Raised on AI / 在 AI 时代成长

When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet. 当我的大女儿出生时，我立刻为她注册了 Gmail 和 Twitter 账号。我在网上大肆宣布她的出生，并把她的照片贴满了各种平台。简而言之，在她还没学会走路之前，我就已经开始为她建立数字足迹了。

Fast-forward a couple of years to when my second kid came, and I had essentially the opposite reaction. I wanted to make sure I preserved her privacy. I didn’t want her birthday to be a matter of public record or her face to feed the algorithms. In time, I would go back and scrub much of the early footprint I had created for my first child as well. 几年后，当我的第二个孩子出生时，我的反应截然相反。我想确保保护她的隐私。我不希望她的生日成为公开记录，也不希望她的脸成为算法的养料。后来，我也回过头去，删除了大部分我为第一个孩子留下的早期数字足迹。

What happened? I watched the promise of the early internet give way to the reality of its potential for abuse. I myself was already fully in the throes of smartphone and social media obsession. My wife, a pediatric nurse, grew increasingly alarmed at the number of children admitted to her hospital struggling with the effects of things like body dysmorphia or cyberbullying as a result of interactions on social media. 发生了什么？我目睹了早期互联网的承诺让位于其可能被滥用的现实。我自己当时也完全沉迷于智能手机和社交媒体。我的妻子是一名儿科护士，她越来越担心医院里收治的儿童数量，这些孩子因为社交媒体上的互动而饱受身体畸形恐惧症或网络欺凌的影响。

We became those parents. The ones whose kids carry flip phones and aren’t on TikTok. We are not alone in this. A surprising—maybe troubling—number of people I know who work at big tech companies also keep their kids at arm’s distance from technology. They lock down their phones, if they have phones at all, and keep them off social media. Hell, even Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t publicly post his children’s faces on Facebook or Instagram. 我们成了那种家长。那种让孩子用翻盖手机、不玩 TikTok 的家长。我们并不孤单。我认识的许多在大型科技公司工作的人，其比例之高令人惊讶——甚至有些令人不安——他们也让自己的孩子与科技保持距离。他们会锁定孩子的手机（如果给孩子配手机的话），并禁止他们使用社交媒体。见鬼，就连马克·扎克伯格也不会在 Facebook 或 Instagram 上公开他孩子的脸。

If the desire to limit kids’ use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling 2024 book The Anxious Generation helped propel the issue into the mainstream (despite criticisms of his conclusions from some developmental psychologists). Last year, Australia became the first country to enact a social media ban for children under 16. Other nations, from Austria to Indonesia, have followed suit, announcing similar bans. 如果说限制孩子使用科技产品的愿望曾经只是一股暗流，那么现在它已经变成了一场汹涌的洪水。乔纳森·海特（Jonathan Haidt）2024 年的畅销书《焦虑的一代》（The Anxious Generation）推动了这一议题进入主流视野（尽管一些发展心理学家对他的结论提出了批评）。去年，澳大利亚成为第一个对 16 岁以下儿童实施社交媒体禁令的国家。从奥地利到印度尼西亚，其他国家也纷纷效仿，宣布了类似的禁令。

The US Supreme Court recently upheld an age verification law in Texas, which acts as a de facto ban, and several states have flirted with their own measures. School districts all over the country are banning educational devices like iPads and Chromebooks in favor of actual books. Kids themselves seem to be embracing this tech skepticism too: The hottest gadget among the Gen Alpha set is a vintage Sony Walkman. 美国最高法院最近支持了德克萨斯州的一项年龄验证法，这实际上起到了禁令的作用，而其他几个州也正在考虑采取类似的措施。全国各地的学区都在禁止使用 iPad 和 Chromebook 等教育设备，转而使用真正的书籍。孩子们自己似乎也接受了这种对科技的怀疑态度：在“阿尔法世代”（Gen Alpha）中，最热门的电子产品竟然是复古的索尼 Walkman。

We have to prepare our children to live in the actual world we have actually created, not the one we wish we had. Yet there is no hiding from technology. It permeates nearly everything, everywhere. And so we have to prepare our children to live in the actual world we have actually created, not the one we wish we had. How can we help kids survive and thrive in what we have wrought? It’s a question that feels all the more urgent in the era of AI. 我们必须让孩子们准备好生活在我们亲手创造的现实世界中，而不是我们希望拥有的那个世界。然而，科技无处可藏。它渗透到几乎所有地方、所有事物中。因此，我们必须让孩子们准备好生活在我们亲手创造的现实世界中，而不是我们希望拥有的那个世界。我们该如何帮助孩子们在我们所创造的这个世界中生存并茁壮成长？在 AI 时代，这个问题显得尤为紧迫。

To help answer it, we brought in the editors of Anyway—an utterly fantastic magazine for teens and tweens that is so good in large part because it meets them where they are. (If there is a teen in your life, I highly recommend it.) They helped us with the stories you’ll see in this issue, and they asked kids to share in their own words how they are feeling about AI and what’s to come. What those young people told Anyway was complex, fascinating, and, to an incredible extent, thoughtful and sophisticated. 为了回答这个问题，我们请来了《Anyway》的编辑们——这是一本为青少年打造的非常棒的杂志，它之所以出色，很大程度上是因为它真正走进了孩子们的世界。（如果你的生活中也有青少年，我强烈推荐这本杂志。）他们协助我们完成了本期的报道，并邀请孩子们用自己的话分享他们对 AI 以及未来的感受。这些年轻人告诉《Anyway》的内容复杂、迷人，而且在很大程度上显得深思熟虑且成熟老练。

Meanwhile, I’ve loosened the digital tether—just a bit. I still don’t post many photos of my kids online, and I remain abundantly concerned about the perils of social media and AI. But when my older daughter started high school, we retired the flip phone in favor of an iPhone. And my younger one now sports an Apple Watch. These devices have opened up the world to them in all sorts of ways. They help forge new friendships, building relationships that move seamlessly between digital and physical spaces. They allow my kids to roam free—or at least more freely—beyond the known spaces of our neighborhood and across the city. Along the way, they’re learning and testing boundaries, just the way they’re supposed to. I guess you could say I am too. 与此同时，我稍微放松了数字束缚。我仍然不会在网上发布太多孩子的照片，并且依然对社交媒体和 AI 的危害深感担忧。但当我的大女儿上高中时，我们淘汰了翻盖手机，换成了 iPhone。我的小女儿现在也戴上了 Apple Watch。这些设备以各种方式为她们打开了世界。它们帮助她们结交新朋友，建立起在数字空间和物理空间之间无缝切换的关系。它们让我的孩子们能够自由地——或者至少更自由地——在我们社区的已知范围之外，在整个城市中探索。在这个过程中，她们正在学习和测试边界，就像她们应该做的那样。我想，你也可以说，我也在这样做。