You roll over in the morning, and you impulsively reach for it. You walk away from your desk and dig into your pocket for it. You have a free second or two waiting for a bus….or waiting for a red light…and you grab it. When you can’t get at it, you crave it. When you leave home without it, you panic.
It’s the smartphone. The modern cigarette.
There’s been some long overdue discussion about the addictive effects of technology on our kids recently, spurred on by release of a book called The Anxious Generation and nudged forward by the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent call for warning labels. The data is slowly rolling in, confirming what our eyes and ears have been telling us for years — phones are hurting kids. Suicide rates are up dramatically, depression rates are soaring and you can backdate the start of this surge to the rise of social media, supercharged by smartphones.
Tech will someday be treated like alcohol and cigarettes. Its use by those with still-forming brains should be carefully considered. We can argue about more or less effective ways to create some boundaries, but there is no debate — hard boundaries are long overdue. There’s a five-alarm fire on our hands and there’s no time to debate what color the fire trucks should be.
But of course, the problem isn’t just kids. We live in the most connected era of human history, yet rates of loneliness are also soaring…so much that our surgeon general called that a public health crisis, too. One third of Americans say they feel lonely every week.
Rates of gambling addiction are rising, too, though it is hard to find good data on that. Casinos and sports books are now in our pockets 24/7. The human cost of this will not come into focus for many years. But as we continue to see professional athletes lose their jobs, and their life dreams, because they can’t resist gambling — and we watch press conferences announcing their bans which are sponsored by gambling websites — the cognitive disconnect should be too much to bear for normal, empathetic humans.
In my line of work, it’s obvious that constant access to technology has enabled organized crime to operate scams on a scale never before imagined. Scam losses are up, but those cold dollar figures can’t begin to express the human toll on victims who’ve lost faith in themselves, or in love, or in the basic trust required to conduct a small business transaction.
Meanwhile, AI is the buzziest of buzzwords, and while it really can’t do much, one thing we all know is true — it will become cost-cutting by another name. Jobs will be lost. I feel pretty secure in my hunch that AI will soon make us long for the day of automated response voicemail trees.
As the surgeon general wrote last week, “In an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.”
In all these areas, and I’m sure in many more you can imagine right now, technology is thrusting dramatic change onto our lives, unintended consequences be damned. This must end. Any discussion from critics like me is always met with a finger wave and melodramatic predictions that almighty “progress” will be impeded if regulations slow down Big Tech entrepreneurs.
You call this progress?
Schools, start putting those smartphones in lockers (like Yondrs). Parents, get to know do not disturb settings. Sports industry, save your business model from ill-gotten gains before it’s too late. Anti-government nihilists, get out of the way of the Federal Trade Commission and Congress as they try to set national policy. We’ve let perfect be the enemy of the good and friend of the lobbyists too long. The time for navel-gazing is over. Pull the fire alarm now.
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