In an entertainingly written open letter to Hillary Clinton, Steven Johnson writes that, in the last decade, the decade of videogames in every home, violent crime has dropped more than in any other period of time. Car-jacking has been getting less and less common since the introduction of Grand Theft Auto, in which car-jacking is of course a major passtime. And US teenagers’ mathematical and verbal skills, as shown on test scores, have improved. Good stats to drop next time someone assumes videogames are destroying youth. Unfortunately,
Previous Post
lost camera Next Post
sexualised violence vs showing nipples 2 thoughts on “carjacking moving from streets to Grand Theft Auto”
Leave A Comment Cancel reply
Recommended Posts
Last night I attended the OpenAI Forum Welcome Reception at OpenAI’s new offices in San Francisco. The Forum is a recently launched initiative from OpenAI that is meant to be “a community designed to unite thoughtful contributors from a diverse array of […]
I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive. […]
Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – […]
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
Linn
I absolutely adore the discussions emerging from this big yooohaa named ‘Hot Coffee’! And it’s so nice to see people like Steven Johnson (although not suprised) contributing. I almost found tears in my eyes reading Game Evolution’s Duke Ferris’ article on the subject ( http://gr.bolt.com/articles/violence/violence.htm)
It is important to discuss this…and extremely important to study it here in Norway as well. But I honestly can’t get over the irony that it’s parents who are letting their 11 year olds play this game that are protesting the loudest. Seems banal to even have age limitations then!!! LOL!
Jill
Isn’t it hilarious? I’m particularly tickled by the grandmother suing the game company – she bought the game for her FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD grandson, despite its 17 and over age limit and all the huge warnings about the violence in it and she’s complaining that she didn’t realise she was giving him sex! Hihi 🙂