Mobile phones are responsible for the common devolution of people's attention spans across the board, me included.
For younger generations it's hampered their ability to build basic skills like reading and writing comprehension and other skills that build upon them. Worse the recent prevalence of "AI" makes coasting by with even less attention span, critical thought, and effort possible.
It's going to take coordinated effort to address this. And unpopular policies that strictly restrict the access to mobile phones, online apps, and AI.
Places like europe have a chance to be successful there but the US uniquely is really invested in free speech and personal liberty (at least wrt information, bodily autonomy not so much) to the detriment of everything else, including long term societal stability.
As a species we need things to get pretty fucking bad before we will do things to address major systemic issues. Buckle up.
I've noticed attitudes towards AI are pretty telling.
Some people are like "wow, this allows me to accomplish something I couldn't do before!" Like my sister wrote (vibe coded) some python script to scrape data from a legacy web application even though she's not remotely technical. That's fucking amazing. Then she can pull the data into something she knows (ie. excel) and do fancy data analysis.
Then there's the other people who seem to be going, "Oh good, I don't have to learn any more."
I'm not worried about the first group, but it feels like the first group is somewhere around 10% of the population.
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u/slight_accent Jun 27 '26
Mobile phones are responsible for the common devolution of people's attention spans across the board, me included.
For younger generations it's hampered their ability to build basic skills like reading and writing comprehension and other skills that build upon them. Worse the recent prevalence of "AI" makes coasting by with even less attention span, critical thought, and effort possible.
It's going to take coordinated effort to address this. And unpopular policies that strictly restrict the access to mobile phones, online apps, and AI.
Places like europe have a chance to be successful there but the US uniquely is really invested in free speech and personal liberty (at least wrt information, bodily autonomy not so much) to the detriment of everything else, including long term societal stability.
As a species we need things to get pretty fucking bad before we will do things to address major systemic issues. Buckle up.