This story appears in the December 2025 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. The social-media era is over. What's coming will be much worse. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

Socialization is an essential development skill for preschool children. In collaboration with the LEGO Group, we developed Robert Robot, a simplified robot, which enables socialization between children and facilitates shared experiences when meeting for the first time. An exploratory study to observe socialization between preschool children was conducted with 30 respondents in pairs. Additionally, observational data from 212 play sessions with four Robert Robots in the wild were collected. Subsequent analysis found that children have fun as Robert Robot breaks the ice between unfamiliar children. The children relayed audio cues related to the imaginative world of Robert Robot's personalities and mimicked each other as a method of initiating social play and communication with their unfamiliar peers. Furthermore, the study contributes four implications for the design of robots for socialization between children. This chapter provides an example case of serious storytelling using playful interactions engaging children with the character of the robot and the mini-narratives around the build requests.

Every hour a child spends playing video games pre day raises their risk of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by 13 percent, a study suggests. There was also a correlation between watching YouTube content and OCD - with every hour spent streaming videos associated with an 11 percent raised risk. Yet, unlike other studies, the latest research found no association between watching films or movies or playing on cell phones. The researchers blamed YouTube algorithms and addictive video game content for fostering compulsive feelings in preteens. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 9,204 children aged nine to 10.

Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato, a masticated yuca drink, was passed around the room. I tried to refuse it as it came to me -- I had already shared an entire pot and was feeling woozy from both the alcohol and my full stomach. But this was a celebration and another bowl was pressed into my hands. The party was the last night of my first field trip to the Amazon in 2012.

When it comes to the digital workplace, the popular opinion, and fear, is that machines are encroaching upon human work activities and taking an ever larger percentage of this work away for good -- from the dirty and dangerous, to the dull, to decisions. Fortunately, this doesn't take into account the realm of possibilities created when work processes are reimagined in the context of mutual human-machine collaboration. By instrumenting the human and socializing the machine, we can redesign business processes to optimize the blend of human-machine participation and interaction -- and complete tasks far more efficiently than either could individually. Machines are stepping out from behind the cage, and humans are stepping into their worlds. As Julia Kirby and Thomas H. Davenport have pointed out in "Beyond Automation," rather than a zero-sum game, robotic automation can be thought of as augmentation, where humans and machines collaborate together to get work done.

Aging gets a bad rap. But disease, decline and discomfort is far from the whole story. Dilip Jeste, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at UC San Diego and director of the UCSD Center for Healthy Aging, is challenging us to take another look. In conversation with Nautilus, Jeste points out that some things get better with age, like the ability to make decisions, control emotions, and have compassion for others--in other words, we get wiser with age. The challenge to aging well, he argues, is to be optimist, resilient and pro-active, allowing the benefits of age to shine through.

Have you ever wondered how the Waze app knows shortcuts in your neighborhood better than you? It's because Waze acts like a superhuman air traffic controller -- it measures distance and traffic patterns, it listens to feedback from drivers, and it compiles massive data set to get you to your location as quickly as possible. Even as we grow more reliant on these kinds of innovations, we still want assurances that we're in charge, because we still believe our humanity elevates us above computers. Movies such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the "Terminator" franchise teach us to fear computers programmed without any understanding of humanity; when a human sobs, Arnold Schwarzenegger's robotic character asks, "What's wrong with your eyes?" They always end with the machines turning on their makers.

Mobile robots can help chronically ill children regain part of the normal school experience. Some kids are unable to attend school for months or even years due to symptoms, treatments, or recovery from serious illness. These homebound children typically continue their education by having make-up work sent home and (depending on resources) studying with tutors for a few hours each week. But they miss out on a key aspect of school: socialization. With today's technology, the definition of face time has changed.

AI has a long history of making fine tools, and an equally long history of trying to simulate human intelligence, without, I contend, really understanding what intelligence consists in: the ability to deal with the world, which presupposes having a stake in one's own being. The tools are very nifty, but I don't see how it is even possible to simulate having a stake in one's own being.

Unlike traditional firms, open collaborative systems rely on volunteers to operate, and many communities struggle to maintain enough contributors to ensure the quality and quantity of content. However, Wikipedia has historically faced the exact opposite problem: too much participation, particularly from users who, knowingly or not, do not share the same norms as veteran Wikipedians. During its period of exponential growth, the Wikipedian community developed specialized socio-technical defense mechanisms to protect itself from the negatives of massive participation: spam, vandalism, falsehoods, and other damage. Yet recently, Wikipedia has faced a number of high-profile issues with recruiting and retaining new contributors. In this paper, we first illustrate and describe the various defense mechanisms at work in Wikipedia, which we hypothesize are inhibiting newcomer retention. Next, we present results from an experiment aimed at increasing both the quantity and quality of editors by altering various elements of these defense mechanisms, specifically pre-scripted warnings and notifications that are sent to new editors upon reverting or rejecting contributions. Using logistic regressions to model new user activity, we show which tactics work best for different populations of users based on their motivations when joining Wikipedia. In particular, we found that personalized messages in which Wikipedians identified themselves in active voice and took direct responsibility for rejecting an editor’s contributions were much more successful across a variety of outcome metrics than the current messages, which typically use an institutional and passive voice.