used in my classroom, the thought is that I am simply creating one more barrier between constant phone use and being a normal human being. Sure, almost everything that a student can do on a phone can be done on a computer, but it’s just a bit more of an effort in situations like that. And teenagers certainly do not like more effort.
So, when you walk into Mr. G’s classroom, the phones go away.
But now, students can use their phones on a computer. The wall has come down. The barrier removed. The levee has given way.
Thus, as a teacher, I’m not sure what can be done at this point. Students can have constant access to their phones now. The tech industry wins and we are now all completely addicted.
We talk a lot about phones in my classroom as I try to explain to students why the adults have to take charge because they have no self-regulation when it comes to their devices. “Sometimes the adults in the room have to make choices for you,” I say, “because you don’t have the capacity to do it for yourselves.” After I explain these things, the students usually see the light in regard to how I operate in my classroom.
But they don’t change their behaviors.
Our phones today are wonderful. They are also addictive. They have been weaponized to garner your attention. They have become an appendage. I refer to them as our external brains. I spent WAY too much time on my own phone this summer and have worked very hard since we returned at trying to reduce the amount that I use it. But it’s a losing battle.
You will find lots of articles today about how there is no evidence that social media leads to anxiety and depression in teens. But at the same time, you’ll find articles about how university students can’t finish a novel anymore. Huh. Something is wrong here and the only common factor is phones.
To me, those articles feel like propaganda by the same industry that says AI is going to save us all. The tech industry likes to throw in “science-based” jargon saying, “there’s no evidence” to counter what we can see with our own eyes and experience in our day-to-day. There is evidence and I see it every single friggin’ day.
I see kids reflexively reach for their phone during idle time. I see kids endlessly numbing themselves with the infinite scroll of Instagram. I see kids worshiping at the altar of Andrew Tate, with some boys saying, “He’s my hero!” (this actually happened). I see kids with one Airpod in all the time, scrambling their brains with quiet music in one ear and absorbing the world around them with the other. I see kids arrange their phone on the desk perfectly during class, as if its a friend that they have to keep comfortable. And I know that kids go to bed at night and then spend their time endlessly looking for things on their phones under the cover of darkness, no longer sleeping, just staying up long hours absorbing unhealthy information.
I have long said that we are the biggest science experiment in history in regard to technology. But the problem with this experiment is that it never had a point. We weren’t trying to learn anything with this new technology. We were simply seeing what would happen.
I’m not a fan of the results. You shouldn’t be either.
