The issue is not one of saying “tools bad,” “senses good” or conversely, “senses good, tools bad,” but rather to discern what skills or instincts of a fundamental human and personal nature might be lost in this massive outsourcing of the skills of empirical observation to technologies created and operated, in the end, by other human beings, who like everyone else in their species, have an in-built desire to sometimes want to control and dominate others.
And not only do people outsource their basal observational skills to these powerful strangers, but they simultaneously cede to them scads of information on their most intimate fears and desires, data points that are, in turn, used to manipulate what two of the more shameless members of this class of elite control freaks, Thaler and Sunstein, call the “choice architecture” around us in ways that are amenable to their interests and not our own. ….
What we do know, however, is that if the adult in this equation never shows up, the process will never get out of the starting gate, and the justice-seeking child will be left, as is the case of so many today, to rely on amoral corporate and government organizations speaking to them through their telephone to piece together some sense of what it means to live a reflective and moral life.
Do we really think we can create a better world in the future when so many of us continue to feed our children to the machine in this way?
Is he saying that we, the adults, are responsible for the unsatisfactory way the children are turning out, nowadays? We, the adults, that put the iPad in the little children’s hands as a baby sitter. Or is it, we, the parents that give six-year-olds their very own smartphone to “keep them in contact” with us. Or is it, we, the adults that are letting machines and the internet educate our children in how to live life properly, just like Bonny Blue? Come on, fess up, we are the problem if we are giving the children no way to form character that is not an image of the world of the internet.