Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital culture

  • Just What The Doctor Ordered

    Just What The Doctor Ordered

    Dana Suskind’s latest book Human Raised: Nurturing Connect, Curiosity, & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI might target parents but offers insights for all of us.

    Suskind, who is also a University of Chicago surgery and pediatrics professor, encourages parents to foreground the irreplaceable human connection, own their parenting imperfections, protect their kids’ early years, and limit AI to enhancing adult-child interactions, or HOPE. She also describes ways that AI can support parents and newborns with language learning or sleep habits as well as reduce demands on both busy parents and overburdened teachers.

    Suskind’s expertise and experience establish a compelling context for this project, and her voice is immediately noticeable. She integrates research and experience, both professional and personal, with an engaging personality in ways that will appeal to, and engage, her intended audience.

    publisher cover image

    The effect is an established authority that commands attention yet remains accessible and compassionate. As a result, her perspective and approach, which consistently position parents at the center, are compelling and convincing. In these, AI functions as a powerful tool that serves human ends rather than dictates or worse determines these.

    Suskind repeatedly encourages parents to retain their instincts, and refuses to relinquish these to not just AI agents but also pediatricians. She also models her perspective in the ways that she owns her own parenting imperfections, which she incorporates into her argument for doing so.

    Artificial intelligence Suskind acknowledges encourages users to expect perfection. Parents however should understand that their failures, and what follows, are ways that their children develop crucial life skills, such as individual resilience and relationship repair.

    This argument can reassure new parents, who can use it to calibrate their own criteria, and even older ones, including those who have grown children as I do. I’ve suggested to my spouse that we were good enough parents, which was more than enough, but Suskind offers an even more compelling argument for such parenting as even more.

    This example suggests the larger appeal of this book. It caught my attention because I have been searching for first, or foundational, AI principles, and wondered if despite its intended audience it would suggest some. From it, I learned a way of thinking about both my parenting and my AI approach, which is even more than I hoped.

    AI according to Suskind should never substitute for human connection, imperfection can trump efficacy and efficiency, certain parts of human experience must be protected, and our efforts can be usefully enhanced with smart strategies.

    These insights are useful for raising kids, and living, in a world of artificial intelligence.

  • Some Vital Signs

    Some Vital Signs

    Chicago Public Media could be showing encouraging signs of life.

    It recently announced the release of a new website about Chicago for its residents. This space, which reportedly reflects a passion for this city and confronts its fractured communities, is based upon a central public media belief that some “civic infrastructure” cannot come from, and depend upon, the marketplace.

    This site at the moment is basic. It features slick testimonials about the city, a donation link, and a contact form link for those who want to contribute to its development.

    The most exciting element is the link to its rationale, which explains that CPM hopes to offer “trusted local information, communication knowledge, civic and cultural resources, and new opportunities for participation” from its “trusted organizations” — the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ. Like these, this new space will be driven not by profit but by the public media mission, and will consider its members not as “number[s]” but as “neighbor[s]”.

    This proposal suggests an awareness of its challenges. However, the proof obviously will be the ways these principles are converted into practices.

    The world has obviously changed, and these changes seem to be accelerating. CPM exists in a world for example where fewer people read newspapers and listen to the radio, and do these if at all online.

    At the same time, the last few years have been challenging. CPM seemed unprepared for instance to integrate the newspaper and to compensate for the predictable federal funding loss.

    Perhaps more challenging has been the inconsistency between its assertions and its actions in small and big ways. Most if not all of these efforts to confront such inconsistencies have been frustratingly ineffective and resulted in maddeningly inadequate responses if any at all.

    Public media are essential, especially in this disinformation era (McQuade 2024, e.g.). Chicago Public Media must retain the best of its previous purposes, such as providing reliable information and curating news stories, and reconfigure its contributions for a fluid future.

    That could go far in restoring my confidence in, and restoring my reduced financial contributions to, this important Chicago institution.

  • The Neo Danger

    The MacBook Neo by all accounts is amazing.

    This newest Apple laptop, which consists of MacBook Air compromises for a much more affordable price, has been praised for its performance, build quality, and value. The demand for this “perfect compromise” even surprised Apple, and reportedly contributed to a record number of new customers.

    MacBook Neo website screenshot

    The Neo has few competitors among Windows budget laptops at least at the moment although it could motivate Lenovo for example or HP to improve its offerings. It has next to none among Chromebooks, which are little more than surveillance browsers without the Linux virtual machine option, and still nowhere close with it activated.

    For these and other reasons, the Neo laptop will attract individual users, especially those who already have iPhones and AirPods or Apple Watches but before now couldn’t justify a thousand dollars or more for an Apple laptop. It will also likely have an increased appeal to institutions, such as schools and small businesses, as a result of the same reasons, including the network effect.

    With it, Apple is extending its reach into hardware, which has always been its focus, and adding this extension to its software, platforms (FaceTime, e.g., or iMessage), and services (iCloud, e.g., or Apple TV). As a result, Apple is consolidating its control, and slowly but surely becoming the primary portal through which people access digital networks.

    Such a consolidation challenges adversarial interoperability, or the cooperative potential of different devices and platforms even without the consent. This condition, which has long been considered a threat by Apple, is both central to the invention of the internet (Berners-Lee 2025) and possible remedy to its chronic devolution (Doctorow 2025).

    This consolidation also promotes its colonization of psychological, social, and cultural spaces, which should be increasingly evident. More and more people are walking or worse driving for example while messaging, surfing, or talking as a result of Apple devices. Too many if you ask me seem enthralled with immersion, subjectivity, and other cultural immediacy features that have been promulgated by these devices.

    Some might be more or less alarmed about a human future that increasingly exists within digital networks. Regardless, all of us can be concerned with the way that Apple has positioned itself to exert the greatest control and make the most money, which only compounds its control.

    None of us can dismiss this dependency no matter how much Apple promotes user privacy for example or environmental stability or otherwise presents itself positively to the world. We cannot be confident that it will continue to promote these or other prosocial practices, especially if or when sales start to slump.

    The Apple MacBook Neo in other words might be amazing but upon second thought is also alarming because it contributes to the degradation of digital networks and encourages digital dependency.

    Equally alarming is that such second thoughts might not disqualify the MacBook Neo as my replacement laptop when I need a new one or worse before then.