Deep Questions with Cal Newport · 2026-09-28 · 79 min · 14,325 words

Kids Should *Not* Use Chatbots! (You Should Be Wary, Too…)

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When it comes to AI, we've been talking a lot recently about these sci-fi style stories where superintelligent systems destroy humanity. And don't get me wrong. Ви до нього хапи. Із important топ то дискас. But in some sense the radicalness of these predictions are letting the AI companies off the hook. For the actual harms that they're causing. Right now. Now, the reason why this is on my mind is that I recently gave the opening remarks.

At a panel discussion that was held at my home institution of Georgetown University, it featured a bunch of Лига скалес і лоєрс такинь about Технологікал хармс ту чодри. And during this panel, I learned about an AI harm that hadn't yet been on my radar and what I discovered. Floored me.

So this is what I wanna talk about today. If you have kids, you absolutely have to listen to this episode. But even if you don't, you still need to listen because the harms I'm gonna discuss Are probably affecting you. As well. One word of warning before we get into this: some of the themes I'm going to cover here are pretty dark. So if you have this on in the car with your little ones around you, you might want to practice. a little bit of discretion. This is gonna get a little bit heavy. All right, let's get into it. Okay.

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