France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that.

What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people?

Playing fucking candy crush.

We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not.

So what can we do about it? I have no idea. The economic model already exists for games and facebook, and so on. And people have since the beginning of time been amused by trivial entertainment.

I guess the fact of the matter, or one way of looking at it is, there will always be people who choose trivial entertainment, and there will always be folks who chase knowledge and self improvement. And now, like always, we can do both of those things. But at least now, we can quantify ourselves better, and know more about the benefits and risks. And in that way, maybe more of us will choose to improve ourselves with these amazing tools.

Hey smartphone makers, if you're listening: Let me set an alternate PIN that unlocks the phone in a limited access mode, or "kid mode." Only pre-approved apps are available. Only pre-approved contacts can be called/texted. In-game purchases require the more secure PIN. Maybe when the phone is in this mode I can track its location easily, and make it emit a noise. The maximum volume is much lower than normal. A lockout timer auto-locks the phone after X minutes. If the battery dips below 20%, only the voice calling, texting, and tracking will work. Bandwidth caps. Et cetera.

This would also be nice if I ever have to lend my device to a stranger. Smartphone OS makers should be embarrassed that this feature doesn't already exist.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10661/windows-phone...

[2] http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/kids-mode/

Why doesn‘t the iPad have this sort of multi-user mode? An iPad is the perfect device for sharing. But no, if you don‘t want your kids to read your emails, you need to buy them their own iPad.

You're right. But I still think I would buy my kid their own iPad even if my iPhone/iPad had a kid mode. My kid has their own iPad and I still find times when it would be ideal to give them access to the basic features on my phone/ipad. Frankly, if iOS just added the ability to password protect any app then that would be good enough, and it would be useful for more than kids... hand you phone to a coworker or relative to look at photos they can't accidentally/intentionally hop over to your email.

[0] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6118421?hl=en This link is for Nexus, but I think it's included in all version of Android since 5.0 Lollipop.

Once upon a time, kids went to school without phones, so it is possible...

It has a lot of options, but probably not enough (like restricting specific apps.) You can however set to allow only apps rated "4+ years, 6+, etc.

Time limitation is possible too, via "Settings -> Accessibility -> Guided Access".

The funny thing is, Apple didn't want to call their computer a "PC", but their smartphone is more a personal computer than any other brand.

http://xiaomitips.com/guide/how-to-use-miui-8-second-space-f...

Second Space isn't unique in functionality, but it's exceptionally slick in execution.

I don’t understand how this is different from parental controls (speaking from iOS experience; perhaps this is lacking on Android?)

You're at a restaurant with your kid, and they're bored because you're having adult conversations with your friends. You give them your phone and they play whatever game for a while, while you have no need for your phone because you're in a conversation.

Or, alternatively, you're sitting around the house and they want to play a game on it.

Call me old fashioned, but my parents just used to make us sit there and be quiet. Bored? That's life, learn to deal with it.

Both the parent and the child in your example are lacking discipline. The parent unable to tolerate a bored child and the child unable to tolerate boredom. This is a pattern I have personally noticed as early as babies being pushed around in prams with a smartphone or tablet in hand. A two year old definitely doesn't need a phone to relieve boredom but it's easy.

I'd prefer my children have something to do. A book, a phone, an iPad or Switch. Why shouldn't they be entertained while I am? Actually, forcing them to sit quietly while I have fun seems like a weird message to me.

Granted, being bored is a part of life. Undoubtedly then, they'll encounter many boring experiences without the need for me to artificially create them. And, if I know I'll have to wait for someone or something, I bring a book or phone. Why would I deny them the same pleasure?

Turns out it still had a rudimentary browser. And because the phone was only capable of 3G, his basic line had unlimited data. He spent a ridiculous number of hours watching YouTube on that tiny 1.5" screen.

The main reason is how worried we are about the impact unfettered, always on, modern Internet/technology will have on the developing brains of teenagers, and beyond.

Besides that, I have very few apps installed on my phone. I basically use it as a mobile web browser from time to time.

That said, I have to admin that the "features" I'm missing are a camera and a map.

I'm told by people who do have some actual talent that a small fraction of the pics I take are good.

For this picture, I was actually riding my bicycle, and snapped two dozen shots over 30 seconds.

I used it for telling time, taking photos of maps and other useful notes, etc. Super useful.

Wait, what? I'd rather say: No in-game purchases for minors at all.

Come to think of it, there should also be a border mode when one is traveling.

Try as one might, the world doesn't seem to want to be better.

Examples, your solution doesn't solve:

- Mugger waits for you to withdraw the money from ATM.

- Mugger forces you to withdraw everything AFTER you entered your PIN.

- Muggers holding someone ransom until you get them their money.

- You are traveling outside of your home country/unreliable law enforcement.

(of course, it will never happen because such a mode "reduces engagement")

But 'smartphones' nowadays makes it difficult for you to create on them, especially program code that you can run on the device. I might not have gotten such an early understanding of how to program if I didn't have a programmable device in my pocket to take with me everywhere and play with.

I wouldn't have such a problem with smartphones if it was a fun toy to make things with. Even now, the only thing I ever really 'make' on the device are some notes that I then use on 'real' devices later.

It wasn't in the Netherlands. A graphical calculator was required for math and many kids learned at least some programming by creating their own little programs to cheat in tests. Also, you could get code for games and then program them. The newer ones with USB cables made adding games much easier though.

The word you're looking for is "serial port."

Neopets allowed "pet pages" containing HTML when I was 10 years old, and this was my first foray into programming.

There's this huge tribal knowledge built up around copy-paste CSS hacks to enable things like tab navigation all on one page with no JS. It's actually pretty wild some of the stuff these folks do, especially since almost none of them have any technical knowledge and it's all trial-and-error and sharing what works through the forums.

The amount of hackery they do for their forum guild pages (hosted as pet pages) and such almost blows my mind more than the fact that Neopets is still around and somewhat active after all these years.

It is not just tinkering, these devices are made for you to consume, not to produce. Which is a great shame as they are natural creative platforms, we just need somehow to break the chains and liberate them, both phones and tablets.

Creating seems to have fallen by the day wide compared to mindless consuming, interaction and feeding content to social aggregation companies who sell users attention to advertisers.

As dreary as this topic is, it's kind of nice to see a healthy exploration about more than the one current way of using tech.

Constraint drives creativity.

Early web development had the same principles...you could only expect the user to wait so long for a page load on a dialup connection before you lost their attention, so the goal was to make each and every one worth the wait.

Text display addressable by row/column... something like 8x24 if memory serves?

No mucking about with event loops, window handlers, setup functions...

ticalc.org was great too. Build your own serial transfer cable... Build external storage..

I'd code in the car, at the grocery store, at family gatherings, while my parents discussed serious business (taxes, attorneys, etc), while sitting in waiting rooms, during boring classes at school (because school catered to the lowest common denominator and teachers would have to re-explain things about fifty times) etc and I would spend about half of the time on my calculator and the other half on my Game Boy. Fairly often I'd just leave the Game Boy at home.

We also had a computer at home since I was 7, and I spent as much time as I could get away with on there (mostly writing and working on my personal website). But when that wasn't available, or my parents felt like limiting my screen time, back to coding on the calculator I'd go.

I still did plenty of other normal things, I didn't exclusively do this, but I did spend a lot of time on it, and I got into a Maker mindset when I was really young that still carries over to this day.

The limitations on the calculator seemed to be a big driving factor in my interest at the time. The drive to push it beyond its intended purpose. With smartphones...you don't really have that because apps already exist for nearly everything.

If "but they're not you" (what they? there is no they in that comment) is such a great argument that it absolutely needs a response, "you're not the person you're talking to, stop trying to influence them, they're not you" is a sufficient one. Your own medicine, take it first.

Parents need to learn to back off. It's the one thing this generation of parents (Gen X and older millenials) seem to not have gotten. You can't force your children to be you or to be a version of you who didn't make the mistakes you did.

What I'm about to say might be a little bit too much of internet psychoanalysis, but I see it too often all over the internet as well as from people I know in real life, and I feel like this is a general trend because of that. So, this needs to be said somewhere for the chances at least one person will see it: this sort of thinking in my opinion stems from the parent putting too much of their own sense of self in a child. Specifically, seeing a child as either an extension of their being, and even a "second chance" to do things right from the beginning. The success of a kid or their failure is essentially the parents' since said kid is an extension of themselves. This can lead to the child becoming an instrument of the parents' self-validation.

While a lot of this may be intended with the kindest of intentions, it is unintentionally extremely selfish, and it gets parenting backwards. A child isn't you, and they aren't a chance to fix yourself; they are their own person, and they have an existence apart from you and deserve respect apart from you. The point of parenting isn't to have a smaller version of yourself, it is to cultivate an individual who has their own self-agency and own right to self-determination. Of course, in this process, that person will no doubt emulate many parts of you...but that process will be natural. It should not be the focus of your parenting and it shouldn't be forced.

Once a parent realizes this, then a lot of these things that keep them up at night won't turn out to be as terrible as they seem, mobiles, drugs, bad boyfriends/girlfriends, art school, you name it. Sure, you want to take care of your child, make sure they sleep, eat, get a great education, and may be not do too many drugs. But the person I was replying to was fretting that, god forbid, a child be more distracted by a phone like x or y person they know was distracted by games, and not become z person they should be. It's so ironic, because so many distractions have existed for decades, but you've turned out fine. Why not let your child discover for themselves what turns them on, despite the distractions and all? Why do you know who they should be? (hint: it might have a lot to do with who you should be (or are), not what the kid should be).

The entire thing about play is that it is play and adults aren't there to supervise. Parents need to learn their place and let kids fail a little and get hurt a little bit. It's part of growing up. And for the parents, understanding this will hopefully get them to realize you won't "fix yourself" by "fixing" your kids instead of looking inward.

But that's the thing, they weren't. I can't find that upstream in this thread. But I'm happy to hold that position.

> It's so ironic, because so many distractions have existed for decades, but you've turned out fine.

I'm not convinced that many people actually did. Right now, it's getting more and more absurd, more and more shallow and violent, and climate and pollution nobody really feels responsible for. The branch we evolved on is being cut off, and we suffer from bystander paralysis. But we're fine because we can actually sleep well in this pathological mess? How sure are we that the people who act out in silly or destructive ways are not more sane still than those who don't even do that? Personally I'm not sure at all.

> Why not let your child discover for themselves what turns them on, despite the distractions and all?

Because they're not by themselves, we're not talking about kids finding mobile devices in the woods. It's kinda saying let the kid deal with the onslaught of machines and algorithms made by all adults except their actual parents, as if the whole world only wants their best, while the parents just selfishly want to have a second chance at their regrets and so on.

I super duper disagree. I don't disagree with your point in a vacuum (Franz Kafka expressed similar thoughts in letters to Elli Hermann), but in this context I do. Like when someone says "too much sugar is harmful" and someone else talks about how we shouldn't expect others to conform to our ideals of beauty. Yeah, it's technically correct, but in context it smells, because it's not addressing the actual point made in the least, and is making assumptions about people you don't know the first thing about.

If a kid gets hooked to ElsaGate videos ( https://i.imgur.com/AlTHFn5.jpg ), who am I to say they're wrong? Someone paying attention. If 99.99% of the people on the planet said "it's fine" that wouldn't make it fine, it would put 99.99% of the people on the planet my personal trash heap. When I was a child, I didn't hold back with my opinion, so why would I do that as an adult? I haven't even found ONE serious adult who can actually take in ElsaGate (the linked image is a joke, a tiny crop of a still frame of a trailer, but even that's too much already). And that's just a derpy bumbling first step, this shit will evolve and iterate. But oh yeah, let's mock "think of the kids". This is cavemen playing with nuclear bombs, bragging.

There's being hurt a little bit, and there's being swallowed whole, and the thing about getting swallowed whole is that you don't live to get hurt a little bit another day.

Yes, the TI had this. I would spend 30 minutes drawing a dragon image and saving it, then loading it in my choose your own adventure text game, without breaking a sweat, changing things and iterating quickly while sitting through an algebra class where I knew everything that was taught instantly (because I already used it in code) where all the other kids needed the rest of the class plus more to understand.

I would use the greek alphabet as makeshift sprites, the letter "O" as a ball and the equals sign "=" as bricks in an alleyway clone, etc. I'm not saying kids should still be expected to do this. There should be newer and better tools, focused on that creation.

Have a look at Pythonista for a full Python environment, or Coda for a web dev environment. There's also all the web-based tools, hopefully some are optimised for smaller screens. On iPad you have Playgrounds to run all sorts of Swift code. For kids, there's other simple environments in apps like Scratch.

So as you might imagine, I disagree with your statement that "'smartphones' nowadays makes it difficult for you to create on them", and think that's just a case of nostalgia on your behalf.

IMHO, most of us in fact choose all of the above; what we should be aiming for is the proper balance, not to replace all of one type of activity with something “better”. “Trivial entertainment“ meets a human need for mental and physical downtime, as well as for the sort of quick gratification that we rarely get from loftier or more productive pursuits. It’s always been that way, from dice in Mohenjo-Daro to graffiti in the Coliseum to, well, fucking Candy Crush. The trick is to engage in the right amount of it - and this is, I think, where the pernicious effect of these sorts of entertainments lies: in encouraging us to make the wrong decisions about that balance.

It’s true that we now have opportunities for self-improvement our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of. It’s also true that they had opportunities in this dimension that are increasingly rare in modern society: formal apprenticeship, for instance. Put another way: the sum total of human knowledge is, in the end, next to useless without a social, human context in which to learn and apply it. Even those in this thread who are “self-taught” have undoubtedly learned much from mentors and peers. In this respect, it matters very little that we have that knowledge in our pockets unless we also have the tools and social structures necessary to promote its use.

Having broached this subject with various people, it is clear to me that most people are oblivious to the nature of 21st-Century media creation. A vast swathe of it is cynically designed to maximise engagement - the Orwellian term for something being addictive.

Open any successful mobile microtransaction driven game and it will be clear that it has taken very obvious cues from the casino industry. To most people, it is completely reasonable that government should educate people about the risks of gambling, regulate the industry heavily and restrict underage people from access. Pose the idea to people who are not tech-savvy whether similar restrictions should apply to mobile games and they'll look at you like you're insane.

It's a ridiculous example, but if we were to start adding heroin to foods or soft-drinks because they make us feel good or because they make our businesses profitable, you could bet your ass populations would be up in arms about the issue. Yet dark patterns and psychological traps in app-design don't incite the same degree of outrage: there is a lack of awareness on the issue, and businesses are keen to exploit it.

Could this not be said about drugs and alcohol? And while it may indeed be beneficial to use drugs and alcohol in a balanced, well moderated way, the downside risk seems to great to me to be suggesting this to a society.

Over half of fatalities in cars have nothing to do with DUI-type impairment. Would you ban those as well?

But lets say you ban alcohol and re-create the problems of the Prohibition.

Banning the way individuals can use their personal freedoms to ruin their lives is generally worse than the disease you are trying to cure. People are very, very resistant to their vices being interfered with.

But, also, if you are comparing video games to drugs and alcohol...you are massively distorting the scale because video games are not killing _other_ people. They are just ruining the life of the addict.

DUIs actually kill innocent, blameless individuals.

I am more interested in how a position of moderation is in theory attractive, and may even show benefits in controlled situations, but in practice use of substances or mobile games can lead to excessive use (i.e., abuse) and have a net negative on a user physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, etc.

Some people, unfortunately, have personalities that are vulnerable to be exploited (at the most cynical case). However, if we are being really honest, the same is true of things like sex addicts.

The reason we are reacting to this is the newness of it and the fact it is being marketed to kids. Really, the only restriction that might be reasonable, is restrictions on childhood consumption.

I would be curious to know what your thoughts on gambling are? Irrespective of any solution, do you feel that leaving the gambling industry unrestrained would not be damaging for society?

I don't think it should be unrestrained. But then again, I don't think in game purchases should be marketed to children either.

Basically, if they are an adult, I don't think restraining them is practical but providing them with opportunities for education and requiring the gambling industry to be a part of that process (by providing the materials and the odds of their games in very visible ways) is really all the "restraint" required.

Correction: an infinite supply using psychology tricks A/B tested to keep you going as long as possible.

Then again, I'm also the sort that has a phone in front of me and spends more time on HN, Quora, and in coding/interest-related discord channels than social media or games.

I took it away from her on new-years eve and stuck it in a closet. She said she wanted to get it back at 12 am, I told her 12:15. At 12, she went outside with us, to watch the fireworks. She stayed outside until at least 12:30 and didn't ask for her phone once.

Pretty much every time her phone is placed out of sight, she turns into a fun, engaging person. But when it's in sight, she needs to have it, to mindlessly scroll, double tap in instagram, or whatever the latest app fad is.

The only way to possibly control this, is to talk about it to others. To spread awareness of what it does to kids and to make it normal for kids not to be stuck to their phones. Because most parents don't want their kid to be left out, so they do the same thing all parents to.

Pessimistically, though, I think this isn't going to happen. Too many parents are happy to have something that distracts their kids, so they can indulge in their own addictions. I feel like this will become the smoking of this generation and it will take decades for the real implications to become apparent. I'm just happy that it seems to coincide with autonomous cars, so at least the damage from texting and driving will get reduced.

Are you absolutely sure they're "mindlessly scrolling", and not just being fun and engaging to their friends on the other end of the social network?

I hate this assumption - one sees a person glued into an IM or a social feed and thinks they're just being a drone. They're not - they're engaging in an amazing achievement of humanity that is immediate communication that transcends physical boundaries. And quite often, what's happening on the remote end is more important than what happens next to you.

I know what a rich and enjoyable online experience is like as for the better part of my life I spent most of it online. Facebook and instagram and other feed based sites are nothing like that. Most people don't engage that much with their feeds outside of hitting a like button or two, which is hardly a wonder of human social interaction.

That, and people forgetting how boring and irrelevant forced social ocassions can be, now that they can choose not to participate.

I'm also a pretty bias because when I did start giving up my phone for long periods, my experience was excellent. Whereas my experience with social media sites and the death of all my previously favourite online communities has been a real bummer. There used to be a HN style community for every one of my interests. Now everyone is isolated in their own Facebook silos and there are fewer collections of random internet strangers, like forums, BBs and chatrooms would provide.

Hasn't there been a drastic rise in teenage depression linked to smartphone and social network use?

https://adaa.org/learn-from-us/from-the-experts/blog-posts/c...

The idea of a fully private social media profile actually scares my half-sister, since it would mean less likes on her posts, so her friends would get more. We had a conversation about this and the way she reacted wasn't pretty.

Not commenting on the motivations of your half-sister, but the very concept of a "fully private social media profile" makes zero sense, since social media is what you engage in to share stuff with lots of people. Compare with "fully private blog".

It's called a diary or a journal.

Some kids will use this thing that, as you say, allows them to access the sum total of human knowledge. There will be precocious kids who learn everything to grad school level before they reach 15. There always have been, but there will be more.

There will be kids who become addicted to games and entertainment, and they will waste their lives in a way that was not possible just a few years ago. There always have been kids who wasted their lives doing nothing, but there will be more.

That depletes the middle ground; in a few decades you will run into more idiots and more geniuses than you had ever imagined possible.

I am mightily concerned. My own experience was that I wasted a fair bit of time doing games. Still made it to a world class uni, but that was on 1990s crack. The new stuff is a lot more addictive and comes in more varieties through more media. I did manage to learn some things from the internet, but it could have been much more.

Now I have two kids with my genes in them, genes that never evolved to cope with this world.

Its an interesting trend that I'm seeing more and more. Its much more subtle than a Black Mirror episode but its worrying nonetheless.

> Playing fucking candy crush.

This is my go to rant for the last few years. Not the fact the people do play silly games, but the whole surrounding myth "computing era is paradise of heavens, highway of information to make your life better, only need an better octocore for your digital life !" ..

this computer era is problem trying to find its solutions.

I remember carrying around physical reference materials for my ti84+ because back before smartphones there wasn't instantaneous access to stuff like that and the calculator's memory got cleared too often (and was probably too small, not to mention the horrible screen) to hold it for me.

They're like knives: in the hands of someone with self control they can extend what you're capable of but they can also be abused by the owner and the people around him.

I taught myself my first instrument last year and being able to look up reference material while my laptop wasn't around was super convenient. At night I watch OCW lectures from math and physics classes I can't afford to take, and I have instant access to an incredible collections of art, music, and literature.

The problem with smart phones is due to the misalignment (almost inversion) of profit incentives of application developers and application users. This wouldn't be such a problem either if it weren't for the increasingly popular idea that application developers need special training and the computer configuration should be left to special experts (in the name of security or DRM or whatever) which severely limits the creation and adoption of community maintained software that is more likely to serve the user's interests.

The real problem is see is more about the ecosystem though. The user controlled their pc (to a certain extent), but the user has so little control over mobile devices that they get fed what advertisers and companies want them to see.

It really feels like corporations and governments are sucking everything good about the internet out (anarchistic freedom of though, discovery of free information, etc).

What I see is a future where computer scientists and hackers are extremely powerful because they understand and (can) control their own systems, but the majority of the people are beholden to some combination of orwellian ecosystems seeking to control and profit off them.

Once again, this is why I think RMS was and is right and we need to start pushing more copyleft now.

Mobile seems so restricted and I'm always amazed by how effectively distracted by phones people generally are. The games and apps to me seem utterly boring in comparison to hacking about on some open source project, making games, or working on something. Computers are fun, and were always fun because you could do so many things. iOS seems like a bunch of lame apps and a web browser with a camera somehow wedged in there.

I'm friends with a Computer Engineer who just finished his undergrad and he doesn't have the hacker spirit at all. I doubt he even knows who Stallman is and considers some of the most basic config a huge hassle. I don't think this is necessarily a reflection of Engineers in general but I always wonder why he studied computers at all. He doesn't seem to enjoy them.

I remember when what.cd was taken down someone on reddit saying, perhaps hyperbolically (perhaps not) something like, "this has ruined the internet for me; it's no longer for fun. only work" or something along those lines. I always think of that comment and don't really disagree with it: as this technology ages and matures the things that made it fun or interesting in the first place to me seem to be slowly getting destroyed. All these little battles keep getting lost and as time progresses it's just kind of "meh..". Instead of wondering what we can do with computers maybe we're finding out?

Proverbs for Paranoids #3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

I tend to hate configuring things and getting other people's software working the first time, but once things are set up I love programming and algorithmic work.

I can only imagine how opaque these small black rectangles are to the younger generations. Without a mentor, preferably a programmer mom or dad, I don't think kids would even know where to start. Sure, you can find all this stuff online, but the problem is that you can't learn much by just playing around anymore.

I don't think this is true. I watched a local mechanic fixing my car, and YouTube was an important tool for them. Watching someone else fix a car was much more effective than reading a schematic. Finding part numbers was easy. Ordering them was easy. I strongly suspect that health care people do the same thing (but don't want to admit it and do it behind closed doors). Certainly lawyers do this, via Lexis Nexis.

For anyone doing creative technical work, the Internet is wonderful. You can find authors, papers, howtos, videos, etc. Of course a good 80% of this content is awful bordering on harmful, but that 20% is vast. For software, HN manages to capture a large fraction of that 20%, IMHO.

It's also true that smartphones have brought addictive gaming behavior to the masses. But if you can avoid this then you've got a great resource.

This is a bad argument. Usually it's not an informed choice, often made by someone who's immature.

Also, some of the...

> massive progress in science, medical, renewable energy, etc.

...was used to make stuff like...

>>> Playing fucking candy crush.

...as addicting as possible.

"...smartphones hook people using the same neural pathways as gambling and drugs."

We have laws regulating the others. Or in some countries, treatment programs. But either way, we don't just say "Cocaine is only a problem for those who choose to use it".

We would be better of learning from the war on drugs that “Wars” don’t solve any problem...but sitting down, listening and providing help to addicts does!

We need to talk a lot more about "false progress". Because that's what it is if we create more problems than we solve when society changes.

It would be irrational to not believe in "true progress", any change that solves more of our common problems than it creates new one's.

If we can't have true progress then human society has kind of lost its point. It seems illogical to say that it's not possible. But we often seem lost at adopting the right process for it.

For all the miraculous cancer drugs we develop, we don't spend enough time or effort making sure they're obtainable by actual cancer patients. All of the "advances" you tout are only available to a certain privileged class of first-world citizens.

It's great you have access to prepared food and an airplane, but for those who aren't part of the jet-set, no progress has been made in addressing or solving any of their problems or making their lives easier.

There's no app to make daycare more affordable for single parents. Laundry doesn't do itself any better than it did 50 years ago. The blockchain doesn't hold police accountable for shooting unarmed civilians during traffic stops. Owning a smartphone doesn't provide you with competent or affordable legal representation when you need it most. Having a GPS transmitter on your person still can't reliably help 911 operators guide first responders to the actual scene of an incident. Nobody dependent on public transit to get to their retail job is saving up for a Tesla. Public schools are still underfunded, and we have entire generations with underdeveloped critical thinking skills plugged into a global network of lies and misinformation for most of their waking hours.

It's obvious none of these things affect you, but come on. At least pretend like the little people exist. The answer to a perceived lack of social progress is not suggesting the dissatisfied should renounce materialism and adopt someone else's rural way of life.

curing cancer is a worthy endeavor that is not on the same plane as most technology we spend time talking about (believe me I wish I could have saved some family members)

experiencing machu picchu and coming back in a week .. feels pointless to me. time is required to experience things fully. there's a middle ground between risking your life on a boat for 6 months before reaching south america and uber fast tourism.

And in a way I think that only people that really want to go the distance should travel.

The old agricultural system was too demanding it's true, but it's not removing it that makes life better. See how people eat shitty things, waste meat etc .. Also with proper education, one can go really far if he knows how to use energy, even without heavy industry behind.

It's a shifting plane, new ideas create new societies, they don't make the previous one better.

>It's a shifting plane, new ideas create new societies, they don't make the previous one better.

Would you mind explaining this more? It sounds rather cryptic to me the way you are saying it.

Solar concentrator (lens, mirror) can harvest large amount of energy.

Proper use of levers and gears can make you move tons with your fingers (although you need experience), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5pZ7uR6v8c and the likes

You don't need to reproduce horse plow with an oil based engine.

Curing cancer is obviously positive progress. No-one who has cancer would prefer 19th century medicine.

Spending less than 1 hour a day focusing on food seems less clear-cut. It's really good not to starve or think you might starve, and we are really lucky that we don't have to spend most of the day meeting our basic nutritional needs. There also seems to be a risk that we put not enough thought into taking care of and fulfilling our biological needs, because we can. We can't escape food, sex, exercise and other meatspace needs, and attempts to do so often become pathological. If we have to eat, shouldn't we be taking our time and trying to enjoy the full rich experience of doing so?

Similarly, visiting Machu Picchu and being back by Monday seems like a double-edged sword. Maybe it would be worth spending more time in Peru. Does the short stay really allow time to absorb the history of the Incas and how it fits into the present-day culture of people living in the area? In the 19th century, the vast majority of the people living in the United States couldn't visit Europe. But those who did went on a tour for several months to a year, visiting many countries and cities and staying long enough to learn a bit about the language and lifestyle. Were they missing out by not being able to go in a day, take photos in the right places, and get back a few days later?

"People get distracted by smartphones" is a problem. But so is, "India doesn't produce enough food to feed its people", and that problem had a technological solution. Climate change will require technological solutions. Energy sustainability will require technological solutions. More diseases have been eradicated through science and technology than through any other mechanism.

I'll take a bunch of distracted teenagers over a bunch of crippled teenagers who barely survived polio any day.

Politics is the perfect example of this in my opinion.

Yet the greatest minds of our generation are trying to make people click on ads more (forgot who this quote is from)

Perhaps. When the question is addiction, who really had free will to choose?

We subscribe to the theory that, to some extent, we need to struggle to grow. So, I've actually convinced her to pretty much let our son (and additional children) get free access to a computer though. The only catch, is it's going to be an older computer with linux installed.

Myself (and many people I know) learned so much from just trying to make our old machines keep working. I remember figuring out how to disable parental controls, figuring out how to remove portions or all of applications I didn't need to free up space, etc. I think it's important, and if my son can figure that out he's earned it (of course I'd help).

We both found it scary regarding cell phones, because it doesn't breed this kind of improvement. Children don't even need to learn to be responsible and meet where they say to meet. Parents can keep in contact at all times. I think there's something to be said for letting children learn to fend for themselves, but also be responsible.

We did agree on perhaps super old phones, that they can then figure out how to speed up - yet still call us. Too slow for modern games and probably even social media.

As far as desktop, he runs whatever the latest version of Ubuntu LTS. He does not have administrative access to it.

I wrote a small program that watches the title of whatever the current/foreground window is and compares that title to a configured list of regular expressions. If any regex matches, then the program kills the process. It logs the current window name in any case.

So we basically blacklist the web sites/apps/whatever that we see in his activity log as needed.

He is required to have a 'chromebook' for school, and they provide one. But instead we got him an old sturdy thinkpad, put Ubuntu on it, and it has the same basic logging/security framework, but with a different blacklist set of regexes.

We have received very positive feedback from his teachers, who struggle to keep the rest of the class off of inappropriate (for class time...ie, time wasting) web pages.

I've been asked how this minor miracle is accomplished, but things go right downhill when I say the first thing you need to do is throw away ChromeOS and install Linux proper.

"Little johnny spent 3.5 hours on 'advanced algebra last night'".

Our family PC (this was back in the 90's) had RH on it for about a year before anyone noticed, I grew up around computers (family friend was a sysadmin for an aerospace company so we got lots of 'broken' stuff and cast offs), I had frankenbuilds with drives duct taped to the outside of them but my favourite was the monochrome VGA 386 laptop when the family PC was a 286, the internal ribbon had snapped from been opened and closed, it cost me about 50p to fix it and it was going in the skip (dumpster) anyway.

My plan with my step-son is to keep the bar low enough that he'll keep pushing beyond it, he's already shown a fair amount of interest in Linux, he figured out how Gnome works faster than my GF did, I caught him watching videos on Linux the other day and now he wants to try some of the other DE's.

I find it really hard though, I remember what I was like at 7 and I want to sit and explain it all to him but then he loses the part where he has to work it out for himself so I restrict myself to answering his questions when he gets stuck or nudging him in the right direction.

The family friend just dumped programming books on me and answered stuff when I got really stuck but his response to any question was "and what have you tried so far?", I still remember getting a mouse driver written in assembly to work (pretty much the last time I wrote any actually since I discovered Turbo C and Turbo Pascal pretty soon after).

I think our next project will be a tracked robot with one of the r-pi's I have in the drawer.

I have friends who had parents that installed NetNanny etc on their computers and their recollections of their parents behavior around their use of technology are now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet (which they invariably did at a friend's house or some such).

My parents didn't know what a regex was so when I was a teenager with a computer and an (extremely slow dial-up) internet connection we had to have conversations and build trust rather than involve blacklists and non-admin Linux accounts.

Our son is 15 years old, and he's in his second semester of high school, a year behind. > what are you most afraid of him doing ... Are you worried about time wasting or porn or social media or what?

The 'advanced', regex based spyware only arrived after he started high school. I've been logging (via a different system) his activities for many years now, so we know what kinds of things he gravitates toward, and it's not porn or social media. In fact, in most contexts, the stuff he looks at online is quite harmless. The key thing is 'wasting time'.

Very briefly, our son is both autistic and also pretty heavily ADHD. He gets 'stuck' on things very, very easily, and he has virtually no innate self motivation to do things academically. Finally, because of the way he is, he currently has no friends, and has historically very, very few friends.

All this adds up to a lot of challenges that would take all day to write down. What he can do on his laptop is heavily locked down most of the time. Basically anything that's currently drawing his attention or anything that's 'fun' isn't available. We're using that as a lever: a lot of that laptop lockdown will be lifted once he is failing none of his classes.

The lockdown on his personal desktop is usually a lot less severe. In fact, right now, since he just started a new semester, nothing is locked down at all.

I can understand that a lot of this might seem rather draconian, and under more typical circumstances it would be. But there's a lot more going on that I don't have time to get into, and would require a whole lot of context.

> now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet

For all of the trails he faces, our son is surprisingly self aware. He understands his own character, weaknesses, strengths and challenges.

Thank you for your earnest inquiry. I would be happy to answer more questions, if any.

We actually err on the side of 'open' and 'permissive' in general, because that's how my wife and I were raised. We honestly find the steps we often have to take to influence our son uncomfortable. But it's been the only way to wedge him out of the enormous, intricate, detailed, persistent, fantastic, odd and amazing world that is in his head from time to time. He must join with society at some point.

Introducing your kids to any technology is an excellent way to teach them responsibility and how technology can be used to increase their understanding of the world around them. But this would require you to spend time with your kids and guide them along their journey with enough freedom to make mistakes.

I have 2 kids 5 & 10 that started using phones at 2 years old. A couple of broken screen and a few dramatic crying fits, but I can trust both of them to use technology with respect. Of course the 5 year is still learning and that happens everyday. The 10 year old is amazing now at self control with usage of his phone while interacting with others.

I say start them early to learn good habits, but also demonstrate good habits in your household.

As they say "Better to teach a man to fish".

This can be translated to "Better to teach a kid how to know when they are using something in a unhealthy way." (rather than do it for them). May take some time but I think that approach pays higher dividends.

Would you make them walk to school uphill both ways in the snow too?

Kids don’t have to have their parents’ exact childhood experiences to properly grow up.

I don't care if my daughter ever memorizes a phone number or leaves the house without a map any more than I care if she learns to write in cursive. She plays games, but is also reading Kindle books and learning to code. I even chat with her on Slack.

And not to pile on, but please be aware that whatever plans you make for how you want your future children to be are 100% guaranteed to go off the rails and your kids will probably be fine anyway :)

I am terrified by the fact that so many other people don't think twice about handing their toddler a smart device. Every time we go to dinner, there's a table nearby with a tablet planted in front of a child in a booster seat.

"There's no evidence that it's harmful", people say, but how could the evidence possibly exist? It would take 16+ years to do a thorough study (possibly longer), but smartphones have only been popular for half that time. And people have only been using them as babysitters for the past 3-5 years, at most.

We may not know the true extent of their damage until it's far too late for the affected generation. There's always a chance that the damage will be minor and/or reversible, but most people don't seem to grasp the risk they're taking.

I'm guessing you're not a parent. As the parent of a 3-year-old boy, I'd like to weigh in on this. There are three kinds of parents out there:

1) Those that simply hand their kid a phone/tablet every time they're out and about. This is probably bad.

2) Those that never let their kid use a device at a restaurant. This is pretty rare.

3) Those that use the device in times of true need: their kid has been at the dinner table for a long time and needs some distraction so the parents can get through their meal. This is where I fall, and I think it's ok. Most three year olds are not built to sit quietly and eat a meal at a restaurant. I guess maybe back in the day, people would simply leave their kid with a sitter and go out to eat, but that's not always an option.

Sounds like us. Either that or my wife and I would take turns carrying our kid around while the other finishes off their meal.

https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages...

Scroll down to "Among the AAP recommendations" for the tl;dr.

>Playing fucking candy crush.

The same could be said for any entertainment that people get via computers, and none of it is really relevant.

If they only use wikipedia once a month from their phone in a situation where they wouldn't have used it at all, I count that as a win.

Sure, they might spent 99.9% of their time on the device for entertainment purposes... But that other .1% is still enriching them.

And I suspect the numbers are quite far from that.

This assumes only positive externalities. The problem with things like Candy Crush is that there might be a net negative for the user in the highly engineered feedback loop.

Finding ways to waste time isn't unique to computers - you could subscribe to a newspaper because everyone else does, but only look at the sports results or the crossword. For that matter I can read books abusively as well as informatively - computers aren't the cause of people wasting time or making bad choices. You could argue that they are more highly engineered to keep people making such choices in the name of profit, though. Admittedly people have leveled the same critique at novels, and they're not entirely wrong.

Now I agree that most people actually get more real use of out their smartphones than just playing games, but I do also agree with the top post that we encourage people to spend their money powerful pocket computers and then frequently those devices end up as conduits for advertising to buy more stuff.

It's not that people are bad for playing Candy Crush, but that we're glorifying the people who make Candy Crush because of their ability to cash in, while many other worthy smartphone projects go underdeveloped/underused because they don't have a billion-dollar story attached.

Facebook has an army of phds whose only goal is to make sure Facebook’s users spend another few percent of their time on Facebook. And Facebook with its social interaction, and in depth knowledge of each user, can actively drive its users to spend more time on it in ways no other medium has been able to so far.

And it’s not just Facebook. It’s oretty much every tech company, barring maybe Apple.

Now that happens everywhere. Use levels of TV vs smartphones aren't close. The comparison is simply absurd because of the nature of the technology.

That's not even taking into account addictions and misinformation.

It's the content, not the tool.

Schools should be teaching kids how to use these tools to create content; not just passively consume.

Former teacher here: I taught open project classes, one class with old school desktop computers and one with iPads. The difference between the two techs was immense.

Desktops are made for productivity. You have a mouse, a keyboard. It's easy to type weird characters, copy/paste, save, use office suite, etc. Yeah, you know that. You're HN.

Ipads are made for consumerism. They lack a good typing device (I admit this specific point is more opinion), menus for more complex tasks are not so easy to use. With an iPads (or a smartphone) you typically scroll, scroll, scroll. Simply saving text students wrote on ipads was such a tedious task for them. I feel most smartphones fall in this category, and as such, I think they have no place in the classroom.

Internet in the classroom? Please more. Internet usable only through touchscreen? Never ever.

For other productive tasks like music creation or digital drawing, where text is far less important than it is in programming, writing documents, using a spreadsheet, etc, the iPad is arguably superior to the traditional desktop setup.

My dad did that with one of my brothers. He ended up building his own electric guitar in shop class. He learned how to play it on the sly when dad wasn't around. Now he has a room full of guitars and teaches kids the evils of Simon and Garfunkel.

What's the point of a semester long instruction in algebra or geometry still filled (mostly) with rote memorization of methods and formulas when those methods and formulas are available ubiquitously at the touch of a button. Schools see smartphones as an existential threat and rather than try to adapt their model of instruction to the tools that we all now have, they're attempting to ban them outright. I only see this leading to resentment and anger from students who are accustomed to instant, easy access to information.

To directly answer GP's question:

I took a differential equations class last semester, where the easy part of quite a few problems was to solve a quadratic equation. And it was easy, because my algebra classes had correctly required me to practice that skill (and memorize the quadratic formula).

So, you say, I'm never going to take differential equations. And you very well might not. I have two responses to that:

1) That's true, you might not, but the guy sitting next to you will, and he doesn't even know it yet. If you were allowed to opt out of that subject, you both would, and he wouldn't even have a chance to make up for it later.

2) There are plenty of other subjects where the easy part is an algebra concept, and it's only easy because you practiced it years before.

Many "formulas" are easy to read but hard to apply effectively.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

How long would google, facebook or amazon last after that?

All this tech is great. But we are kidding ourselves if we say we liked advertising or if it benefits anybody except the people putting them up.

advertising is a literal cancer on society. If it was gone even in the simplest of forms so you aren't able to legally see advertising until you turn 21 years old. Or have our kids be able to grow up until they turn 18 without seeing a single advertisement.

Especially big pharma ads!

This isn't completely new though, it's why chess is regarded so skeptically in the Hadith.

Maybe we are in a newly rapid iteration cycle in humanity's quest for better distraction... But we've always had distraction nipping at the heels of meaningful accomplishment.

I'm just not sure how to measure the delta... How much better is distraction today than fifty years ago? How much steeper is that curve than the one measuring our ability to tackle meaningful societal problems? (Does the second curve even have a positive slope, and do they draw from the same pool of human effort?)

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bubble-maker-relaxing-way-to...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/11/france-to-ban-...

> Playing fucking tic-tac-toe.

That's why the entire thing seems like a non-issue to me. If some people don't want to do anything useful with their lives, then who are we to prohibit them from continuing to do-nothing and thereby starving themselves?

(Of course, we already, rightfully, prohibit people from harming&stealing-from each other; that's beside my point.)

The difference now is that the technology that now exists makes this sort of gratification both constantly available, and better than ever at scratching that dopamine itch.

The evidence the article presents also points towards something happening after the advent of smartphones, and not before.

Perhaps in the same way as an LED dimmed via pulse-width modulation has, to a varying extent, a proclivity to not produce light? Then just as the human perception of such an LED is on a continuum between "off" and "full brightness", so people's net-worths-at-retirement will stand on a continuum between starvation and Bill Gates.

If people who make no meaningful contribution to society have no entitlement to any benefit of society then i wouldn't care.

Meanwhile, however, trying to make the current society function better under the ubiquitous-welfare thesis is a step in the wrong direction. Better to, instead, make the act of discarding ubiquitous-welfare a more and more serious+obvious+viable solution to more and more of society's problems.

Smartphones and the internet make access to knowledge easier for everyone, but that is a small amount of what is otherwise cluttered with mostly useless(and sometimes damaging content), which naturally, appeal to the larger part of the population.

However, if having access to a smartphone can help some kids learn a little bit more, or maybe change someone's life by just making it easier to browse useful content, isn't it worth it? Those who won't find a good use for a phone would just have some other silly pastime if phones didn't exist.

I say just let people play candy crush, maybe while they are waiting for a life reload they might learn something on the tiny screen.

I've got 4 step kids, who are 11, 13, 16 and 18. All aside from the eldest have smartphones, (they have each had them when they have gone to secondary school), and it's a constant problem - probably the thing where I have the biggest disagreements with them (I have an excellent relationship with all four of them, and they're all good, intelligent kids).

It's like a disease, and it's insidious. They are completely unaware that they are being manipulated by the software that they use every day, and are addicted to their phones, being connected and the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). I have spent many an hour trying to tell them that nearly everything they use isn't agnostic about its behaviour, but that it tries to manipulate them into spending as much time as possible in the app/site and so on.

I've really cut down on the amount I use my phone over the last year or so, and it has paid huge dividends. About 18 months ago I stopped using Facebook, and any other social media. I feel massively better for doing so, but it took me a long time to break the habits; and I'm a 46 year old with a brain that developed without such patterns as the norm, and I'm told I have 'immense self control'. So how on earth is a kid who doesn't know any different supposed to be able to do anything different?

I'm sure I'll get shot down by some (or downvoted), but I think there's a huge difference between technology itself and the way that it's being used to manipulate. There are always the arguements that 'you don't understand the modern way' - that being connected and always on is the norm... or that I'm a hypocrite as I use computers at work.... or that it's OK, and it means throwing away the ability to look at Wikipedia... but the truth of the matter is that most of the time spent isn't enriching yourself, it's flicking through instagram posts like a cat pawing at a washing machine.

I'm particularly concerned about the 13 year old, as she appears to be going backwards in terms of reading age and ability, and her attention span is dismal. She used to like reading, and now she complains that any book we suggest is 'too difficult' and the stories are 'too long and complicated'. And we're not talking 'A Deepness in the Sky' here. Particularly tragic as she was extremely creative (far more so than the other three), but seems to be getting less so as time goes on. Don't get me wrong, she's not stupid, but she seems to be diverging from the path she could be on as time goes on, but spends hours looking at junk on her phone.

Meal times are always device free, which works well. There's (now) one place in the house to charge your phone, and if it's on charge, you stop using it until it is charged.

For about the last 6 months we have had Sunday nights as completely 'device free' - from 5pm, every computer, ipad, phone, etc., gets turned in, and no-one goes on anything (yes, me included) - no TV or anything. And it works brilliantly well; there is nearly always some resistance at first (and the first month or so was difficult), and some moaning, but everyone acknowledges that we've had some of the best times as a family when we've been completely without any distractions; sometimes we will play games, sometimes we will have discussions, sometimes we will read, or do something individually or in small groups, but it's a complete change from the usual time where most of the people in the household are disconnected in some way, or distracted.

The eldest is at University, and is obviously an adult, but when she's home she plays by the same rules, and has also (in the last discussion had on the subject) admitted that when she got a phone (6 years ago), it was a completely different landscape; it wasn't weaponised against the user as it seems to be now. She said in no uncertain terms that it's not suitable for her youngest brother in the way it used to be, which was interesting, but she still doesn't agree that being device free an evening a week is a good idea.

Anyway, one of my biggest worries as a (step-)parent is that I will not have done enough to protect my kids' minds against the tobacco of our age, particularly when I've been reading about how bad the problem potentially could be. I sincerely hope I'm exaggerating the risks, but I doubt it.

Definitely not limited to 13 year olds. I've notice this myself the last couple of years, and it seems to have coincided with an increase in my usage of Reddit and HN apps (ie. feed-based news apps with comments).

I'm finding that sitting down to read a good book no longer seems appealing to me, and I almost have to trick myself into doing it. I also am a lot pickier in terms of whether a book is good enough to hold my attention. Ditto for long-form magazine articles.

Interestingly enough this also seems to bleed over into other media. Movies seem too long to focus on without using my phone while watching during slow scenes, and same with TV shows. In fact, across Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime Instant, I am struggling to find any shows that seem interesting enough to warrant spending the time to even watch the first episode. Yet I find I enjoy trailers for movies and shows way more than I used to. I'll bet some of that is due to the short couple minute format and quick cuts which keep my brain occupied.

I'm making an effort to cut back, but even being aware of the problems doesn't make that easy. I almost wish I'd lose my phone for a day so I wouldn't have an option.

I had to make a really conscious effort to not use my phone at times of low attention, and now actually revel in the time I get when I used to get my phone out and just browse stuff (stood in queues, while waiting for anything for any length of time, etc), and enjoy actually daydreaming or thinking about things. I find it a bit sad that this is a novelty!

Not all of my time is wasted on Reddit/HN. I actually have quite a few high-quality subs I subscribe to, and in general I learn quite a bit each day on both places from the comments. Sure there is room to cut back, but there is definitely some strong "signal in the noise."

I have felt a lack of creative energy these past few years, so I wonder if that would start to come back, but I genuinely can't picture what I'd do without those things in my life. It is very sad when I think about it, but I wonder if there is a happy middle-ground vs. going all out with a dumb phone.

I wouldn't say all of my time was wasted (and HN is the only remaining regular thing I look at, but I tend to read an article or two and comments and then be done, rather than repeatedly looking through it for something), but the vast majority was. Maybe better filtering was needed for me, and I've achieved that in other areas by subscribing to a couple of worthwhile email lists (of relevant interest areas) where I get maybe 1 email a week that takes maybe half an hour to filter and that's that.

Most of the spare time I've reclaimed is being used usefully - I'm learning Python at the moment, so I'm finding I'm doing bits an pieces here and there with that, and also I've actually made time to go back to practicing and enjoying playing the guitar, which I've done for a long time. I'm starting to feel more musically creative as well, which is definitely a change from the past few years - I had thought that it was all gone, so perhaps we're experiencing something similar?

Very well said. Apps and social media and clickbait-sites are digital Skinner boxes, its creators (dopamine) dealers. As a general rule, if you can't put something away for a week (or even better, an unspecified amount of time), you're addicted; and addictions are never a good thing.

They do ask when they can have phones. In their wildest dreams they would text and call their friends all day long, so thankfully the brain warping stuff has not entered the picture yet. They know it's a long ways off, but they are curious and want to get a sense of the time frame. For now we stall and talk about the risks and responsibilities with them while we gather data such as referenced in the OP.

Unfortunately Android's controls are pathetic, at least in v4 which we had. One of the kids got into the play store and downloaded a bunch of princess and pet type games one day. No harm done but the whole situation raised great lessons for everyone.

Raising kids is hard work...and they don’t turn out as you like...they go their own way...good for them!

What you wrote could have been also written by a parent 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

Yes, of course, no-one's life is without influence and advertisers have always sought to claim your attention for their own needs. But now you have the process being personalised for each user, and weaponised because accurate stats on effects can be captured quickly and iterated on straight away. Everyone's personal weak spot can be identified, analysed and taken advantage of - and in a very short timescale. That was most definitely NOT the case in the past; behaviour of advertising and attention capture was at best aggregated across a large fraction of the population at a time, sometimes the entire population at once.

How is looking at cats not enriching yourself though?

What I heard was incessant buzz which sounded very urgent to me. She said it was Snapchat notifications. The rate was over 20 notifications per minute.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and keep up with something like this.

I don’t think she wants to log into the phones. She just puts them on vibrate and into her bag ;)

Since you admit to this why are you applauding broad application of draconian law to address the problem? This reminds me of the last episode of this past season of Black Mirror -- the UN mandates that 'containers' for artificial consciousness contain at least five emotes (woefully inadequate) and simultaneously that artificial consciousness cannot be terminated; effectively trapping people in hell. Reacting to every manufactured media panic, running to the bedroom of your parents (government) and asking them to protect you from the monsters under your bed is the true problem here.

"People" have always been driven to play, gamble, game and such. What matters is that the human-knowledge-computer is there and accessible, not that 7 billion people immediately proceed to become Hawking/Feynman/Schopenhauer/etc-whoever clones on a daily fulltime basis. We're playful creatures, as are all well-fed carnivores =)

Our rule is the kids can have a smart phone when they can buy it and a data plan on their own. So far our first didn't do that until she was 18. The second was a little earlier at 17, but she was heading off to college and really felt that she needed it. Our 16 year old so far shows no interest in trying to save up for one.

Is trivial entertainment completely unjustified? What exactly entails trivial entertainment? What makes acquiring a mechanical skill in a game more or less trivial than reading a novel?

And what exactly does self-improvement constitute? Is it about knowing more facts? Having more skills than our predecessors? Having more developed particular skills? What about ethics and morality, are they amenable for self-improvement or mostly a product of one's experiences? How should ethics and morals be weighted against other areas of self-improvement?

What is the ultimate goal of self-improvement, or is it a goal in itself? If living a long happy life is a goal, should we give into some simple pleasures that make us happy?

Obs: I don't mean to imply that Candy Crush is the pinnacle of human condition, I've never even played it myself to judge. More to emphasize the hazards in analyzing this sort of question.

The real problem is getting people to balance fun/play and “work”.

Open question as to how to get people to balance those. Maybe the freemium/Facebook stuff need to be discussed like cigarettes/sex Ed.

As a parent with two children who are gamers we try to limit their time but it is a struggle for them to sign off the games.

I'm going to try and model better behavior.

I agree that some people will use the awesome power of pocket super computers for frivolous things, and some won't, but I don't think banning smartphones in schools is the answer.

The folks empowered by smartphones will suddenly have less power, diminishing themselves and their contribution to society.

The folks who can't stay off Candy Crush when they have a smartphone are still going to struggle with distraction, it'll just be comics/dating/some other distraction.

The second group may learn a bit more, but it seems like a net loss for society as a whole - which completely opposes the stated mission of a mandatory education.

Well, that and replying to HN posts about digital distractions...

This is not balanced at all. We also use it to connect, relay information, learn, translate in realtime, coordinate events and meetups...