Is your mobile phone the best or worst friend you’ve ever had?

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0:43BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. On the Today programme this week, we did a very interesting thing. We asked some wonderful young people whether or not they could do the absolutely unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unfathomable. and during half term actually give up their phones. Auriel, how much is your phone sort of part of your everyday life? How will you cope without it? It's very much part of my everyday life. I use it to talk to my friends quite a lot. I get very distracted when I'm meant to be doing my homework. I've got a lot of revision to do for my exams that are coming up. so maybe not having my phone will be some sort of a blessing in disguise I love the way that you're trying to sound hopeful about it it will be a blessing in disguise it'll be a good thing Annie I'm particularly impressed by you because you're giving up you're giving up a huge streak to do this I should say by the way if people don't know what a streak is it's where you every day have to send a message and if you miss one then the streak ends and you've got quite a good streak going Yeah, me and my friend Isabel have got a streak for 768 days.

1:57Well, we don't anymore. We don't anymore because it's gone. And you've given it up for us. I feel honoured. Well, that was our brilliant colleague Anna Foster talking to Annie and Oriel who have given up their phones, which is amazing. And today what we're going to do is a bit of a deep dive into the brief history and the rather complicated future of the smartphone. And I should say, I approach this on the one hand as a massive technophile, someone who thinks we ought to celebrate the extraordinary advances, the species altering advances of technology over the last couple of decades. But also as the parent of four young children who are extremely excited about smartphones.

2:35They haven't got one yet and they're not teenagers yet. And those two things are linked. You know, a BBC survey found last year that 50 percent of teenagers, half of teenagers feel anxious without their smartphones. A quarter said they used their phones for more than five hours on a typical day. Remember, smartphones didn't exist a couple of decades ago. Three quarters said they would not consider swapping their smartphones for a more basic device that only allowed phone calls and text messages. And that's why we were so keen to try our little experiment with Annie and Oriel, who were very willing guinea pigs, for which thank you.

3:07Could you, like we've asked these teenagers to do, give up your phone? Is your phone the best and worst friend you've ever had? and what is the future of these miraculous devices in all of our pockets. Let's do it.

3:32Yo, I just, I'm just going to say, oh, oh, sorry, a bit distracted. I'm just on my, I'm just on my phone. That'd be my smartphone, which I'm currently using to have a look at Instagram. Got some news from the FT. Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB early. Very interesting. BBC News Alert. Spent a bit of money at NatWest. Okay, that's interesting. My phone... Right, so I'll put that away. Hang on a second. Let's start this again. Right, I should start this again. Undistracted. It is a mole here in the Today Podcast studio. I've just had my phone in hand. What does your smartphone mean to you? You know, there's this wonderful moment where Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, said, imagine if even two or three decades ago we asked kids to turn up in school and out of their pockets they pulled out a massive sound system and then a TV and then a telephone, you know those old landline telephones, and then a camera on top and put it in the desk in front of them, we would say that was bonkers.

4:23How dare you come to school with all those things? And now with smartphones they can, which is why there is this huge movement across the country for a smartphone-free childhood and why lots and lots of people are thinking very hard about the relationship we all have with smartphones, particularly kids. and particularly kids because there are lots of people who feel that actually, and one of them is going to be speaking to us shortly, if you give children a smartphone, you deprive them of the essence of what it is to be a child, the freedom to think, to play and so forth. One person who's tried this experiment of life without a smartphone is not Paul Merton, the comedian who famously doesn't have a smartphone, but a brilliant regular on the Today programme.

5:02He's a children's laureate. He's the novelist in residence of the Today programme book club and his name is of course Frank Cottrell Boyce. Frank left us this voice note but he had to use his wife's smartphone to do it. It's just coming up for three years since I got rid of my smartphone. I got rid of it because I noticed that I'd lost my centre direction. I was totally dependent on Google Maps. I wanted my centre direction back and three years on I can tell you it did not come back. I have to really prep for every journey, draw little hand maps and inevitably in the last few miles have to stop and ask directions from someone who will always pull out their smartphone and use google maps it's this phone that's got um its keyboard is the old-fashioned kind where if you want to type the letter c you have to press the number one three times it's incredibly laborious to leave messages back in the day i can remember using that kind of keyboard and having two thumbs of being able to type really rapidly that is another ability that did not come back the one thing that has come back and i kind of love it surprisingly is boredom now if a train is late or i'm in a queue or whatever so i'd have no recourse to duolingo or whatsapp or any of those other things that used to kind of beguile the idle moment i just have to stand there bored and there's something quite nice about being bored?

6:31Is your mind buffering? And there's something nostalgic because it's been a long time since I've been bored. Anyway, hope that didn't bore you. Frank, that certainly didn't bore us. My goodness, the effortless grace of his sentences. Boredom is your mind buffering. He used a technological idea to explain what boredom is. I have to say I'm completely and utterly addicted to my smartphone. I am probably massively overstimulated. I do have very strong rules about when I use it late at night. I try very hard to avoid it to the extent that I can. And I also try to put it away during weekends where I try to devote myself totally to my children.

7:06And I do think it's worth just spending a moment celebrating how absolutely amazing these little devices are. I mean, the line from the Google bosses who I used to cover for a living when I was the BBC media editor is that we used to have the printing press. Now we've got the printing press in our pocket. The genius of smartphones was brought home to me the other day when, for this BBC One documentary I'm doing, I went to a place in West London where I grew up with my mum. And my mum, when she came over, my dad loved the idea of English trees. And she wanted to get a picture of English trees to her family back home in India.

7:36She was a recent migrant. And what you had to do to get a picture in 1986 of a tree to India was take a picture on a camera, get the role developed and then put it in the post and then send it by mail, which took about seven or eight days. Now you can do it instantly by WhatsApp. And that is near miraculous technology. And I hope for all the concerns, legitimate though they may be, about the impact of smartphones on our lives, I hope we can all bear in mind just how absolutely astonishing and miraculous they would have looked at to people barely a few decades ago. Having said that, maybe we're over-dependent on them.

8:10And we're going to talk to two people now who've thought very hard about this in an academic and in a campaigning fashion. Jim Ang is a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Kent, an expert in the past, present and future of the mobile phone. and is going to be busy in coming years as human-computer interaction is completely revolutionised by artificial intelligence. And B-Ban Kidron is a crossbench peer, one of the UK's leading voices on children's rights, particularly in the digital environment. She's been campaigning on the regulation of social media since 2017. Also one of the nation's finest film directors, whose works include Bridget Jones, Edureason, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

8:45Jim, B-Ban, welcome to the Today podcast. Glad to be here. Hello. wonderful to have you both with us i'm very excited jim i've been immersed in your academic research over the past couple of hours in preparation for this podcast i'm very very keen to get into that just to just before we do that i must um declare an interest here which is that i know b-band kidron a little bit i'm going to go so fast as i've met her several times and i've never quite got to the bottom b-band of how you went from being one of britain's foremost film directors to being above all known as a champion of children's rights and i think this is probably the time to ask you.

9:19Well, so I, when I used to make films, I used to make feature films, you know, for a cinema near you. But I also used to make documentaries. And in 2012, when a smartphone became the price point that a parent might give one to a child, I noticed all the kids around suddenly changed. And I got really interested in, in what it was like to grow up here and there simultaneously. I didn't really have a view on what it was like. I just was interested. And I ended up spending hundreds of hours in the bedrooms of British teenagers filming whatever it was they were doing. And they were doing some great things and some terrible things and some very dull things in between.

10:04And somewhere along the line, I realised we'd invented a technology that we hadn't really thought about how it would impact on kids but it was the central technology of their lives and I just could not unsee that moment and I became a campaigner. And just before I bring Jim in what is your understanding of the way in which the past decade or 13 years since that moment in 2012 what's how has your understanding developed about the impact that smartphones are having on our children? What are they doing to them? I think there's two things. I think one is that I was like the middle-aged woman, you know, saying, hey, look at the new rock and roll.

10:46We've got to think about it slightly differently here. We've got to think about kids first, not after the event. And I think everybody's sort of woken up to that. But I am very concerned now that everybody's looking over their shoulder at social media as the last problem and they're not looking forward to AI, to the bots, to the friendship bots etc and they're not thinking about technology in all areas of children's lives. So I think I'm waving my flag again 10 years later and saying let's look forward not back always. We're going to get into how we look forward in just a moment. Jim you've written that our smartphones have become an extension of human cognition.

11:26What do you mean by that? Yeah, so I've been working in this area as a researcher for many years, mostly to understand how mobile phones and other similar technology can support our day-to-day life and increasingly in our healthcare. So when I talk about this idea of extended cognitions through our devices, specifically mobile devices, we're talking about things like our memories. For instance, we no longer need to keep an address book. Our memory has been extended and our ability to process information has also been extended because of these tiny little really powerful computers in our pocket.

12:06And it allows us to do a lot of calculation very quickly and also access information very, very quickly. And I would even go as far as saying our social condition has also been extended, our ability to connect with others not just with information has been massively expanded as well now this has lots of really interesting exciting opportunities but also potentially some downside we need to also pay a lot of attention to and and research as well and jim one of the things that you often hear said in the public domain is that people are hooked they're addicted to their smartphones and generally speaking including when i've interviewed b-man in the past this has been done in the context of social media when it comes to smartphones specifically obviously social media apps are on smartphones but can you just take us through the science to what extent are smartphones actually designed by their manufacturers to keep us hooked and addicted to them as a product i think it's really hard to talk about smartphone design without actually thinking about the design they facilitate all these social media apps and also not just social media apps but gaming apps as well which are particularly designed to be very very engaging so the design of the interface for instance this really frictionless interactivity you can double tag you swipe are very satisfying and and this really enable various app developers to take advantage of it Obviously, you can use it to design something different.

13:39But the reality of today's app design in terms of the business model of a lot of the tech companies is that they want more views. They want more click. And this smartphone design happened to just facilitate all these features for this social media app to work so effectively. And Jim, your research looks at human-computer interaction. and I'm fond of a little thesis which I like to air on this program and have done actually for a few years now about how humans and computers and their relationship has changed. And the broad, the headline of it, I won't bore you with the detail, but the headline of it is that humans use technology to master their environment and really to become sovereign on Earth.

14:20They became godlike, in fact. And increasingly, or rather in the last 20 to 30 years, it feels like the technology is mastering us. Smartphones are one example of that. Social media, which has us hooked, is another example of that. things like YouTube where you know 70 % of viewing or roundabout that is often what's recommended to us by the algorithm rather than what we originally searched for that's where most of the viewing is is your sense that actually we are outsourcing some of the fundamentals of what it is to be human to computers often without really thinking about it fascinating thesis you have I think we need to remember that technologies are ultimately designed by humans as well and they are more ethical and responsible principles in design and we need to be very aware of.

15:07And what I just said earlier is that under the current business model and under the current economic system where companies aim to create value for the shareholders, not for the users, then we end up having a situation where technologies are designed to maximize shareholders' value rather than maximizing our well-being. so I would not necessarily put the label on the technology being good or bad but I think ultimately it's up to us to decide where we are going from here. Yes absolutely. B-Man I'm really keen to talk to you about the as you said the future and the campaigns you're undertaking in the House of Lords but can we just spend a moment reflecting on your lessons while you've been campaigning on this issue for more than a decade because really B-Man the lesson you and I have discussed in the past and I've enjoyed it you know the lesson the last few years is that technology is extraordinarily fast these companies are exceptionally powerful they're very effective at lobbying these companies and regulation has been slow and it's always the case isn't it that democracy is playing catch-up with technology yeah I think it's right and I think that actually you know picking up on your theory about you know if we have outsourced to the computer then you know de facto, what we do is we make Zuckerberg and Altman mum and dad, you know, and I think that that's how we have to think about it is, yes, we try to bring things in.

16:36And I'm glad you mentioned lobbying, because I think that where Jim is right is that a lot of people, half the people in my phone book say, it's too late, we can do nothing. And the other half of the people say, it's too soon, we can do nothing. And those two things are the political reality. And because of the money and because of the level of interest, you know, of financial interest in the sector, it's very hard to move the boulder. There's nothing that actually says that we can't look at what we want from technology more swiftly. And I think one of the biggest mistakes we've made from a political perspective is to accept its idea of exceptionality.

17:18That is to say, these are businesses, these are products, these are games, and we treat them as if they are other. And I think that is our big political mistake, because actually, we do have rules. You know, we have rights, we have consumer rules, we have product safety, we have all of those things, except when we're talking about technology. So I should clarify that Mark Zuckerberg, people will know, is the founder of Meta, previously known as Facebook. Sam Altman, who you mentioned, is the co-founder of OpenAI, which is now significantly owned, though not majority owned, by Microsoft. But the argument that you often hear, B-Ban, and you have heard this in the Lords quite often, is that if Britain wants to be a leader in these technologies of the future, if Britain wants to unleash the power of AI, if Britain wants to have a Silicon roundabout in London or a special triangle between London, Oxford and Cambridge or the great technical universities of the North, it's going to have less regulation because actually it's less regulation that will attract the best talent and allow these companies to flourish.

18:20So there is a kind of national renewal economic argument that you often hear, which says if you want to compete with Silicon Valley, don't over-regulate. I do hear that very often. And in fact, Peter Mendelsohn mentioned this own yesterday. He said, we want to build the UK on the back of American technology, capital, and talent. And I think that that's a really interesting thing, that on the day that the king goes to support Canada in its sovereignty is the same day that another arm of government is saying, actually, we have to bend to the requirements of America. And I think that that is a very concerning thing.

19:02So it is interesting that that is said, but I think it doesn't 100 % say that actually the markets in which AI needs to be trusted, for example, aerospace, cybersecurity, you know, all these other places, these other places where we need trust, that's another market that we could choose to go in. And I also think that some of the deals that are being made around our sovereignty when it comes to the digital services tax, which I think we think is a bit wobbly now, or indeed child safety. I think that the electorate would have something to say about that. So, you know, these deals are not zero-sum game.

19:44There are pieces of the AI economy where the UK could be strong. That's particularly around data, health data, creative industries, education data and so on, and to sort of give away all our strength as bait for something that traditionally makes Silicon Valley money rather than the UK money is a complicated thing to do. But I want to get back just to say, you know, there's this big economic argument, which I think could be a bit more sophisticated. But in the end, I think Jim said something really important. This technology can be built to be whatever we want it to be. And this is not an anti-tech argument.

20:26And I heard a little snippet of what your excitement about your mum sending a picture back to India. I share that excitement, you know, just because it's been sort of somehow weaponized against children or weaponized against the user. it's not an anti-technology position it's saying actually how are we going to use this technology to make the world a great place for our kids to grow up and for us to inhabit and i think that is really important jim surely that's a fantastic commercial vacancy if someone could come up with a smartphone which had controlled access but was useful for say under 16s or one for under 12s to 13, you know, because 12 to 13 is very different age to 16.

21:11I just thought all around the world, there will be literally billions of parents who think this is a thrilling opportunity. So where are we at with the design of a potential smartphone, which is child friendly, whatever that might mean, Jim? Wow, childhood's kind of a long period. And we need to absolutely talk about how we will introduce technology, not just necessarily smartphone. We talk about AI, We talk about the internet in general. And I think we change the way how we deliver education to children. We've seen it during COVID, how we could potentially tap into this technology and deliver education.

21:50And this is particularly important for children living in a more rural area. Perhaps they have less access to the resources that you have in the urban area. And I think that there are opportunities and there is certainly financial economic opportunities for this tech company to do something positive through perhaps better education and better well-being. There's a lot of well-being apps now in this area. Some of them indeed are designed specifically for children. And there are ways to design applications, design smartphones, which are children-friendly. And in fact, if you design the technology to be children-friendly, most likely you will also design technology which are also applied positive to the general public as well.

22:36if you can design something that is not specifically designed to hook you in, to spend hours and hours on the internet, on the phone, doing something quite senseless, meaningless entertainment, if you like, or these short videos. And I think this power can be channeled elsewhere. Yeah, but I mean, if that's what the challenge is with smartphones now, designing better smartphones, better apps, what about where the smartphone is going, Jim? Because there was this fascinating story last week where Sam Altman, who B-Band mentions, announced a very big partnership with Johnny Ive, Sir Johnny Ive. And the thing that's so interesting is Sir Johnny Ive, who's an Englishman or Brit from Essex originally, educated at Newcastle University, he was the kind of spiritual soul, along with Steve Jobs, of Apple.

23:24He invented the smartphone or the iPhone, the iPad, tablet, iPod, and so on. And he's always, he's left Apple, and he's now working together with OpenAI, part owned by Microsoft. Apple's great rival, to try and create an AI-powered future post-smartphone. What's your sense, Jim, of what the kind of world after smartphones, which is still some time away, but the world after smartphones might look like? Are we moving towards more wearable technology where, for instance, some of the things that are done by smartphones will be kind of almost extensions of us physically instead? Absolutely. It's always hard to predict the future.

23:58And suddenly I can sort of draw some examples from research around the world in computing and software. hardware engineering. Certainly wearable is one potential area. And we've seen various companies like Meta and Apple trying to essentially design the next generation of the smartphone to be wearable, like glasses, virtual reality, augmented reality, headsets, where pretty much you have 24-7 screen access on your face. So that's one certainly potential area to move into. But even before that, to think about how we can redesign the way we interact with smartphone and laptop. Currently, we use our fingers, we swipe, we type.

24:48Suddenly, AI has potential to completely change that paradigm of how we interact with machines through perhaps mainly just chat in the way that we would interact with other humans through languages. And hence the success of large English model is actually quite important because we might be at the point where we will be about to see a completely different types of computer interfaces where the interaction between human and the computer will be more like the interaction between human and human. This points us a little bit towards the future B-Ban. So what are the campaigns that you're currently busily working away at from within the Lords, B-Ban?

25:32Because, you know, when we were doing this podcast last week, Ed Vasey, the Conservative peer who you know well, fellow member of the House of Lords, was sat here, and he basically wouldn't stop talking about how successful you'd be in these campaigns. You do have a bit of a track record. Are you currently working on a smartphone-free policy in Britain's schools? Do you know what? Well, I do think it's important that school is free of smartphone. And when I say that, I mean, I don't mean a ban, I mean a restriction. So that it's only used either for teaching, or by people who have a specific pupils who have a specific medical or emotional reason to have a phone.

26:07So I think that that is important. And I've been very frustrated by government statements that say, oh, yeah, but that's not the problem. The problem is use at home. But one of the things that we're seeing is that kids never get a break and it is one place where they are in fact supposed to be doing something else and it's supportive of teachers if it's the rule that they don't have to spend their time trying to chase people with their phones just on that point there's a very strange thing i didn't have to i didn't understand fully and someone who's followed this stuff very closely used to report on it for a living keir starmer was asked about this by kemi bedrock at prime minister's questions a few weeks ago maybe it was a month ago now and he said we don't need a blanket ban or blanket restrictions because most schools are doing it anyway.

26:51Now, I'd have thought most schools, a bit like how parents want a bit of help maybe from the law, I'd have thought a lot of schools would say it would be quite useful if there was a kind of statutory legislative enforcement of this because it would allow them to say, listen, mate, it's the law. You can't have your smartphone on you. Exactly. Well, you've just made my argument better for me. So thank you for that. And I shall be quoting that as I stand in the Lords. But exactly that. And I think there's another area that I'm looking for the government to do some movement on, which is about early years.

27:23I think we spent so much time talking about teenagers that actually we're seeing story time replaced by video and singing time, you know, by YouTube. And it's normalizing things that mean that kids are growing up thinking that their eyes should be on a screen. And that's got all sorts of developmental issues. For example, you know, if you babysit a kid of 18 months on the screen, they have anger management by the time they're five. And that's sort of emerging kind of research. And I think the thing that people miss is two things, really. First of all, it's about the opportunity cost. There's not anything wrong with a little bit of everything, even sort of mindless scrolling, frankly.

28:15You know, it can be relaxing. But the opportunity cost of a life totally embedded in the screen means you're not moving your body, you've not got any dream time, you've got not down time. And as Jim was talking about, you know, outsourcing of memory, with memory goes imagination. So there's all sorts of sort of developmental things that we need to create time for. And we've taken away a lot of those things and replaced them uniquely with this digital. I think the other thing is that, and this is an argument I had with previous governments. So just to be clear, I seem to be arguing with all governments, but they were so concentrated on content that they miss the point of design.

28:59And I would much prefer to see age restrictions around live streaming, meeting adults, real-time moderation, addictivity levels, privacy, you know, friend bots, et cetera. You know, I would prefer to see things around the features rather than around any kind of category of use, because then it doesn't really matter whether Whether it's your glasses, your watch, your phone, or indeed your ed tech that the teacher's brought in. Yeah. So hardware as much as software. Just before I bring Jim back in on that, it is worth saying, again, in the spirit of fullness and accuracy and impartiality, that I spent a lot of time reading this research.

29:41And I think 10 or 12 years ago, B-Man, people who had concerns, as you did, and raised them in public about smartphone technology or social media, we're often accused of trying to kind of turn all our childhoods into this kind of sound of music, kind of bucolic vision of us kind of gambling through the fields. It was all kind of cider with Rosie. And actually, the evidence now from around the world is pretty overwhelming that smartphone use slash addiction does have developmental detrimental effects. And one of the things that people like Jonathan Haidt and The Anxious Generation have talked about a lot is how it literally takes away time from other things, especially outside play, which are very, very important for the development of relationships, which is kind of the most important thing about being human.