Balaji Srinivasan: prediction

Transcript context

…Here’s a very general question. Right now, children, especially in the Bay Area, they grow up with so much tech. It surrounds them all the time — iPad, smartphone, apps, whatever it may be. They learn how to use it very young. There are costs and benefits to this. Overall, I would say I’m optimistic about it. But just in general, what is the implicit ideological commitment or value judgment we’re making by just allowing this to proceed? How do you think about that decision? The state has six hours of compulsory education per day. What’s interesting is the network is getting a lot of those hours and taking them away from the state because the kids are plugged into their laptops and iPads and iPhones and self-educating during the period they’re supposed to be having compulsory state education. There’s an interesting thing that’s happening there, where you’re having kids plugged into a different network, not the state-approved network, during their nascent years. They’re plugged into the internet and their own sub-communities and subcultures. So the state has a lot less control over kids as they’re coming up. If you go all the way back to how Bismarck instituted public education and whatnot, it was really to raise children who were “obedient to the state,” who were patriots or however you want to call it. Because that acculturation is happening less and less because kids are getting plugged into folks who have different ideologies at a much younger age, I think that’s got a lot of interesting medium-term consequences. Some parents would say there’s a potential maybe addiction risk, if that’s the right word, or maybe an attention risk. Then on the plus side, there’s a lot more information, more freedom of thought. If you’re an unusual child, you can connect with others like you more readily. How much do you think we know now those are positive tradeoffs?…

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