Research indicates that the abuse of chatbots by young people to interact has the effect of a drug. Nothing new, unfortunately: it is our prison.
For months, Italians have rightly been wondering about the case of the “children of the forest” removed from the authority of their parents because they are forced to live in a situation – according to the established authorities of the State (social workers and magistrates) – of physical marginalization and social alienation compared to their peers and in general compared to society. In other words, these would be children forced to live not in their time but in the past, a past close to that in which our grandparents grew up and, depending on their age, quite a few of our parents who also survived, some very well, this situation. Well, if the problem is that every child must live in his present, I wonder why the fact that millions of parents are left free to uproot their children from their time and catapult them lightly into a future of which no rules, limits and boundaries are unknown is not of equal concern.
Between the two extremes – life marked by the rhythms of nature and life regulated by an algorithm – in terms of danger and possibility of falling into alienation, there is no difference. Yet we are getting used to it, or rather, we have already gotten used to it to the point that the alarms that many authoritative scholars are raising about the spread of Artificial Intelligence chatbots, software designed to simulate human conversations via text or voice, remain unheeded. According to a study published by Drexel University in Philadelphia, over 50% of American teenagers regularly use chatbots, giving up real interactions with peers, a phenomenon that creates addiction like a drug.
In short, our children – and unfortunately many adults too – walk with their necks bent, their eyes glued to a screen, reduced to digital zombies. It is the “society of surreality”, to quote a recent analysis, where reality no longer counts for anything unless it is mediated by a click or generated by software. Don’t call it “technological evolution”. Let’s call it by its name: a subtle, pervasive, devastating addiction.
Social media are not virtual marketplaces, they are methadone distributors for an audience of drug addicts that is expanding like wildfire. An algorithm, designed by some Californian genius in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, decides what they should think, what they should watch and, ultimately, who our children should be. We have delegated the education of young people to a machine. And now we are surprised if the results are a wave of functional illiteracy, pathological narcissism and a chronic inability to look each other in the eye and speak to each other.
And then comes Artificial Intelligence. The final blow to effort and critical thinking. Why study? Why struggle to write an essay, an article, a report? Click, and the AI prepares the pre-packaged package for you. It is the death of the intellect, the celebration of the false. A world in which the fake is worth more than the authentic. I have seen videos myself, constructed with various apps, in which my image and voice were used to scam people. It is proof that this technology is not neutral: it is a weapon, and we are delivering it, loaded, into the hands of the most fragile.
Politics? He sleeps. Or, worse, it chases these platforms looking for the easy link, submitting to the People’s Court of the Web, that digital “baton” that dominates without rules. You don’t hear an authoritative voice saying: “Enough”. We cannot find the courage to protect the culture of effort, of school, of books.
We have become subjects of a digital empire. An addiction that is taking away our freedom, the real one, that of thinking with our own heads. If we don’t set ferocious limits, if we don’t go back to imposing reality on virtuality, we won’t just have ignorant young people, but an entire nation hostage to a server that, when it wants, will shut us down. And we won’t even be able to complain, because we’ll be too busy taking a selfie to notice that we’re finished. And then the doubt arises: are we sure that the problem is really living like the children in the house in the woods?
