Michael Bennet: “I am sorry I didn't have the chance to say thank you to our colleague from Connecticut for his speech tonight about…”

“I am sorry I didn't have the chance to say thank you to our colleague from Connecticut for his speech tonight about loneliness in the United States. I was grateful that he gave it and grateful that he is in the Senate and grateful to know that another parent of young kids has the perspective that he has shared tonight because I think it is so important. And strangely enough, I am here to talk about something similar tonight. First, Madam President, I will put it away because it is not supposed to be on the floor, but I wanted to come here tonight to talk a little bit about this smartphone and the world of social media, the world of machine learning algorithms and generative AI that has now been put at our fingertips. The rise of smartphones and social media is one of the most rapid, profound, and, I would argue, poorly understood transformations in American life in our entire history. If you had asked me when I was the age of the pages who are here, when I was growing up, and you had said to me: Someday, Michael, there is going to be a device--well, here is the device--there is going to be a device that looks like this; it doesn't even have a wire next to it, that would have been astonishing in and of itself. How can an electronic device not have a wire? But it does not have a wire. Not only does it not have a wire, but you can FaceTime anybody on Earth the way Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock FaceTimed each other.…”