This Week in Tech (parent edition)
Stuff happening in tech that is relevant to your kids, classrooms, and lives.
Welcome to my new weekly round-up of tech news parents should know about. I am guessing you all don’t follow tech news super closely. Since I do, I will sift through it and attempt to pick out what is most relevant to what we are all navigating in terms of tech + our kids and lives. This week was a big one.
This was not a good week for Meta (or “social media” more broadly) in the courts. By now you’ve probably heard about the big cases in New Mexico and LA, but there was another one in Delaware that hasn’t gotten as much coverage but has pretty major implications: a Delaware court ruled that Meta’s insurers don’t have to cover the costs of defending the thousands of lawsuits piling up against them. Why? Because what Meta is being accused of is the result of deliberate design decisions — not an accident. This has major financial implications because Meta may now need to pay for legal expenses… which are quickly mounting.
Wikipedia’s editors officially banned AI-generated content from the platform. The reason is pretty simple: AI makes stuff up, and Wikipedia is built on verified human knowledge. Thank you, Wikipedia.
In yet another move that no one asked for… Google has been using AI to replace the actual headlines of news articles in search results. Google calls it a “small experiment,” but they have said that before their small experiment turns into a permanent feature. **This is directly relevant to our kids, who are learning to do research online, and / or using Google Classroom.
Speaking of the classroom… the First Lady walked into the White House with a robot and asked us to imagine it replacing teachers. This as we grapple with (and clean up the damage from) the last wave of “transformative” classroom tech. The Atlantic ran a glorious satirical piece imagining what Plato School actually looks like, reminding us why satire is uniquely qualified for confronting uncomfortable realities.
RIP Metaverse. Remember when Meta spent somewhere upwards of $80 billion building a virtual world that was going to change everything and then renamed the entire company to triple down on that future? Well… it’s dead. Please remember this the next time someone tells you some new sci-fi fantasy BS is going to change everything.
OpenAI shut down Sora (its heavily hyped AI video generator) just six months after launch. Turns out it was burning through $1 million per day with fewer and fewer actual users. Disney had signed a $1 billion deal to license its characters to the platform, yet they found out it was being shut down less than an hour before the public announcement and the deal died with it. Again… remember this for whatever the next round of hype is. (Also… if this is how they treat business partners that give them $1billion, imagine how they treat everyone else…)
A company is turning your Zoom calls into podcasts. Yes, exactly what it sounds like… A company called WebinarTV has been scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, joining calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts. This includes calls that are not recorded, and is apparently totally legal.
The Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology wrote a remarkable open letter to students responding to the university’s push to integrate AI into activities across the campus. It’s an honest and clear-eyed description of what we actually give up when we hand education over to AI. It’s worth your time… please read it.
If you have suggestions for what to include next week, please DM me here on Substack.
