The compromise is that it is either really easy to work around, effectively defeating what it is trying to do, or it becomes tightly locked down to trusted devices only, destroying the free internet.
A full answer is somewhat dependent on specific implementation details, but the simplest approach is much like the simplest way to acquire alcohol or other age-restricted product as a child: Ask someone else to act as an intermediary. Get another computer that identifies as an adult, and that isn't concerned about your age, to send the data to you.
And maybe that's a healthy way to think about it. That it doesn't matter if kids find it easy to work around. There is no child who hasn't been able to get their hands on alcohol when they want it, but perhaps the infinitesimally small amount of friction leaves many to second guess their choices? Then again, from what I see out there, just rationally explaining why alcohol might have negative consequences is enough to see that second guessing. Alcohol consumption amongst the youth has completely plummeted now that we no longer treat it as some magical taboo thing and finally started talking honestly about it. The same pattern has been observed over and over in other things with undesirable consequences for children.
Yeah there’s no getting around that kind of thing. My parents would unplug the router at night and take the power cable so i found another device in the house with the same cable and plugged it in. But my sister never did that so at least it worked for half of us.
I’m all for sane best efforts for restricting children’s access to mind warping materials online if the consequences on the overall internet are minimal which I think this does. I’m not on board with killing the internet as we know it to get from 80% of children off social media to 90%.
The problem with social media and to a lesser extent porn is addiction. If a kid had to go to a friend’s house or sneak on to their parents computer to scroll tiktok that’s already a huge step in a healthy direction.
Is it? Only around 10% of the population will develop an addiction (of any kind). About the same rate as the population who live chronic sedentary lifestyles, which comes with equally (or maybe even worse) health and social consequences. Where is the regulation that forces you to prove you are of a certain age to sit on the couch?
This seems like a lot of effort for something that impacts such a relatively small group of people — a group of people (in size) that we otherwise don't normally care about one bit. 10% of the population is marginalized time and time again. What's special about this particular case?
I would hazard a guess that much higher percentage than 10% of the population thinks that they themselves are on social media more than they’d like to be, whether thats addiction or not idk.
You’re probably right though, i don’t think 10 year olds should be on social media in any capacity. Why? Partially because they can easily get addicted sure, but also because really any amount of interaction with these platforms is bad for them because they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.
> they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.
No doubt kids will choose social media over cleaning their room. Would they choose social media over going outside to play, if society still allowed them to do that?
The "boob tube", so given the derogatory nickname due to the perception of much the same idea you present, may not have been able to take the warping engagement to the same extreme, but during its prime also didn't really capture the youth attention because the youth had better things to do, like disappear into the woods until nightfall. TV use has always been dominated by older people who, through things like failing health, have lost the ability to do anything better.
True addiction or not, it is worth noting that addiction doesn't happen overnight. One needs repeated exposure to develop the necessary neural pathways. This is why addiction shows up much more commonly in obviously tough environments. People use a device as an escape from their situation, which feeds the mechanisms necessary to develop an addiction. Social media is most certainly engineered to tick the "this is enjoyable" box, but that alone isn't enough to develop a problem. There needs to be something that sees someone want to use social media above all else on a regular basis and, as you point out, it is very likely that much more than 10% of the population don't actually find social media to be all that enjoyable; just more enjoyable than taking out the trash.
So, maybe we can reframe this as: All this work to continue to keep up not wanting to see kids without a metaphorical helicopter constantly over their heads as a result of an imagined boogieman that was invented in the past? Seems like a horribly misaligned effort.
> the simplest approach is much like the simplest way to acquire alcohol or other age-restricted product as a child: Ask someone else to act as an intermediary.
They can do exactly the same with other proposed solutions - ask an adult to register a social media account with their id or pass selfie-age-verification for them.
I've been in the industry for 30 years. "UNIONIZE" has always been the suggested answer. Always. But nobody ever steps up and actually does it, even despite the people being already socially united through platforms like HN, making formalization about as easy as can be possible.
To the greatest degree of our understanding, the mid-career slump happens to some people because priorities can shift mid-career. Kids/family starts to grab more attention, seeing life as more than a job and wanting to live it to the fullest becomes more prevalent as one becomes more aware of the clock ticking, for professionals they've likely started to build a bit of a nest egg so money doesn't seem as important before, etc. They slump because they just don't care about work like they used to.
How does your union keep people focused on the job? Or is it simply that the union self-selects those who are already focused on job-related matters and wouldn't end up in the slump anyway?
Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?
The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing.
I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.
This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.
Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.
This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.
What limits the length of the lever? The agricultural lever is already crazy long, the manufacturing lever, same. We could be doing the same with less, not more with the same.
Depends on where in the world you're looking. In India, something like 50% of the population works in agriculture. At the scale of India's population that's a significant fraction of the population of the planet, it's more than twice the population of the entire US.
To be fair to the parent, jobs require capital, and big tech owns a big chunk of the capital, and thus do own a big chunk of the job market even if they aren't putting it to work. Which is part of the underlying problem. Those with capital don't really need workers and the areas of the economy who could put workers to work in a bigger way don't have the capital to do so.
Everything is a religion to at least a small group of people. LLMs are no exception. It is currently not broadly adopted religiously, but it does have qualities that could see it become a much bigger religion over time, especially as more and more are moving away from the traditional religions.
> I think the thing companies forget is that a lot of them can't remain functional if a shrinking percentage of the population can afford their products.
Why not? Apple, for example, had billions upon billions of dollars in cash. Think about that: That means they gave billions upon billions of dollars worth of stuff to people and never got back anything in return. And there is no sign that they ever plan to get anything in return. They are already quite happy to give their stuff away for free.
And why wouldn't they? When you give people stuff for free, they put you on a pedestal and treat you like a king. Those who lead Apple get to do things and get away with things you and I can only dream of. That's the appeal of still doing it even though you don't get any economic return. Social return is what actually starts to matter once your basic needs are met.
It is a hard problem. That is why in the pre-browser days a small number of entities did the hard work and gave the rest of us mere mortals tidy APIs to make use of their efforts without everyone having to painstakingly duplicate what they created each and every time.
But then CSS came along and threw out the baby with the bathwater, returning us back to the bare primitives, forcing entities to redo all that work again. Except this time CSS didn't offer a good mechanism to wrap up that hard work in a nice API bow, so everyone ended up getting pushed into having to redo that same hard work every time they started a new project, leading to a bunch of poor, inconsistent, and often downright wacky implementations.
To be fair, the problem isn't CSS per se, it is just that it is much too low-level for all but the small number of entities focused on the aforementioned hard problems and browsers failed to offer anything higher-level for the rest of us. Javascript has tried taking on a stand-in role for the lack of the higher-level abstraction being natively offered by the browser, but that comes with its own limitations so it isn't always a viable choice, not to mention that having to resort to using a full programming environment completely defeats the purpose of having CSS.
CSS gets all the hate because it is more often than not the wrong tool for the job but the only tool available at hand.
CSS is for styling documents, not for creating applications interface (which has a whole sets of constraints). It's like trying to use typographic design rules to create a car dashboard. CSS is great, just not fit for that particular job. There's an handful of properties that are the same (padding, margin, border, background color,...), but one common thing with native toolkits is that they have specific widgets for layouts.
It is for styling documents, but nobody (except for maybe designers trying desperately cling to a job) wants every document to have a bespoke style. I want to use a style created by experts that is consistently shared with every other document across the whole of the internet. CSS is fine as a low-level primitive for those experts, but it is not the mechanism the rest of us should be using. However, there is nothing in-between, at least not unless you lean heavily into Javascript, but, again, if you are going to use a programming environment then CSS is pointless anyway. There are much better ways to draw to screens when you have a programming language at your disposal.
People do want bespoke style (think booklets) and there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components. The web as a platform was built for documents, and when we try to twist it to do applications, the crack appears. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.
Javascript is used for the Gnome shell and it’s doing a fine job there. And if you paired javascript to something like Tk (as in Tcl/Tk), I guess it would be fine too. The web primitives are just horrible for desktop uses.
That's what PDF is for. CSS is for documents, but namely documents for screens, and on screens you want consistency with all the things on that same screen.
> there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components.
But not a great way to use them. You can make anything work when you have low-level primitives, so it is not a case that it cannot be done, but that's missing the forest for the trees. You can also program a computer by flipping toggle switches, yet we developed better tools (e.g. programming languages) because sometimes its nice to have more comfortable abstractions.
> I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity.
The current business goals around the use of AI is essentially the startup model: Throw shit into the wind to see if it sticks. Acceleration of the business goal means throwing more shit into the wind. Isn't that the same thing as quantity?
> When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children.
But also, statistically, the richer you are, the fewer children you have. Why do you think those who are seemingly in the best position to be optimistic about the future are those most pessimistic about it? It is quite counterintuitive on the surface. Is it because the rich feel they have nowhere else to go, whereas those who are poor can still envision becoming rich themselves someday, giving them hope about a brighter future?
Regardless of the exact mechanics, the human state is self-correcting. Being rich is unsustainable without a lot of people around you. When births decline too much, those who are rich will become poor, and thus will start producing more children again. Humans will not echo horses based on this.
> I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
Those who were formally workers? Remember, money is debt. It is an IOU that, sometime in the future, allows you to receive something of value (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) that was previously owed to you.
Profit occurs when you give more than you receive. That's okay in the short term because you still might exercise calling the debt over the a slightly longer timeline. However, when a business is continually profitable year after year, decade after decade, they are no longer receiving any direct value in exchange for the good/service they gave away. In other words, they start giving the good/service away for free.
It might seem counterintuitive at first that anyone would give something away for free, but I noted "direct value" above because there is also an indirect value to consider: Social influence. The stakeholders in businesses that show continual, large profits become admired by the people and get put on a pedestal. In that, they start to get to do things other people can't (see Epstein files, for example). So if the workers were automated away, not much would change. Those who have the goods and services still wanted will still want to buy, if you will, the social influence from the population at large.
Of course, the flaw in thinking that jobs will be automated away is that those who seek social influence also want a social setting, so they will employ people simply to keep them around as friends. Most jobs in today's economy are already just that. For what "real" jobs still remain nowadays, if automation automates them away the people will simply transition into "friend" work.
Historically one pattern this took was patronage. Most famously associated with sponsoring artists, but historically it covered a wide variety of professions. The patron gets power, influence, the ability to call on a guy who can do the thing, and so on.
Of course the first thing we replaced with AI was artists, so expect more exclusively as the lower rungs of patronage clients fall off the economic ladder.
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