It’s not us versus the machines — it’s us versus us

What follows should feel like a pretty familiar setup where the old guard and the new thing battle it out (here it’s analog versus digital), except the film is more honest about how this plays out in reality. Lilypad isn’t wrong per se, she’s doing what she was built to do. Her job in life is to connect Bonnie to her peers through The Pond, Lilypad’s built-in social network, where the other kids already are. What Lilypad doesn’t realize (because the act of realization requires sentience) is that more connections don’t create a sense of belonging, and the path to getting to that special place is a very human and very messy process.

The irony is that it is in this messiness that some of humanity’s most consequential innovations have occurred, artificial intelligence among them. But humans have an old habit of building first and asking for forgiveness later, and when it comes to our children, the tools we keep deploying in classrooms and living rooms and on tablets we buy for 8-year-olds who just want to belong are doing exactly what we built them to do and there are some real questions as to whether or not the benefit has outweighed the cognitive, social and emotional disaster humanity has created for itself.

Here’s the thing, I don’t think the problem was ever the machines. Optimization looks like help and velocity for an adult who has already lived through the learning parts but for someone who has yet to do that learning, it too frequently becomes a replacement for the experience itself. We keep framing the debate as a war against devices, but, in reality, the debate has always been with ourselves and the blatant inability for the adults in the room to provide adequate levels of protection and governance for those who do not yet have the capacity to self-regulate.

Even if for many this feels like it’s happening at a glacial pace, a correction seems to be on the horizon. Gov. Newsom signed legislation in 2024 requiring every school district in California to adopt a policy limiting or prohibiting smartphone use on campus by July 1. Los Angeles Unified, the country’s second-largest school district, went further: After banning phones outright in February 2025, the board came back in mid-2026 with a unanimous vote capping screen time on all district-issued devices, with no screens through first grade, graduated time limits through high school, and no screens at lunch or recess regardless of grade.

Globally, UNESCO reports that 114 education systems have a national mobile-phone ban in schools, which represents 58% of countries worldwide. South Korea, one of the most digitally connected nations in the world, passed a nationwide classroom ban on mobile phones and other digital devices that took effect in March 2026. None of these countries can reasonably be considered technophobic jurisdictions in any sense of the word. They helped build the digital world that surrounds us all, and now they’re coming to terms with the ramifications of what handing largely unfettered access over has done to one, maybe two or three generations of humanity’s children.

It’s this question that “Toy Story 5” left me contemplating underneath all that great adventuring and imaginary play and hope and heartbreak and love. I love that the franchise has always understood that you cannot shortcut the experience of becoming a whole person. Jessie’s grief is about watching her kid move through a world that changed faster than anyone ever planned for, and deciding to show up anyway. The toys don’t get to choose how fast things change, and as it turns out, neither do we. But we do get to have a say as to which levers are built into the systems that our children live inside, and I’m glad to see parents, school districts and nations starting to insist that technology serve the child as that child needs it to, rather than for what adults gain from children using technology.