Since you bought your first smartphone, an entire generation of kids has been born that will never know a world not mediated by AI algorithms.

Why is this important?

For one thing AI and kids is serious business. According to a Pew research report released in 2019, YouTube videos targeted at and featuring children were 3 times more popular than any other content on Youtube.

In 2019, the year Ryan Kaji turned eight, he made $26 million from his YouTube channel, Ryan’s Toy Review, making him that year’s highest paid Youtuber (and beating out his $11 million salary from the year he turned seven).

A significant part of his success could be attributed to his cuteness and his (and his parents) relentless daily video work schedule. That reach would not have been possible, however, without the boost he received from Youtube’s owner, Google, whose AI algorithms were tracking children’s viewing habits, and assessing when, where and how to best place its most popular content.

In September 2019 those practices were curtailed somewhat when Google agreed to pay out a 170 million settlement for violating The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). That same month, two complaints were filed against Ryan’s parents, one for failure to disclose that he was receiving money from toy companies, and second because in certain ways Google’s AI was not working. Ryan’s target preschool audience of three to six year olds were also being treated to ads for R rated movies, and the bodacious spokeswomen of Carl Jr.s.

Kids don’t realize that the adults around them weren’t born into exactly the same world they were. They expect their parents, educators and leaders to understand the power and the mechanisms behind these algorithms. But if the current popularity of Netflix’s The Social Dilemma can attest, in too many cases they don’t.

This is why in the fall of 2019, we at Kids Code Jeunesse, a Canadian charity with a mission to seed digital skills communities across the world started working with the Canadian branch of UNESCO on The Algorithm Literacy Project, a campaign to raise awareness around the need for better understanding of how algorithms work.

We created a PSA to spark a conversation around how AI algorithms use data to predict what kids like. We housed this on a webpage with discussion guides and materials to explore both traditional and AI programming, and the ethical issues that are and will continue to emerge.

We have no illusions that the video will reach the same number of kids that Ryan does. Our objective remains to start a conversation that addresses this blind spot and inspires teachers and parents to want to learn more about algorithms, to increase their willingness to learn side by side with their kids, and their confidence that they can do this.

Over 2020, even with all the challenges of teaching during the COVID, we have still managed to work with teachers to pilot and introduce materials that will seed the literacies that kids will need to better conceptualize and understand AI: data, machine learning, and modelling, as well as algorithm literacy.

We’ve worked with kindergarteners to conceptualize the first layer of machine learning by assessing their confidence level over whether the picture they are seeing is the face of a puppy, or the topography of a cookie. As they question why this is easier for them to guess than for a computer, we seed the healthy skepticism through which we hope they will continue to see AI.

We’ve worked with elementary school children classifying data through Google’s Teachable Machine (which to Google’s credit, runs of tensor flow, a great platform for experimentation that allows the user to keep data within a browser and entirely out of Google’s control or analysis.) In doing this we’ve opened up discussions around why a computer might have an easier time identifying the faces of white men, than black women. Is this a failure of the computer; or a failure to train the computer with a diversity of data?

All of these activities internalize what we call The Big ideas:

• That AI is everywhere, but often invisible
• That it is not magic
• That it can be wrong
• That training data matters
• That the use of AI is creating and will continue to create ethical issues around bias, transparency, accountability and explainability.

It’s one thing to use AI to help you decide what youTube video, or what Netflix movie you want to watch next. It will be another when teachers or future employers use it to assess a future generation’s work performance. There will always be situations where we should always have the right to have humans explain why they are coming to the conclusions that they are about us.

Our algorithm literacy campaign is a conversation starter, but it’s also a call to action to take some small step today towards either learning something about AI, or transferring what you know about AI to someone else.

We are confident we can harness the tremendous power of AI, to imagine, create and share what we know and have. But first we have to aim to go beyond digital literacy to acquire digital wisdom.

Further viewing and reading

Algorithmliteracy.org

Pew Research Report on Kids and YouTube

Children’s Online Protection of Privacy Act

The Social Dilemma

In his book Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, British evolutionary psychologist Dylan Evans argues that one of the things that distinguishes us from animals is that we are the only species that has invented artificial technologies to alter our moods. The first of these was language. “Our ancestors probably consoled each other with hugs and caresses long before they learned how to  talk, but once language was invented they found a new way of providing consolation by offering words of sympathy and advice.”

With the invention of writing we started find other new ways of consoling others, and eventually even ourselves. As Evans points out, the idea that our thoughts can influence our emotions goes back to Aristotle.  But as we look down the long road from Aristotle to gratitude journals and kitten posters, he’s obviously very far from the last person to believe this.

Of course humans didn’t only use writing to console ourselves. We’ve also tried to use it to control ourselves. It makes so much sense.  Thoughts influence our emotions.  Writing gives our thoughts permanence. So, writing should be able to give our emotions permanence. Or to be honest about what we really want, it should be able to make one emotion permanent: happiness.

New books are published every month about how to use writing to make you happier. If you’ve ever undergone cognitive therapy for depression you’ve experienced the relief of understanding, finally, what was missing from your eight years of talk therapy.  Fifteen minutes of daily writing.  You didn’t need that psychotherapist probing your memories and denials.  You just needed to write down your negative thoughts, and replace them with more rational ones.  Your brain is smart. How could it not realize the folly of  this constant flow of irrational  frustration and negativity?

And yet, if this works, it seems to only work for as long as you want to keep doing it. Unless you’ve had the good fortune to  experience a language disabling stroke, like neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor,  you may have noticed that your brain remains remarkably and curiously  stubborn in its insistent tendency to feel unpleasant things, and accompany these unpleasant feelings with unpleasant thoughts.

About the only thing as long as our history of believing that writing can change our mood, it our history of becoming disillusioned with writing as a way to change our mood. As Evans points out, writing may be one of the slowest and least effective ways to become happy. And so “humans have constantly sought to discover other technologies of mood that might provide a faster and more secure short cut to happiness than words alone.”  If you want writing to permanently alter your mood, probably the only writing for that would be a signature on a prescription.

Evans takes this  a little farther. He wrote his book at the turn of the millennium,  while he was a research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London, and also moonlighting as a D.J. In the chapter “Short Cuts to Happiness” he gives a lucid and interesting of summary of the various different technologies humans use to improve their moods, from color to music, and from anti depressants to meditation. Then he ends with his personal favorite, dancing and taking drugs. And true enough, if your goal in life is to change your mood for the better, writing will never compare with the speed and intensity of dosing on ecstasy while drinking smart drinks and getting holistic massages.

If language was the first technology we used to artificially change our moods, it was probably the first technology we invented that, in time, actually seemed to make our moods worse (and wouldn’t it be nice is raves were the last!)  Before language, humans felt fear, followed perhaps with a silent grunt. With language each stab of fear was accompanied with a potentially misleading headline like:  “THIS MIGHT KILL YOU!”   Hear that inner headline enough times , and it’s not surprising human history tends to be a violent one.

But trying to change our moods by changing our thoughts is probably about as useful a strategy as changing world events by legislating that headlines should have a more positive spin. The problem is that our brain is only doing what’s it’s designed to do.

It’s designed to get us to pay attention to our emotions, and so like a highly ambitious blogger, it has figured out that the key words “fat”, “loser” and “fucked” work a lot better than more reasonable, even more accurate, phrases like “slightly, but not dangerously overweight,” “average person over concerned with failure”, and “crisis, which if you were Chinese would also mean opportunity.” Our brain, or certainly one of the strongest parts of the brain, the amygdala, wants hits. So it pitches the stories it attaches to our emotions accordingly.

So now we find ourselves in this weird time in civilization where our brain is increasingly hooked up to other brains as they write their raging reddit approval seeking stories, or relentlessly chart their bland routes to happiness. Online readers seem to be increasingly helpless in the face of this onslaught of questionable mental energy.

I’ve spent years keeping messy stream of consciousness journals, and the one useful thing I’ve learned from this practice is that much of  what goes on inside my brain is, essentially, just bad writing. (I find it easy to accept that this is also true of others.  There are days, however, when I am feeling the weight of so much of this bad writing being outside of our brains.)

Interestingly, the newer schools of cognitive therapy seem to be coming to that conclusion as well. Third Wave cognitive therapy concentrates less and less on trying to replace thoughts, or reason with thoughts.  It works on simply accepting that most of our thoughts are and always will be negative, and  a little lame.  The newest of these therapies is known as Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT).  Developed by cognitive therapist Steven Hayes, it is rooted in Buddhist mindfulness techniques.   At the core of ACT’s philosophy is the idea that merely accepting that the human brain is in a constant state of emotional and cognitive flux unburdens us from the emotional stress of constantly trying to control it.

ACT has a lot of  interesting strategies for dealing with the relentlessly primitive thoughts coming from our brains. One of them is the effective use of irony. For persistently negative, immature thoughts, Hayes recommends the “mental T-Shirt.” Instead of trying to debate your brain next time it calls you a loser, merely appropriate this label by visualizing yourself in your “Loser” T-Shirt.  The goal of this trick is to develop the habit of recognizing a thought as just a thought and moving on. (I find this works equally well with useless obsessions. My “Fucking Goldman Sachs” T-Shirt is currently in my mental laundry hamper, though I’m sure I’ll be wearing it again.)

In The Happiness Trap, Australian ACT therapist, Russ Harris, cites research that shows that about 80 percent of our thoughts have some degree of negative content. Harris compares the average human brain to a  tabloid press constantly following us around looking for evidence of our deficiencies and weaving must read stories from these.  In dealing with our minds we have to decide if we want to be  Sean Penn or Julia Roberts. Is it worth our time to be in a constant battle with it. Or is there a way to simply get used to that reality, and go on about our day, and our life?

Does this mean that writing can’t be used to improve our lives, or increase our happiness?  No. Of course it can.

Writing can be used to articulate our values, and break down and make visible our goals. It can make us aware of commitments we want to make and remind us when we’re not making them. Writing can be used to define what is truly meaningful to us and to humanity. And most of all it can be used to  redefine happiness.

Writing can help us start thinking of happiness  as the feeling that sometimes comes over us when we’re living a complex, rich, interesting life; when we’re taking consistent action towards things that are important to us–whether these are the basics like friendship, family and work, or the higher pursuits like meaning, and spiritual and intellectual challenges. Writing can help us understand that real happiness necessarily incorporates all the frustrations, anxieties and disappointment that are part and parcel of living a full  life.

But while it’s okay to use writing to take the edge off a persistent, or overwhelming moods, for the love of god we have to start saying no to using writing as a way to nail these moods to the ground.

An example of “alien handwriting” courtesy of www.abduct.com

We’ve all heard of post-partum depression. But after giving birth to premature twin boys, who later died, Alice Flaherty developed a rare case of post-partum mania, and with it hypergraphia, a chronic, compulsive urge to write.

“The world was flooded with meaning. I believed I had unique access to the secrets of the Kingdom of Sorrow, about which I had an obligation to enlighten my –very tolerant–friends and colleagues through essays and letters.”

In time it subsided, and the grief thawed. She became pregnant again, this time giving birth to twin girls. The hypergraphia returned. Soon she had wallpapered her house with post-it notes. But this time she was better prepared.

Flaherty is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and also teaches at Harvard medical school. She decided to curb the second bout of hypergraphia with a prescription for mood stabilizers.

But this gave her writer’s block, leading to a depression severe enough to hospitalize her. In the comfort of a psychiatric ward, where her credentials gave her access to certain privileges like “how to get into the room with the Cap n’ Crunch”, she discovered a culture of manic-depressive writers.

“…the hospital had a literary tradition–and a physical campus–more impressive than that of many liberal arts colleges. One day a staff member gave me a virtual tour from my window. He pointed out buildings where two famous poets had stayed. If I pressed my nose against the window’s steel mesh, I could just see where a third had taught poetry to patients soon before being admitted herself. All three, manic-depressive. The scientist in me can quote the study (the single study I must point out) that finds manic-depressive artists to be more productive when they are adequately medicated. The residual psychiatric patient in me is not convinced–it thinks I wrote better when I was a least a little bit ill.”

Flaherty went on to write The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, a book about the neurological basis for both writing disorders and writing talent.I’ve drawn from this book for the first few writing disorders presented here. The others I’ve drawn from my own life.

Hypergraphia: As described above, an overwhelming urge to write. Hypergraphia may seem to be the opposite of Writer’s Block. But that depends on how you define writing. People with hypergraphia don’t usually write well, though they often think they are.

What’s significant about this disorder is what hypergraphic writing lacks, that special substance that compels a reader to keep reading. We know what’s happening in the brain when someone writes compulsively. But what is happening in the brain when they’re writing well? What’s the difference between mania and the productive drive and disassociation better described as “the muse.” Forget all those right brain, left brain self-help books. Flaherty’s book suggests that this is still almost as much of a mystery to modern neurology as it is to us.

Writer’s Block: “Dissecting writer’s block” is according to Flaherty as easy “as carving meatloaf at the joints.” The problem is we don’t often know if we’re blocked. Maybe we’re just procrastinating, maybe we’re processing an idea. Flaherty uses two criteria as a basis of diagnosis. First that the blocked writer is not writing, despite being intellectually capable. And second that this writer is suffering from not writing. If it doesn’t bother you that you’re not writing, then it’s not really writer’s block.

But it’s not only a question of output. Writers can be both hypergraphic and blocked if they’re not writing the kind of writing they love. Coleridge was a hypegraphic journalist, but struggled over his poetry. Oliver Sacks writes about an agonizing block while writing Uncle Tungsten, where he trashed 2 million words of writing for 100,000 word book.

Sometimes the block is a result of being hypercritical. Think of all the self-help books on de-fanging the inner critic. Still, no writer ever progressed beyond mediocrity without the willingness to endure at least a little fang.

Graphomania: Often confused with Hypergraphia, sometimes deliberately because it sounds scarier. Graphomania is actually the chronic urge to publish.

Flaherty claims it was coined by Milan Kundera who argued that this condition arises from emotional isolation and ennui, and

“Takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1) A high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities. 2)An advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual. 3) A radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.)”

Ithink we can now safely add one more condition: the invention of technology that enables quick and easy publication for anyone with a computer:

Dysgraphia: My son has this disorder, which affects the ability to master the muscular co-ordination needed to write quickly and legibly. I discovered this when he was five. His neurologist caught it two years after he was diagnosed with mild temporal lobe epilepsy. Now you know the origins of my fascination with writing and neurology.

You might think that handwriting is a separate problem from the cognitive process of writing. But a kid struggling with the mechanics will soon learn to detest everything involved with the demands of writing. I’ve seen this with my very bright eight year old who has plowed through four Harry Potter books since Christmas. Every time he starts a writing project he does best to convince me that he can’t because “I have no ideas, Mom. Really. None.” If you can successfully block your imagination on demand, no one can ever make you write. This would be my strongest argument against Flaherty’s second criterion for diagnosing writer’s block. Just because someone doesn’t admit to suffering, doesn’t mean they’re not.

And there are other problems linked to dysgraphia, which is typically only the most obvious manifestation of:

Dyspraxia: This is a disorder that affects the gros motor-skills. People who have this often have a hard time with hand eye coordination, sports, anything involving muscular planning.

What does this have to do with writing? They typically have poor posture making it uncomfortable to sit for even small periods of time at desks. Children with dyspraxia who are sitting on a chair that is an inch too high to plant their feet firmly on the floor will have a tendency to experience a low grade vertigo that will make it difficult for them to concentrate. They become fidgety and seek sensation.

Because dyspraxics have a poor sense of space they are typically messy, chaotic, and slow. Bright dyspraxics usually get labelled as lazy, unmotivated and slovenly. It is not unusual for kids with dyspraxia to fail or abandon school around grade nine or ten when projects become too long for their poor organizational skills. It’s estimated that about 2 to 10% of the population suffers some degree of this.

But sometimes they compensate for their problems by becoming actors, storytellers and choosing professions that allow them to develop their oral and performance skills. Daniel Radcliff suffers from dyspraxia. He fell into acting because he was failing school. His mother figured he needed something to boost his confidence. The next thing he knew he was on his way to Hogwarts and a hero to school aged children around the world. _______________________________________________________________

So what about you. Anything here strike a bell? Aware of a disorder I haven’t included?

And are disorders necessarily a bad thing? As Flaherty mentions time and time again, it is rare to find a writing genius who hasn’t struggled with some form of writing imbalance. Correctly naming your disorder, if you have one, can be the first step to curbing its excesses and maybe even taping its power.