They’re just handed an iPad and go slack-jawed, for the most part, watching other kids play video games for them.

Now these are clouds I can shake my fist at!

I was taking the bus one day and there was a two-year-old kid who, instead of wanting to look out the window, demanded her tablet, which her father dutifully gave her. I saw her quite frequently, and I am legitimately horrified we are raising a generation that literally can not look out the window.

And we’re seeing it in education, too, scores are plummeting. Kids brains have adapted to the constant rewards of gamification. Teachers are quitting in droves because kids can’t handle the pace of human instruction.

I sometimes do educational apps and I’m constantly distracted by bouncing coins and bleeps and bloops. If I remember the the preterite third person plural of poder is puderam, I don’t need a fucking penguin doing a dance. Learning is its own reward, motherfuckers!

But one thing I think about is how much of our future is just “flying cars” all over again. People have this idea that things will just keep improving infinitely but eventually we run into limits and, while those limits are beatable, it is not worth the expense.

AI is very much a flying car. We’ve hit the limits of what AI can do and every attempt to advance is just adding exponentially more AI on top of it, but the market and investors are pretending if we just throw enough data and electricity at it, we’ll somehow magically birth AGI, or Sam Altman’s monster.