// social movements

Source: Marginal REVOLUTION

The article identifies a genuine inversion in childhood risk management: as schools, parks, and physical spaces face increasingly stringent oversight and liability concerns, digital environments—despite their documented harms—offer children autonomy and play without adult gatekeeping. This creates a perverse incentive structure where Roblox and Discord provide more unsupervised social experimentation than a neighborhood basketball court, pushing kids toward the very platforms regulators claim to want them away from. The policy gap between hyper-cautious IRL institutions and comparatively hands-off online platforms suggests two paths: either public spaces become less paranoid about childhood independence, or digital spaces face the same liability-driven restrictions that drained freedom from physical ones.

Source: The New York Times

The framing of AI-induced displacement as an acceptable tradeoff shows the industry's AGI pursuit operates under a different moral calculus than previous technological transitions. Mass unemployment isn't framed as a problem to solve but as collateral damage to manage. Jasmine Sun's reporting documents that this isn't hyperbole from critics but an actual operating assumption embedded in how AI executives discuss scaling. The industry legitimizes inequality as the price of progress rather than a failure of implementation. The risk isn't that AI will disrupt labor markets—it will—but that by accepting permanent stratification as inevitable, companies and policymakers abandon the policy tools and investment needed to prevent it.