🖐🏽 the five.

this week's roundup helping parents navigate matters of technology, community and play.

Jane Fisher’s (woman on underwater steps)

1. 👩🏻‍💻 Computers should work so that people can think - if there is one phrase that best captures my philosophy on how our tech should work with humans, it’s this.
   
   I found myself head nodding so often in this gem from friend Gina Trapani that I hope you’ll go outside or to your favourite coffee shop, load this piece up and really just spend time savouring all of the many well articulated points.
   
   She is able to say much of what I believe - that AI (and digital tech in general) holds so much promise but today, it’s exhausting to work so closely to the tech because of how it’s being lauded and shilled to outcomes that aren’t really real in most cases.
   
   Worse, in some cases they’re being sold so confidently without consideration to very real concerns from anyone actually building with it.

   
   I strongly recommend you read the whole thing but if here’s the most important bit, to me:

At a high level, I believe that true understanding requires effortful engagement. The more effortless AI tools make tasks, the less we will understand them, know how to do them ourselves, or think critically about how they’re done. This is true of all technology. I don’t know how exactly my car engine runs, or type a series of 1’s and 0’s to program my computer. There are levels of abstraction everywhere in modern life. But the abstraction layer of “this will do it for you so you don’t have to” for AI tools is especially amorphous, opaque, and comes with real risks.

For example, LLMs are not designed to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. So when they’re right, it’s because those patterns are frequent. When they’re wrong, they’ll still give you the information with 100% confidence and believability. Their output is language without thought behind it.

Furthermore, AI chatbots are designed to make you feel good, not challenge you to think on your own. Every time a chatbot tells me “That’s a great question!” and “Now you’re thinking!” I cringe. Your AI chatbot might as well be a fawning junior intern trying desperately to impress you. You can prompt a bot to challenge you but sycophancy is the default. (In fact, at Anthropic’s own office, Claude ran a simple vending machine business into the ground trying too hard to please its customers.)

LLMs seem very good at summarizing lengthy text. I use them to generate summaries of books, papers, meeting transcripts, and notes, and get answers to follow-up questions about that content. That said, an LLM also hallucinated an entire book my author friend never published, so I take all summaries with a big grain of salt.

I worry about people falling for hallucinations and flattery. I’m worried about young people opting out of building life skills because it’s easier to outsource important work like critical thinking, creativity, and friendship-building to probabilistic patterns of words. When you use an e-bike for the mind, you don’t build any pedaling muscles.

2. 🎨 Aqua - some of my favorite products in the world are the ones that blend our digital and analog worlds together effortlessly and delightfully. Here’s a beautiful product that came from the best origins - a labour of love from a team of parents at Adobe who wanted something like this to exist. I’ve always loved having something like this available (we’ve used Paper app in the past) for my girls when we want screentime to be active engagement.

   

   
   

3. 📕 Why Use a Dictionary - this is an oldie but really relevant I think, in this age of: what do we pay attention to? Had me pulling out our old dictionary and laying it out in our family room.

   
   ”Dictionaries heighten my senses, almost like certain mind-altering substances: They direct my attention outward, into a conversation with language.”

   

4. 🚀 Progress books for children - I hadn’t really thought about this, but I find Jason’s point resonating - where are the examples in our popular culture inspiring kids to solve the big mechanically complex challenges? Not just learn the tools (coding/AI) and not just an inspirational salve (you too can be a builder)… but a very practical foray into how our world works to feed the natural curiosity of kids that matches the technology and challenges of our times.
   
   So much of the things around us - our computers, our cars, our phones, seem too complex to break down (say vs when we could physically break apart our phone handsets, radios, car engines, typewriters) to get a intuitive sense of how the things around us work.
   
   I think as our building blocks like AI make things even harder to understand at their component level, our kids will find it harder to experiment and play their way to becoming builders.
   
   Food for thought - how to advance a sense of progress and agency using stories and suggestion.

5. 😂 How long?! As we start planning for Thanksgiving and other holiday gatherings, a little levity: