The Danger of Safety-ism

If only experts would stop telling us how mentally ill we all are. 

"Mental Illness a Growing Threat Among Teens" is a headline we read daily. Apparently it's what readers and listeners want to hear; media outlets poll them to find out and then give them what they want. For hits and ratings, mental illness is rated highly, topic-wise. 

The "mental illness among teens" narrative feeds the reluctance of teens to grow up and be self-supporting -- it seems too dangerous. Did Covid lockdowns teach them to shun employment just as they reached adulthood and governments were pouring out free money to help people stay home? It was no training for independence.

Youths no longer drive (climate change), no longer find after-school jobs (prefer online gigs), nor if they go to college, find student housing (rents too high). Do they even become students? Apparently colleges might put them in range of "harm" due to hearing opinions in class that differ from their own. "Anxiety and depression" lurk in every lecture hall and library, where unwelcome ideas might be encountered, and discussion relabled as bullying ... 

(Check out Heterdox Academy for lots of current detail on that: https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

Young people refuse to put their security-blanket smartphones down. For them, if something can't be done by swiping, it won't be done. Scrolling is a soother, the contemporary version of the thing their mothers put into their mouths in toddler-hood. Are today's thirty-somethings still toddlers? Many seem to want the gender-fluidity of toddler-hood; take that away and you're "marginalizing" them. Maybe because you're a privileged white Boomer? 

As small children, these twenty- and thirty-somethings spent a lot of time in daycare centres; maybe the over-exposure to non-family "carers" in early childhood fed into a generational fear of adulthood? You learned in daycare to sing-along with a group, in preparation for singing in secondary school from the correctness song-sheet. Now you might be shamed and cancelled if you deviate from it. 

Better to stay home and watch Zoom (sounds like the childish noise you made with the toys in the daycare centre). The place you were banished from in early childhood (home) now seems your "safe place".

If you can't tolerate working and striving, you won't tolerate novel ideas or diverse thought. In their own day, the baby-boom generation despised the narrow-minded "establishment". Independence mattered, and they were lucky: it was easy to find jobs, afford rent, run an old beater of a car and leave home. They valued free thought, free verse, free love, they marched for Earth Day and Banning the Bomb, started communes, discovered pot, turned vegetarian. Now, they look upon the non-works of grandchildren and despair -- or shake their heads in puzzlement.

Not all youths are hiding in basement lairs of course. Some are excelling at STEM or becoming artists or studying History (learning to take the long view). Maybe it won't matter in the end because everything practical will be done by robots. The robots' intelligence may be artificial but they won't get anxious and depressed while they watch and monitor us through digital surveillance. 

Now that will be real danger.

Can You Sue a Robot?

And can robots be censored for hate-speech or other "wrong-speech" written by Artificial Intelligence content creation software? What legal liability will news outlets have, once robots write their columns?

Contentbot service providers ("chatbots") offer prices affordable for students wanting to buy AI-produced essays (the concept of plagiarism is mere nostalgia). This service is also affordable for freelancers who submit a lot of material to magazines. If even only a few online mags per month publish their submissions, they could soon cover the cost of contentbots and start profiting.

Is this seriously where the "knowledge economy" is going (the economy comprising journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research)? Then you'll need only feed into your contentbot provider the terms which hip magazine editors use in their Submission Guidelines (terms like "inclusive, indigenous, racialized, marginalized, ablist, trans-supportive, fat-supportive, anti-colonialist" and so on).

Journalists and news reporters thought the rising tide of unemployment was already bad, but newspapers and magazines won't need journalists at all once owner-

editors feed requirements straight to their robot staff, based on polls showing what readers want and what the identity-biases of the moment are.

So never mind cancel culture -- we've got pre-cancel culture. But what happens when a magazine is sued for defamation or for discriminating against someone? Can you sue a robot? (Soon we'll be asking, can a robot sue me?)

And who would defend the news outlet or magazine in court? Will lawyers and judges too be robots that automatically search precedents which lead to the only logically-artificially-intelligent decision?

What if a radio host wants to interview the "source" of a controversial article -- and the source is a robot? (Can robots use four-letter words on the radio, or will another robot bleep them out automatically?)

Clergy are already debating among themselves the morality of using AI-generated sermons (though some people say the fundamentalists already do ...)

Some call these trends "DeepAI". Others call them Final Shallowing -- of the life of the mind.

Best response? Maybe thinkers still able to articulate their own thoughts should have a soapbox in every town square where they can be heard by a public who can see that they're made of actual flesh and blood. But wait ... that's been done! The ancient Greeks called the town square the agora, and the Romans the "porch" (stoa), where the Stoic philosophers spoke to the passing crowd. And in Enlightenment Europe the cafes and salons filled the same role, and people knew how to be good conversationalists. 

So best response? Get offline, and communicate in the flesh -- especially in classrooms.