The American Psychological Association (APA) has released a report calling for developers to prioritize features that protect adolescents from exploitation, manipulation, and erosion of real-world relationships in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The report, “Artificial Intelligence and Adolescent Well-being: An APA Health Advisory,” warns against repeating the mistakes made with social media and urges stakeholders to ensure youth safety is considered early in AI development.

The APA expert advisory panel notes that adolescence is a complex period of brain development, spanning ages 10-25. During this time, age is not a foolproof marker for maturity or psychological competence. The report emphasizes the need for special safeguards aimed at younger users.

“We urge all stakeholders to ensure youth safety is considered relatively early in the evolution of AI,” said APA Chief of Psychology Mitch Prinstein, PhD. “AI offers new efficiencies and opportunities, yet its deeper integration into daily life requires careful consideration to ensure that AI tools are safe, especially for adolescents.”

The report makes several recommendations to make certain that adolescents can use AI safely:

1. Healthy boundaries with simulated human relationships: Ensure that adolescents understand the difference between interactions with humans and chatbots.
2. Age-appropriate defaults in privacy settings, interaction limits, and content: Implement transparency, human oversight, support, and rigorous testing to safeguard adolescents’ online experiences.
3. Encourage uses of AI that promote healthy development: Assist students in brainstorming, creating, summarizing, and synthesizing information while acknowledging AI’s limitations.
4. Limit access to and engagement with harmful and inaccurate content: Build protections to prevent adolescents from exposure to damaging material.
5. Protect adolescents’ data privacy and likenesses: Limit the use of adolescents’ data for targeted advertising and sale to third parties.

The report also calls for comprehensive AI literacy education, integrating it into core curricula and developing national and state guidelines for literacy education.

Additional Resources:

* Report:
* Guidance for parents on AI and keeping teens safe: [APA.org](http://APA.org)
* Resources for teens on AI literacy: [APA.org](http://APA.org)

Harnessing the Power of AI: Why Leashes are Better than Guardrails for Regulation

For years, policymakers have debated the best way to regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI) to prevent its potential risks. A new paper by experts Cary Coglianese and Colton R. Crum proposes a game-changing approach: rather than imposing strict “guardrails” to control AI development, they suggest using flexible “leashes.” This management-based regulation would allow firms to innovate while ensuring public safety.

The authors argue that guardrails are not effective for AI due to its rapidly evolving nature and diverse applications. Social media, chatbots, autonomous vehicles, precision medicine, and fintech investment advisors are just a few examples of how AI is transforming industries. While offering numerous benefits, such as improved cancer detection, AI also poses risks like AV collisions, social media-induced suicides, and bias in digital formats.

Coglianese and Crum provide three case studies illustrating the potential harm from unregulated AI:

1. Autonomous vehicle (AV) crashes
2. Social media-related suicides
3. Bias and discrimination through AI-generated content

In each scenario, firms using AI tools would be expected to put their technology on a leash by implementing internal systems to mitigate potential harms. This flexible approach allows for technological innovation while ensuring that companies are accountable for the consequences of their actions.

Management-based regulation offers several advantages over guardrails:

* It can flexibly respond to AI’s novel uses and problems
* It enables technological exploration, discovery, and change
* It provides a tethered structure that helps prevent AI from “running away”

By embracing this leash-like approach, policymakers can harness the power of AI while minimizing its risks.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineering team has made significant strides in developing soft robotics and wearable systems inspired by human and plant skin’s ability to self-heal injuries. Led by engineer Eric Markvicka, the team presented a groundbreaking paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation that showcased their innovative approach to creating an intelligent, self-healing artificial muscle.

The team’s strategy overcomes the long-standing problem of replicating traditional rigid systems using soft materials and incorporating nature-inspired design principles. Their multi-layer architecture enables the system to identify damage, pinpoint its location, and autonomously initiate a self-repair mechanism – all without external intervention.

The “muscle” or actuator features three layers: a damage detection layer composed of liquid metal microdroplets embedded in silicone elastomer, a self-healing component that uses thermoplastic elastomer to seal the wound, and an actuation layer that kick-starts the muscle’s motion when pressurized with water.

To begin the process, the team induces monitoring currents across the damage detection layer, which triggers formation of an electrical network between traces. Puncture or pressure damage causes this network to form, allowing the system to recognize and respond to the damage.

The next step is using electromigration – a phenomenon traditionally viewed as a hindrance in metallic circuits – to erase the newly formed electrical footprint. By further ramping up the current, the team can induce electromigration and thermal failure mechanisms that reset the damage detection network, effectively completing one cycle of damage and repair.

This breakthrough has far-reaching implications for various industries, particularly in agricultural states where robotics systems frequently encounter sharp objects. It could also revolutionize wearable health monitoring devices that must withstand daily wear and tear.

The technology has the potential to transform society more broadly by reducing electronic waste and mitigating environmental harm caused by consumer-based electronics’ short lifespans. Most consumer electronics have a lifespan of only one or two years, contributing billions of pounds of toxic waste each year.

“If we can begin to create materials that are able to passably and autonomously detect when damage has happened, and then initiate these self-repair mechanisms, it would really be transformative,” Markvicka said.