By Gene Mills, special to the Baptist Message BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) -- Big Tech is not your friend and does not share your family values. Now that I’ve said the impolite part out loud, let’s circle back to why that matters and what must be done about it. There are two significant and converging stories in the emerging technology arena. The first is the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) and the legitimate motivation for the United States to win the AI innovation race against China. The second is the reality that Big Tech has knowingly used its social media platforms to monetize ‘childhood attention and affection’ for over two decades, and it is planning to do the same with AI platforms. One current example: A New Mexico jury recently levied $375 million in civil penalties on Meta for misleading consumers about the potential dangers to children interacting with its platforms, namely Meta subsidiaries, Facebook and Instagram. Parents have known this instinctively for years, but the ruling confirms that Meta also understood long ago that its platform was exploitive and addictive to minors, and they continued to market it to children anyway. In fact, that was the goal – design the platforms to capture … [Read more...]