The UK Government thinks the problem is nude images on children's phones. Signal thinks the problem is government interference with encryption security. Symptoms.
The real problem is that children enter and inhabit a digital ecosystem built for adults without much built-in 'safeguarding'.
The stock libertarian answer: parents should control what their children can access. Perhaps libertarian parents are competent, attentive and technically capable. But the worst outcomes arise where parental supervision is at its most incompetent or perverse.
And so to negative externalities.
The costs of failure are borne by one group - young people themselves - while incentives for other parties vary. Platforms optimise for engagement; the media likes clickbait; politicians revel in righteous moralism.
The UK Government has focused on unsuitable content, politically attractive because content is visible. The nude image says, "There is the problem." But grooming, coercion, blackmail and exploitation are behavioural phenomena: that image is embedded in a relationship, a history, that's harder to pin down.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been arguing for some time that the solution should not involve regulating communications directly. He has suggested AI-based chaperones operating on children's devices. When he first proposed the idea it sounded interesting but futuristic. Increasingly it looks like the direction in which the technology is moving anyway, with agentic assistants which inhabit your context.
For years child protection online implied state surveillance: read the messages, scan the content, break/subvert the encryption. But that may already be yesterday's architecture. Suppose every child account on an iPhone or Android device automatically entered Child Safety Mode.
The phone itself could recognise grooming, coercion, pressure to send images, suspicious adult contact with high fidelity. Not perfectly, but neither are spam filters perfect - yet spam has largely disappeared from our inboxes.
And things will get better.
The AI would contextually blur those problematic images, issue warnings, delay transmission, require parental approval for certain contacts - and flag genuinely suspicious interactions. Most processing would happen locally on the device. No government database. No finger-wagging bureaucrat reading messages. No weakening of encryption.
The technology is only now catching up with Cowen's idea. It is AI-assisted guardianship built into children's devices by default - the requirements technically standardised, the app accredited and legally mandated, and given privileged access to the operating system.
The AI technology is becoming available while policymakers are legislating the wrong things.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.