Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
oligarchwatch.substack.com140 points by jumploops 4 days ago
140 points by jumploops 4 days ago
I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.
(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
That's exactly correct, The idea in itself isn't bad.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
> If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
Research has shown there isn't any ambiguity here. Stuff like this isn't good for adults, and is even worse for kids. So yeah, obvious child abuse.
Dunno if poverty (the things you mentioned) counts as abuse. This is closer to giving children cigs, but back then it was not recognized as harmful. Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
> Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
Technology is harmful, starting from fire and farming. So what?
150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.
> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty
Right, because it's profitable.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
> If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
This line of argument is popular bullshit.
Technology is not linear. There are many paths it can take.
Your contributions are somewhat unique. To a certain degree, if you don't make it, no one will.
The sad part is that parents want this. They lack the skills, time, and/or motivation to entertain their kids in any other way. Its easier to just stick a screen in the child's face to avoid the difficulties of parenting.
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
Cool idea. Where would I get one?
In this case I gave them a COMPAQ Portable III I rescued from my father-in-law's computer repair shop.
myroom.isfine.org on a pinch. I tried to make everything as authentically annoying as it was, having to rewind tapes shapes character
Don't give kids a computer, give them a camera. A real one.
A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.
Hard agree. And a lot of unstructured play. Actually, that should all last well into their pre-teens IMO.
I did that and now they want me to buy film for it, which costs a small fortune. And would be even harder to find someone to develop.
Why does it have to be a film camera? A "real" camera can still be a digital one.
This feels somewhere between an Onion article and one of those vintage ads for giving children cocaine.
I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
[flagged]
No we don't, and propagating this myth is damaging to people suffering that need that medication.
Many medications behave extremely differently under different dosages, delivery methods and variants.
To quote an ex of mine who was a school psychiatrist, "oh, ADHD meds are addictive are they? I wish someone would tell that to my kids who keep on forgetting to take them."
It is also worth noting that meth is not typically prescribed for ADHD, it's typically other amphetamines like Adderall that are, or methylphenidate (Ritalin). Prescription meth (Desoxyn) is typically only prescribed for some things like eating disorders, usually not ADHD. And it's very distinct from the other amphetamines, they're not really directly comparable.
That said, plenty of people with ADHD do actually self-medicate with (black market!) meth and are perfectly functional. To be quite frank, the stigma surrounding meth use is simply harmful in all but the most egregious cases. And even in those cases, usually it's not the meth itself that is the problem, it's simply the favorite substance of the addict (who would've otherwise just gotten addicted to something else instead).
Another often-overlooked aspect is that addicts usually only get addicted to substances because their life already sucks, and taking away the substances without helping their life at all is often just cruel, and especially blaming them for trying to cope with their circumstances. So many members of society use such simple (and flawed) logic, seeing someone using drugs and assuming the drugs are the problem, and that taking it away will make it better. Usually both are false (though some notable exceptions are drugs that form strong dependence like opioids and benzodiazepines, and other drugs that pose a strong risk to life, like research/designer psychedelics -- ones that are not safe like LSD/DMT or psilocybin -- or deliriants)
I'm not a parent, but don't parents give their kids tablets all the time? The number of toddlers I've seen walking around with tablets glued to their faces makes me uncomfortable, but they're actually just ipads or android tablets. This product seems to me like just another tablet, with a slightly different build for kids.
I'd guess any parent who is already planning on giving their kid a tablet would get this but any parent who is against it will not? I'm not sure this product in isolation increases the number of tablet viewing toddlers.
If you’re not a parent, you're probably only seeing children in places which are not designed with children in mind - places where there’s no place to run and play, and kids have to be quiet. In those places you have to pacify child somehow, a lot of parents use digital entertainment. If you go to child friendly places, you would see it much less.
Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.
> bad choices
As one of them, no, not really.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
Would you really compare a Kindle to a full fledged tablet with endless video and addictive games? I think you are being hard on yourself.
It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.
I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox
As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
I just threw infuse logged in as "kids" to Jellyfin which has curated kids stuff - and it's all tied to a custom home assistant timer profile that turns jellyfin access off at a particular time; there's a "door lock" in HomeKit that can be used to extent TV time past the normal cutoff if a parent decides, but since it's a door lock "hey Siri" can lock it, but not unlock it.
It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
Addiction brings out the worst in people; they're suffering and only become aware -- keenly aware -- between "fixes."
Have you considered that their actions could be a consequence of their continued and prolonged stimulation through digital pacification?
I think that’s exactly what the GP was saying
The parent comment said "It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved." which I was directly responding to.
> On its website, Amazon notes that ads can appear in apps for children whose devices aren’t signed up for the premium subscription.
Giving serious Black Mirror vibes with that. Specifically Common People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.
When I was a kid I had a toy robot that you could input a path into and it'd walk the path. Is that out of bounds for you?
Was it a bee?
No, it was a toy robot... I just said that.
I guess I should have clarified that I meant a robot made to look like a bee...
https://www.teaching.com.au/product/rechargeable-bee-bot
These were a rite of passage here in Australia for any kid who showed an interest in maths or computers.
Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
I don't know why anybody cares about this. If anyone's ever used an Amazon tablet, you'll know that the battery lasts 5 seconds, the animations are chunky, it's bloteful of ads and basically doesn't work. Save yourself some time and get an iPad. I have multiple times.
Jeff Bezos, our neighborhood crack lord. Thanks Jeff!
this is what the future will look like if the epstein-class wins: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dez_ma0xagT/?hl=en
This reminds me of the Kid Beer sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepbNahnsE4
The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
From the article,
> While observing 422 children ages 3 to 5, a 2022 study led by Radesky found that mobile device use for calming — in other words, a digital pacifier — was associated with “decreased executive functioning and increased emotional reactivity.” (Executive function refers to memory and problem-solving skills needed for everyday life. Emotional reactivity refers to poor impulse control in response to stress, pain, and other negative feelings.)
ADHD is a type of executive function disorder.
The study doesn't claim causation. Instead of mobile device use causing executive dysfunction, it is more probable that the correlation is because mobile device use is more effective at calming down a child with poor executive function than a child with typical executive function. That's not to say it's a good way of calming of course.
Alas, you've received downvotes even though the substance of what you say is valid.
I'll say it's misguided, as well as the root comment to which you're reaponding. The particular study soesnmt show causation, but there's a growing bidy of research that does (it's easy to find).
The meta analysis study referenced in the article that covers 2.8 million kids in total did not find a link between screen exposure and executive functioning issues (or with math, science, reading, and a few other things). But I couldn’t tell from the summary what age ranges were covered.
Inspired by "Toy Story 5" ... It's amazing how catatonic my 7 year-old can become in a phone or tablet.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,”
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
Put AI on it an you have the future of upbringing.
you think this isn't gonna ship with some illegal data harvesting ai? oh sweet summer chile
If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
So yes it's a great idea.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy)
Yeah, but they were right though?
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phones. The kids occasionally watch Bluey and Peppa pig on the TV (live not apps).
Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
> criticizing from the sidelines
You dont even have kids, why do you have such a strong opinion on what real parents are saying about bringing up their own? You are the one criticising from the sidelines whilst us parents are making the tough choices in bringing our kids up.
In agreement, and I'push another point:
The dual working parents part is a red herring.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
I am a dual working parent. It is hard. I am not saying zero screen time.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
At least you acknowledge some screen time unlike the puritans we have in this thread but i also suspect you're not in the most extreme of difficult parenting situations.
If you don't give kids a tablet and instead give them a stack of toys, the kids will grumble and eventually start playing with the toys.
Hell give a bunch of bored kids enough rocks and they'll find a way to build a small village out of said rocks using mud as a connecting material.
Parenting before the age of tablets and phones was a thing that seemed to work fairly well overall.
My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
It's true and it's also true that parent's would be criticized from the sidelines for allowing kids, even from a very young age to sit in front of screens for hours on end when i was a kid.
I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.
I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
>The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
> I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
I turned on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the first time for my son a few days ago. After a few minutes I asked how the show felt. "Relaxing".
We sat down and watched the Music episode together for 20 or so minutes.
Parents can choose what their kids watch and listen to. Ignore the feed.
This assumes TV and tablets are they same, they very much are not.
Your very point about them being more interactive is what makes them much more dangerous.
You can do whatever mental gymnastics you need to justify parenting decisions. But a static device located in a common area in the home is no comparison a device that follows a child everywhere which they stare at alone.
The content of TV was also vastly different. There was a barrier to entry, not an infinite stream of brainrot content.
There is just no reason to give kids such devices at a young age, far better learning experiences exist until at least 9 years old.
My wife was worried our son would be "left behind". We talked about it and I pointed out he can already navigate photos, and Spotify to play an audio book; from just looking over our shoulders every now and then. Must be around 5 hours interaction in total (he is 4).
Poking a screen is barely a skill, less than a day and he would be caught up to all the kids that had been staring at one for hours a day since they were 3.
The problems are tablet and phones. Apps are really bad, even the ones made for kids.
I am sure there are exceptions, but if you are a duo working parents, you don't have time to dig through children apps to figure out which are good.
Overall tv in common space is better (occasionally), you can keep an eye on what the kid is watching and how is affecting their behavior.
You realize when they are done watching tv way earlier than they are (if ever)
The arbitrage will show up when kids raised without screens compete for the same college / job spots as kids raised by screens.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
Sudden lightbulb moment:
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
Maybe desktop computers? But touch computers have been designed to be dead simple to use, I don't think jobs had uniquely designed the iphone to be simple enough for a child to use, but he did design it to be usable by people from other countries and cultures with no previous training, children being able to use these touch devices is at least a side effect.
I did mean desktop or laptop computers. Yes touch devices are like you described
I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
You are the parent, you can start at the IF. I'm attacking the premise, not the conclusion.
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
[flagged]
The original comment invites discussion, yours is just a pointless sarcastic response and will most likely be flagged or killed for being as such.
> If you think this is a bad idea, please tell me why, happy to discuss.
There are several reasons. The most important one is that children (ab)using highly stimulating devices don't learn to be absorbed by or find reward in less stimulating ones (most importantly, books). It's exactly the same risk as giving addictive drugs to adults.
This is not theory. Just look at children whose parents give them mobile phones/tablets as pacifiers - they become easily restless.
The intellectual argument is also important. Gamified learning is nice on paper, but one can imagine what children are actually going to play.
Related to another post: the difference between a child and an adult who plays videogames is that the latter has (hopefully!) learned "slow" skills, so they can choose pastimes like this deliberately.
Having said that, I'm for forbidding children from using this type of thing, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope, and there's lots to work on before that step.
Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Not always. AI is being pushed on plenty of people. Let's just say that not all products serve consumers and there's room for regulation.
Even if I want to buy uranium, I shouldn't. And if I want to buy a chair, I shouldn't be seeing only uranium chairs.
I mean uranium can be a hazard to people around you, so I don't think that's an equivalent scenario.
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
Amusingly, I totally bought Uranium off of Amazon ~7 years ago when I wanted to test my Geiger counter. Doesn't seem to be available anymore though? Sad!
This is also a great argument for low-tar cigarettes for children.
Do you have a strong argument against them?
The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health
The parents who don't allow it would never consider them
I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero
You're asking if I have a strong argument against targeting children with tobacco products?
The existence of them, yeah. I don't think it's so clear cut that it'd be a net increase in harm. Advertising I'm not so sure about, but as for the mere existence of them:
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
You’re missing Group C, who didn’t offer cigarettes to their kids until their kids heard of these “healthy” cigarettes that are “safe for kids”
Absolutely no cigarettes should be marketed to children. That doesn't mean various cigarette-adjacent products cannot exist.
The net harm result really only changes because the scope and numbers differ. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually allows their kids to smoke, I see a lot who give them tablets though.
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
I think I get what you're saying, but it's really an unfortunate example.
I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.