A whole generation of American children has grown up glued to screens and the damage has become apparent to almost everyone, including a couple of juries.
A jury in Los Angeles has found Meta and YouTube liable for harming kids who got hooked by addictive algorithms, while a second jury in New Mexico agreed that the social media purveyors at Meta knew they were undermining children’s mental health while keeping secret Meta’s awareness of the child sexual exploitation that was being enabled by their platforms.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his peers in Silicon Valley have tried to keep up the pretense that they are just enthusiastic whiz kids who are making lives better through their command of new technology, but that image is a facade. Now that these young geniuses have reached middle age, it is abundantly clear that they are no different from the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Like the builders of railroads and founders of oil companies, when faced with a choice between making huge profits and protecting human beings, they will always choose the money.
And that does not bode well for what has come next: artificial intelligence. The race to get obscenely rich by selling AI to the world is being run by billionaire techies who oppose any government oversight or any guardrails on the road to the future they are paving for all of us.
It is probably unavoidable that the next generation of kids will be the targets and victims of this unrestrained greed and hubris. Children are already being lured into an exploitative sphere where cheery, robotic voices pretend to be their best friends, and access to a hyper intelligence housed in their phones and computers negates the need for study, for reading, for writing or for critical thinking.
Call them Generation P, the puppets of technology.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
Editor’s note: Seattle Times Opinion no longer appends comment threads on David Horsey’s cartoons. Too many comments violated our community policies and reviewing the dozens that were flagged as inappropriate required too much of our limited staff time. You can comment via a Letter to the Editor. Please email us at letters@seattletimes.com and include your full name, address and telephone number for verification only. Letters are limited to 200 words.
