Hanes: Adults need guardrails on AI as much as kids |
Over the Easter weekend, my brother-in-law turned to artificial intelligence for advice on how to speed up cooking the roast we were late putting in the oven so it wouldn’t delay dinner.
The results were delicious, but it wasn’t exactly rocket science. We’d come up with the same solution ourselves in discussing our options prior to enlisting the chefbot.
It’s just one tiny example of how pervasive the use of AI has become in our daily lives, whether we need it or not. It’s also a troubling sign of how easily we’re delegating basic knowledge to technology, even when it comes to things that make us uniquely human, like the food we eat.
But as the federal Liberal party gathers in Montreal this week for a convention where members will consider policy proposals to restrict access to social media and AI for children under 16, forgive me for taking them with a grain of salt.
Don’t get me wrong — there are good reasons to weigh such limits for kids, as countries like Australia have already done.
Concern has been growing about the impact of social media on young minds, be it the addictiveness of video games, cyberbullying, sextortion, social isolation, depression, radicalization or exposure to pornography.
Parents, educators, police and policymakers have only woken up to these risks belatedly and often feel powerless trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Quebec banned smartphones from schools last fall to improve attentiveness and socialization. A California jury last month found Meta liable for hooking children........