Raising Children on the Eve of AI

One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones.<p>It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions.<p>Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the things that can <i>really</i> make the biggest changes.

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie.<p>I&#x27;ve learned to accept the situation, and realize that we can&#x27;t really predict what will happen so I just try be the best, happiest parent I can to my kids that I can. But I never anticipated the &quot;along for the ride&quot; feeling I have now. Financially planning for 3 years ahead seems quite impossible as I have no idea what type of employment will or will not exist then.<p>It <i>seems</i> like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. I say &quot;seems like&quot; because I have no idea if that&#x27;s real or perceived but it&#x27;s very hard plan ahead.<p>I&#x27;m kind of glad my child didn&#x27;t just finished university and planning a career in something that is ripe for disruption because that must be pretty heart breaking, especially because we bring kids up thinking they need a purpose, having a purpose (in my opinion) is a stupid way to live, but not everyone feels that way.<p>I can&#x27;t help feel a bit cynical too, like I&#x27;m kind of annoyed that realistically, the tech elite of the world are just throwing money at this thing like it&#x27;s no one else&#x27; business and fuck what anyone else thinks about it and fuck how it might impact anyone else because, progress, which at the moment, is code for, &quot;we&#x27;re about to make copious amounts of money using everyone&#x27;s IP, a bunch of open source software, and we might give something back, so fuck off.<p>I&#x27;m trying to put the cynicism down, look forwards and hope for the best.

This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.

I&#x27;m curious to know what people are going to be like when they&#x27;ve grown up in a world of things that are not comprehensible. Eg, I grew up easily understanding how films were made, but I wonder how a child&#x27;s character will develop when growing up with &quot;films&quot; made by something called a neural net - will there be eg a sense of detachment from the world around them? Will there be an extended period of life during which time children don&#x27;t understand things? What effect will that have?

It&#x27;s always astonishing to me when people talk about what they want their children to be or do and the answer is a list of soft skills. The Protestant work ethic really has done a number on some people. I always thought the answer is simple (though not easy), I want my kids to be healthy, honest, loyal and kind, what they do from 8am to 4pm is for them to figure out, but it&#x27;s not that important.

I&#x27;m much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction.<p>A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue.<p>I&#x27;m sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and &quot;natural&quot; disasters.

I think kids are a lot more prepared for this future than professional technologists probably realize. If you ask them today what profession they want to be, you often get “YouTuber” as an answer. Which might seem like a joke, but I think it’s actually quite accurate in terms of future professions. The jobs at most risk from AI are “anonymous” ones in which the creator of the work is unknown to its consumer. Writing, in a professional context, is a good example. Do you know who wrote the text on Amazon product pages? Probably not.<p>What is less at risk are charisma-based occupations, like actors or YouTubers. People are social animals and want to connect (or feel like they’re connected) to other humans, not robots. I expect the concept of an influencer to get even bigger.<p>Ergo, I would tell kids today to focus on social skills, filmmaking skills, and presentation skills.

A lot trying to predict the future. But kids need love and attention. And if you teach them to think for themselves there is not much more you can do.<p>As for the “should I even have kids” argument? Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. I’m sorry I’m an optimist.

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”.<p>I’m not surprised.<p>I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime.<p>I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child labour to visualize modeled outputs is traumatizing. It’s really made me wonder about how reality morphs into millenarian thinking.

Listen, I have 2 boys (6yrs and 8 months) and I&#x27;m doing all I can to buy a house and land to cultivate just in case. It&#x27;ll be really hard since everything is expensive but I&#x27;m hopeful things could get better if the war in Ukraine ends, the pending global recession start to fade away, and interests go down.<p>The end game here is to have just enough just in case AI comes to fruition and we all go bust.<p>I&#x27;m still trying to teach my children how to code, Electronics, etc... Since, well, that&#x27;s what I know. Other than that, I&#x27;m just trying to give them a head start in life even I didn&#x27;t have one.

I feel like the future pretty much has to be more local, in person, and human, and as much as you can interact with the internet as a utility rather than as the main source of interaction in your life it is for the best. That’s probably the best lesson you can teach your kids if you don’t want them to be part of society that just sort of permanently falls into the internet, always plugged in via goggles or brain implant and fed AI generated content, never to return. It already seems like there’s a group that is basically terminally online and it seems like it’s only going to get worse.

&gt; Partly because even in a world where it became clear that school isn’t useful<p>I don’t follow… In what world is school not useful?<p>I suspect the social value of school will become much more apparent soon.

Well at least you guys are lucky enough to have kids. There are us unfortunate ones who happen to just graduate at the wrong time. We, are eternal juniors, with niche skills within a narrow CS domain. So competition is extremely high for us.<p>We would be lucky if we get to survive next five years. There is no way for us to get into something tangible, if we are resident of relative south (asia, SA, Africa). Surviving for the next day in the developed world is the game we play.<p>How about home country? What is the point when globalization floods the local market. We were wiped out there, hence we had to leave. Everything we want to do, giant corpos do it cheap or for free. In relative south of the world, people lack money. So data privacy doesn&#x27;t matter. The concept of paying for software doesn&#x27;t exists.<p>In the developed side, existing is a dread with no hope. There are enough competent people joining the field who get more priorities. For eternal juniors like us, please show hope. Pretty you may find it difficult to relate to any words here. Anyone born in the west are taught to find their purpose, other countries not so much. It&#x27;s all about money because money solves 99% issue over there.<p>Username checks out.

I think the future predictions miss one major possibility: That ubiquitous&#x2F;powerful AI is available only to very few people (super rich and corporations) and everybody else is pushed back to basically subsistence living, where they have nothing of value to offer the other side of society because everything has been automated away.<p>So maybe sharpen your kids on their manual labour too

Life changed less than you think: The cobbler down the streets still makes shoes, the butcher next door still cures meat, the carpenter in the neighbourhood still builds chairs.<p>It’s just that the cobblers brother works in a bio-factories clean room, and the carpenters wife is a sysadmin.

My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea.<p>Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.

What happened to all the people who were saying AI is just a stochastic parrot and aren&#x27;t worried at all about AI?<p>Is it that this thread only attracts people who are worried about AI or is there an actual paradigm shift that all the nay-sayers are realizing they were wrong?<p>Serious question, don&#x27;t take it the wrong way if you were a nay-sayer. No offence at all.

&gt; Is it even ok to have kids?<p>According to me (utility function, etc) it&#x27;s <i>required</i> you have kids. Only in the 2.X statistical sense though, but if not what&#x27;s the point? You can&#x27;t condition all your problems out, but you at least have to play to not lose.