Technology

Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said Friday. Hafid in a statement to media said that she just signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox. The implementation will start gradually…

China knows exactly what this does. Their domestic version of TikTok caps kids under 14 at 40 minutes a day, locks access between 6am and 10pm, and swaps the entire feed to educational content. Science, history, museums. The version they export to everyone else? Unlimited, unrestricted, pure dopamine on demand. When kids in the US and China were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the number one answer in America…

Yet my smartphone has affected my life in often negative ways. The world I disappear to inside it has made me – and probably you – angrier. That’s my main impression of how the world has changed since 2007: we’re all a lot more pissed off with each other. And I really do blame phones. Humans are profoundly social and wired to solve the problems of existence by forming into collaborative groups. When we feel we belong and are…

Andrej Karpathy: I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of…

As an adult now living in the city, I often find myself wondering, where do kids go for that kind of independent play today? This is exactly what evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster explores in a recent essay. We like to blame tech companies for trapping our kids in digital spaces – and sure, the slot-machine mechanics are real. But Stark-Elster argues we’re missing the bigger picture: “Digital space is the only…

So, I was asked to come and explain AI again at SuperAI. I always think a good place to start if we want to understand this is to ask, "Well, what is it that we mean when we say AI?" This is a really important observation from 1970 from Larry Tesler, who was an AI scientist. He said, "AI is whatever machines can't do yet, because once it works, we say, 'Well, that's not AI anymore. That's just software.'" AI is the stuff that…

We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced. As AI systems increasingly match or exceed our cognitive abilities, we’re witnessing the twilight of human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence. This transformation won’t arrive in some distant future; it’s unfolding now, reshaping not just our economy but our very understanding of what…

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments. While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem…