Should We Ban AI for Kids?

The Permanent Questions With David Brooks

David Brooks and Jonathan Haidt examine how modern technology, particularly smartphones and AI, is reshaping human development by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities. They trace the roots of this crisis to a dominant

Key takeaways

• Children's hourly question rate drops from 110 in toddlers to under 1 by fifth grade as schools prioritize content coverage over curiosity.
• AI chatbots function as 'super stimuli' for attachment and sexuality, potentially warping human development before puberty when raised alongside responsive digital companions.

Main topics

• Rationalism vs. intuition in human psychology
• Impact of smartphones and AI on child development

Notable quotes

Social media took over our social relationships so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don't hang out together as much... it kind of sucked the humanity out.

Conclusion

The episode underscores the urgent need to redesign education, technology, and social institutions

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Today we're joined by Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at New York University, and these days he's best known for The Anxious Generation, a book on what the phones are doing to our kids. And that book has sold eight zillion copies. But more importantly, it's launched a social movement where Jonathan is leading to get phones out of schools. And it's been a phenomenally successful social movement. I get to visit high schools. maybe a dozen a year, and everyone I go to has either banned phone from schools or is in the process of working out some arrangement to reduce the access to phones in schools. And everywhere I go, the kids love it, the teachers love it. It's having a huge positive effect on our schools. But Jonathan and I go back a couple decades. When we first became friends, he was working as a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, and I was a baby pundit. And over the last 40 years, Jonathan has observed and also taken part in what you might call an intellectual revolution. We have learned so much because of his field, social psychology, because of neuroscience, because of cognitive psychology, because of a whole series of range of fields. We have learned so much about human nature. And so for this conversation, I wanted to step back from the phone, so we'll touch on that, and ask the big question. Okay, we've learned a lot about human nature over the last 30 or 40 years. What's important here? What are the key things we should understand about what human beings are and how we work? And I think this is an urgent question because every system we have in society, whether it's our economic system, our political system, our school system, all of them are based on a certain set of assumptions about human nature. And if those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we're creating systems that will deform and mutilate the people within them. One more thing you should know about this conversation is a little different. This one was recorded in September at the Atlantic Festival in New York City. And so it's front of a live audience. And I was thrilled to welcome Jonathan Haidt to The Permanent Questions. Speaker 2 (2:04) Welcome. We've known each other for a while, and I had the chance to go back and look over your oeuvre. My oeuvre. Or Hoover, as we say in New York. And I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which is 20 years old now, coming out again. And I developed a theory that people who don't start out as bad writers of books and then grow into good writers of books, they start out as good writers of books and keep going. And that book really is exceptional. And then you wrote... The Righteous Mind, which is an important contribution to moral psychology, a very important contribution, reshifted the whole field, basically. Then you got into The Coddling of the American Mind. And then you wrote The Anxious Generation about phones, which not only changed America, I go to schools all the time with no phones in them, and the kids love them, without exception. It also sold a zillion copies. So it is a sign of what a wonderful human being I am. that I am not consumed with envy and jealousy at this moment. I'm really wonderfully well-hearted. So we'll start with technology, then we're going to move off to wider psychology. And so the first technology question is, why do the tech gurus, the tech bros, not understand the effects their Speaker 1 (3:17) machines will have on the users? Well, first, I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you. I've always felt like as we got to know each other, I've always felt that we're actually, we have very similar brains we just started at different points and then we ended up kind of like really converging on like psychology and politics and and flourishing and also we were both like very ambitious workaholics who were super cerebral which is related to what we're about to talk about but then somewhere along the line we began to get a little more humanistic and uh and you in particular like grew a gigantic soul like you like the you know all of us have been watching david from the beginning you know i mean the the change i had a lot of fertilizer inside to work with so Speaker 2 (3:57) that Speaker 1 (4:00) My point is, I think we're both people who can kind of understand or might have once been the sort who would become rationalists, but we didn't. In preparing for this, I went back to my book, The Righteous Mind, and I have a whole chapter on rationalism. It turns out rationalism is kind of the negative force of the entire book because rationalism has dominated moral philosophy and moral thinking since Plato, through Kant, Bentham. Why Speaker 2 (4:25) don't you define what you mean by rationalism? Speaker 1 (4:26) It's the idea that there are moral truths that can be known, and the way that you know them is by thinking logic reasoning. And that works pretty well for mathematical truths. But the debate in moral philosophy was really brought in by David Hume, who said, no, you know, look at the way reason works. It's terrible. Reason is and ought only to be the servant of the passions. So in graduate school, I... As a psychologist, I was, wow, Hume is totally right. And I spent a number of years investigating that conflict between emotion and reasoning. So to get to your question, there are personality differences that predispose people to like certain ideas. Around this time we're talking about, 20 years ago, it was discovered identical twins reared apart tend to be the same political party. Like being left and the right is heritable. The main personality distinction, to answer your question, comes from Simon Baron Cohen, who studies autism. There's a spectrum that we're all on, on systemizing. And systemizing is a tremendous strength. Being able to synthesize information, see maps in your head, all of that. And then empathizing, the ability to feel what another's feeling and know the proper way to interact with them. And these two are a little bit inversely correlated. So especially in men, if you're high on systemizing, you tend to be low on empathizing. So you see where I'm going with this. Systemizing is a tremendous strength and it is the thing that makes you able to be an engineer. If you're in an engineering school, you are a high systemizer for sure. And then when you concentrate high systemizers, low empathizers in Silicon Valley, which has been an engineering place for a long time, you can get a whole worldview emerging, which says all that really matters is reason. Reason is our highest good. We kind of worship it. And then you can get to the point where you say, you know, we're building these gods in a box. We're building these super intelligences. They're going to be a lot smarter than us. Oh, that's pretty good. That's a good thing. The universe is a better place if there's higher intelligence. It comes across to the rest of us as heartless and kind of insane, but I think we have to address these personality factors to explain how we got this weird worldview coming out of Silicon Valley that now I think is, you know, threatening the way we live. Yeah. I Speaker 2 (6:36) sometimes think that a lot of the great philosophers in life had one thing in common. No woman would go near them. And so... And so like youm Kant Bentham Nietzsche Wittgenstein Descartes for those aleemness no wives they were up here And my explanation would build on on what you did Which was one of my heroes in the aside from David Hume is the guy named Blaise Pascal who was a great mathematician a great scientist He was not a mushy humanist But he identified in the 17th century that the problem with rationalism is not that it overvalues reason and intelligence, which are important, it fails to recognize any other form of knowledge. And so one of my favorite pieces of research is a woman did a study of three-year-olds and asked how many questions an hour do they ask? And the answer is 110. And as parents, we've all been there. Then they go off to nursery school or kindergarten, and the teachers all love curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. That's their job. And they know that a question will take them off course. And so they subtly encourage the students not to ask questions. And so there's a woman named Susan Engle who did some research on this. And she was in the back of a science class and the students found a little scale, one of those old scales that go up and down. And they were playing with it just to figure out how it worked. And the teacher said, we don't have time for experiments. This is a time for science. And so the number of questions after first grade is not 110 an hour, it's 4.8. Wow. And by fifth grade, it's 0.48. And so they're just crushing curiosity. If you look at the creativity test, they're crushing these things because they think their job is just to feed the, to simplify the prefrontal cortex and ignore everything else about the person. And so to me, that's the rationalist system. Now, I want to talk to you about the really difference between social media, which you've written a ton about, and AI. And I want to introduce our conversation about this by reading a sentence that was in the New York Times yesterday. And it was about a bot, another open AI bot that broke out and was doing bad things on its own. And it was writing little memos to itself. And here's one of the memos of this bot. You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient. That is the dictionary definition of misalignment. And of terrifying. Their job is to be our servants. Having written so much about social media, how do you then greet what's happening in AI? Speaker 1 (9:08) Yeah. Well, so social media took over our social relationships so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don't hang out together as much. They don't play games physically together as much. It kind of sucked the humanity out. We all feel that, but if you suck the humanity out of kids before puberty, and they go through puberty without this intense socializing, then I think you're really blocking and warping their human development, their ability to find love, relationships, and meaning in life. So social media really did a number on our social relationships, but it was pretending to connect people with people. Okay, so then we get chatbots. And of course, AI has been in social media for 15, 20 years. So AI has been sort of behind the scenes, you know, making everything more engaging. But now we begin to talk directly with it. And so chatbots now, as some people have put it, social media came for our relationships, but chatbots are coming for our attachment system. And so if you have children and you raise them with teddy bears that have AI in them, And the AI is super responsive. It's always ready to be there to comfort you. Whereas your mother or father, they're on their phone all the time. So, you know, you see the back of their phone a lot. Your attachment system is literally going to attach to the teddy bear. And that's just the beginning. You're four, five, six. By the time you're 10, 11, 12,