“AI is coming down the tracks like a freight train. It’s going to be a huge issue in our kids’ lives,” warned Jim Steyer, advocate for American children and founder of Common Sense Media in a CNN interview last week.
He’s right, and parents are right to worry.
I took Professor Steyer’s inspiring and popular class – “Children and Public Policy” – during my time at Stanford in the early 90’s. I recall his energetic teaching style and earnest desire to help American young people. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal named him one of the “New Tech Avengers” - a member of “an unlikely triumvirate of Silicon Valley insiders holding the industry accountable on privacy and addiction.”
We can’t stop the AI freight train, but we can try to prepare our children for whatever disruptions artificial intelligence might cause in their lives. We can begin to prepare them by strengthening their understanding of what it means to thrive as human beings living in a natural three-dimensional world. We can prepare them by taking more time to help them comprehend and appreciate their human selves and their relationships with knowledge, their environment, other human beings, and the transcendent.
“We are entering a time of great uncertainty where we are dealing with things we have never dealt with before. It’s as if aliens have landed, but we didn’t really take it in because they speak good English,” warned the so-called “Godfather of AI”, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, in a PBS NewsHour interview. “We should realize that we’re probably going to get things more intelligent than us quite soon.”
AI will present unforeseen challenges to human confidence. As adults, we know how it feels to live in a world without artificial intelligence, but younger generations may find it difficult to see beyond the limited view created by the AI-infused water in which they will soon swim. They may lose their sense of humanity.
So what is to be done? Here are five ideas we can implement today.
1. Help children understand their abiding value as individual human beings charged as stewards in the world of living things.
As an initial practical step, we can provide children opportunities to spend more time cultivating and interacting with the gentle side of nature. Parents can provide children with the opportunity and responsibility to nurture a pet, care for a house plant, or even tend a small garden. These activities may sound simple, but they can provide balance, build an organic confidence, and teach metaphysical lessons that can begin to inoculate children against the dangers associated with an AI-dominated world.
These activities develop a child’s sense of responsibility as a steward and cultivator of the natural environment, providing a foundational sense of purpose. Children know at the deepest levels that they’re doing good and becoming good at something that matters – supporting life.
We should also provide children more time and opportunities to gaze into the heavens and look at the stars - considering themselves in the context of the cosmos. For those who live in urban areas, that might entail deliberate trips away from the city lights, leaving their phones at home.
2. Help children develop a healthy relationship with knowledge and creativity.
Navigating the forecasted onslaught of sophisticated AI-generated misinformation will require children to develop an even keener sense of discernment and stronger critical thinking skills. More than ever, they will need to analyze evidence and formulate sound judgments.
A daily habit of reading with children can help build those valuable skills.
Regardless of a child’s age, we can help them become voracious readers of quality content. They need to read, read, read and build the storehouse of knowledge with which they will think, think, think. “If we want our children to be broadly competent readers, thinkers, and problem solvers, they must have a rich, broad store of background knowledge to call upon, enabling them to flex those mental muscles,” wrote E.D. Hirsch, Jr., theorist of education and Professor at the University of Virginia. “Learning builds on learning: children (and adults) gain new knowledge only by augmenting what they already know.”
During my years in the high school history classroom, I observed first-hand the difference in intellectual firepower between those students who had read on their own and enjoyed learning for its own sake over many years and those who only read assigned work.
We should collect and treasure good books and teach children how to build their own libraries. Take trips to the library or bookstore. Read with your child every day and discuss what you’ve read. Most importantly, make reading together a warm and joyful experience that reinforces positive associations with reading and helps form a habit that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.
Background knowledge also builds imagination and facilitates a child’s creativity. We should nurture that creativity by ensuring children appreciate themselves as artisanal creators who generate their own ideas and carry on the satisfying work that gives those ideas dimension and form - without interference from a digital intelligence. Perhaps AI will assist children’s creativity in some capacity, but we should teach our kids to value, trust, and build their own skills and sense of imagination rather than using AI as a crutch.
3. Inspire children to become active designers of their surroundings, creating spaces that celebrate beauty and facilitate joy and learning.
Children need to appreciate their power to actively shape the controllable aspects of the spaces in which they live. We can teach children to create and maintain order in the worthwhile effort to stave off chaos and counter feelings of helplessness. Parents and children need not tolerate the unremitting intrusion of digital objects. They can maintain bedrooms as places for sleep, study, and play - sans any screens, phones, or other digital devices. We can encourage children to include objects, images, and sounds in their spaces that conjure up good memories, bring joy, and inspire hope – without the presence of artificial intelligence. Such empowerment allows children to learn how to create a sense of “home” made just for humans.
4. Encourage children to strengthen and maintain relationships with other human beings.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly present in our lives, we can’t let our children become estranged from other human beings. When asked by Pieter Abbeel, host of the “Robot Brains Podcast”, if a future business owner might want to hire an AI rather than a human as CEO of their company because the AI “understands everything going on in the company and the world and can make better decisions,” Dr. Hinton responded without hesitation. “Why not? I don’t think that’s an absurd idea.”
Imagine a child turning to AI rather than to a parent or family member for advice. Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a loving parent.
Teaching children to cherish human relationships will help prevent them from falling into the abyss of loneliness caused by trying to connect with a non-human intelligence that does not love. We should encourage kids to build and nurture face-to-face friendships, understanding that relationships take time to develop and grow.
5. Help children understand the transcendent and what it means to lead a good and meaningful life.
We humans often ask how and why we came to exist and what to do with the finite time we have on earth. “Why and what then?” many of us wonder. Our answers to such questions and the faith we have in those answers help form the spiritual foundation for our lives. Children will need those strong foundations in order to avoid being misled by a machine mind shaped in part by the internet’s vast sea of human-generated refuse.
To be sure, some changes associated with AI may certainly benefit children and society – perhaps advancements in medicine and healthcare for example. The potential for good certainly exists.
But we can pocket those benefits while taking proactive steps to protect our children from the significant potential harms associated with an AI-dominated world. Some experts speculate the disruption to human civilization may compare to that of the industrial revolution or the advent of nuclear weapons.
The AI freight train is coming. We must ensure our children are ready.
It's right to be concerned. But we shouldn't worry about what we can't change. Do what you can. For parents, this means learning about AI for their own jobs. Where can they use it? How can it help their work? It will produce new opportunities. For kids, AI is likely to create wider learning opportunities, probably customized to the individual pupil. Of course there will be downsides but we'll manage them as they come up.
Wonderful advice! We are in unknown territory. On the one hand, it would be great if AI could do all the busy work, and we could tend to the things that make us human, but the economic implications are just so huge.