Our Kids Are Growing Up in the Age of AI: Part 2
Let's encourage our children to build human skills... and to stay informed. That will prepare them to pivot and evolve as AI continues to expand.
This post is the follow-up to Part 1 about parents’ and kids’ concerns about growing up in the age of AI. Please check out both posts and leave comments below!
My previous post examined some of the fears that kids and parents have about AI—how it can be used for cheating in school (or can be the source of cheating accusations by teachers), and how it’s endangering future jobs and career paths, for example. But what should we do to mitigate the harmful risks?
Some in the media have been writing recently about how the humanities could somehow rescue us from the dangers of increasingly prevalent and capable AI systems. I’d love to think that it could be true, especially as a lifelong student of history, literature, and philosophy myself. But I’m not so sure this argument.
It’s all very well to say that we need “an army of thoughtful English majors” to help “sort out” the “colossal and dangerous issues about technology, as AI begins to take over the world,” as Maureen Dowd writes in The New York Times. But here are my questions: Who will hire these English majors? To do what? And how will it have any impact on the growth and dominance of AI?
In other words: Who will give the humanities grads paid work to create the ethics of AI, and who will make sure that companies use that ethical approach, rather than go straight for the profit motive that lies behind each new AI development? In a time when many large tech companies that had previously hired in-house ethics staff have since laid them off, how and where will these “thoughtful” folks spread their work to make an actual impact?
The most elaborately thought-out ethical and responsible approach will mean nothing if our technologists, corporate leaders, and political leaders do not collaborate on new rules, regulations, and guidelines that our government will actively enforce them. Here’s why it’s hard to be optimistic about that happening: Where is the ethics of, and the policing of, social media? Or, for that matter, of the internet? If you’ve listened to Bo Burnham’s terrifying and hilarious Welcome to the Internet song—as one of my daughters frequently has—you know full well it is the Wild West, and anything goes, no matter the harm.
Saying that the humanities could save us from damage caused by AI is almost like saying that poetry could save us from starvation. Poetry is a remarkable way of reflecting on our place in the universe and exploring our inner world, making it visible for others… an art form that truly helps us flourish as humans. I absolutely love poetry. But on its own, it doesn’t generate dinner on the table, and when given the choice, hungry people will look for a way to eat before a way to reflect and imagine. Starving people will privilege food about all else, and in the same way, competing companies will privilege revenue above all else. In our market-driven economy, corporations in technology fields want to make a product that will appeal to the market and generate revenue, their logical goal. If they don’t have laws, regulations, or other constraints to channel them, most companies will base decisions on market incentives. (Some companies will choose to be more ethical than others, but that will be a corporate choice that could set them apart in a market that will contain a range of options for consumers.)
The good news here is that AI risks and regulation are now a hot topic in the business world as well as in Washington. Just in the past couple weeks the Biden administration has gotten agreement on “voluntary safeguards” on AI, as reported in the NY Times on July 21:
Seven leading A.I. companies in the United States have agreed to voluntary safeguards on the technology’s development, the White House announced on Friday, pledging to manage the risks of the new tools even as they compete over the potential of artificial intelligence.
The seven companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — formally made their commitment to new standards for safety, security and trust at a meeting with President Biden at the White House on Friday afternoon.
It’s hard to know if this voluntary agreement will have any teeth, and it’s up to us—and our kids—to keep an eye on what’s happening. And even if one government sets limits, others may not—and this technology can be developed anywhere.
It’s important to add that there are many potential ways that AI could actually benefit more people, not least in rewarding the millions of us whose work and data is being used to train neural networks. A great summary of this appeared in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post. The crux of it: If AI uses your work in any way, you should get paid. Advocates for “data dignity” have been talking about this for years. If you’ve ever put content online (including all the photos and text on the internet—and who hasn’t contributed something there?) you could be due a paycheck, which Gordon-Levitt says should be thought of like actors’ residuals.
And of course, the whole promise of AI is that it can help more humans do more things, with fewer resources. That’s potentially amazing, giving us more tools in our toolbox, as long as we know how to use the tools wisely and without hurting a lot of people.
So: back to my question about how to support our teens and kids as they grapple with the future. I think the best approach is to emphasize how our kids can develop both “hard skills” in specific fields for their future careers, and also human/people skills. People skills are, in their essence, about being more pro-social and more human. This is a key Stoic pillar—humans are designed to work together for the “common good,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, much like a set of teeth chewing, or bees building a hive. Humans are part of a larger cosmos of others, and should learn how to get along. Unfortunately, these people skills are the tough to grow in our “chronically online” era, when people relate more to others via screens and less via real life interactions.
But they are what’s needed. Take just one minor example: Recently my kids and I were in a shop, when a middle-aged police officer came in and started talking with a similarly-aged store owner. Both of them were complaining about the younger staff members they worked with. They said these staffers couldn’t hold a conversation or relate to others, and were constantly looking down at their phones. The staff members were having trouble advancing in their careers because of this lack of social and interpersonal skills.
So maybe when it comes to tech and the AI revolution, the idea isn’t only to study humanities (which is still super valuable to individual people seeking flourishing), but to figure out how to BE A HUMAN in community with others, while staying informed about technical advances as best we can.
A human who can share and communicate, one who can express empathy and understanding, one who can work to relate to others no matter their differences. This also goes against the grain of our online and media culture that focuses on those differences and fosters hatred of “the other,” by the way.
Many human-centered work styles still exist for cultivating being more human: for example, design thinking (which emphasizes empathy with user needs); question-and-answer-based coaching (which I do in my work); and good bedside manner (necessary for the best doctors, and other helping professions).
Change isn’t new; in fact, it’s a constant. I’ve pivoted many times in my own career, going from academia to journalism to nonprofit/higher education communications and then research communications. And as I’ve made these career changes over the years, what’s constant for me—and will be for my kids and their whole generation—is to cultivate people skills. Not just transactional ones, as Seneca wrote long ago (i.e., you help me and I’ll help you), but ones focused on compassion and listening, and emotional intelligence. That’s at the heart of my work. And the secondary core of what I do is to follow the news and innovation, and to understand what’s happening, and what has been changing. It’s helpful to keep in touch with what’s in the zeitgeist, and that’s constantly shifting.
I recently read a fascinating story by a journalist who followed a man who lived to be 109, Charlie White. The guy had gone through all the stages of life and was affected by loss and change, and many shifts in his profession (medicine). The number of times and ways he changed and evolved after learning something new was inspiring, and could be a helpful role model for us and especially our kids, in this dawn of a new era of AI.
To thrive in this age, we can take a page from Charlie’s book, and learn to get even better at rolling with the punches. Cultivating the Stoic approach of making good choices in the face of our current (and impermanent) opportunities, and reminding ourselves to do the best we can in the situations that we’re in, will get our children very, very far. And in addition to that, building human-relationship-skills by developing our social connections can only help us be healthier and happier, as I wrote last time. That’s a Stoic concept, too: emphasizing how much better we do when we work together and help each other. These bonds can come in the world of other Stoics (check out the Stoic Fellowship and the Stoic Registry, as well as Stoicare and Modern Stoicism, if you have the chance) and among classmates, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and the whole of the cosmos.
Our kids can start building their pro-social skills now with the opportunities right in front of them to collaborate with others. They can do this by partnering with others in school, joining clubs and student government and teams where they interact and build community. It’s also wise for them, as they get older, to keep up with the news to see in which direction the wind is shifting for future work. They’ll likely have more than one career, and no one can predict what will be needed down the line. To sum it up: We still don’t know what changes AI will bring… but if our kids can stay human and stay informed, they’ll be as ready as anyone can be.