Think of the Children
What will AI do to those most impressionable?
After last week’s piece on whether AI is actually making us dumber, I got two outstanding pieces of feedback:
My point about people’s cognition adapting to meet their society’s needs may hold water for fully developed adults; but what about the children who haven’t yet developed critical thinking, reasoning, and the ability to distinguish truth from hallucination?
As I said in the piece:
My personal opinion is, there are only two measurable things that actually do impact a generation's mental acumen: socialization and nutrition. And that’s cause we’ve seen how societies change and become stronger when these two core necessities are met; while the reverse is also true.
What makes me assume only nutrition and socialization have a significant and measurable impact on a society’s mental abilities?
So, today, I’m killing two birds with one stone, cause these two questions are quite related in my eyes. The reason why today’s children will develop uniquely adapted minds through AI is the exact reason why our current moment in time and the way we approach socialization will prove to be the defining factor in their development.
Before I jump in, just a disclaimer: I’m far from an expert in developmental psychology or neuroscience, take all of the below as just my interpretation of the stuff I’ve read; and of course, know that the final truth will probably have a million shades of gray in between.
I’ve written about our unfounded fears over the next generation’s ability to take the reins under other circumstances. Before our current AI-fueled panic, I wrote a piece called “Asemica” in which I looked at a very disturbing number from a very optimistic lens: “Gen-Z and Gen Alpha have the highest pre-industrial illiteracy rates”.
Now that societies and culture are coordinating en masse through the language of memes and shared experiences (presented as Tiktok clips), maybe it’s time to reconsider just how impactful a book or article are when their intended audience thinks in terms of slang, short form video and infinitely reproducible meme formats.
- Asemica, 2024
Being straightforward, we developed language to communicate our needs and track our growth. Though, it seems that written language is no longer able to keep up with our current needs, so we’re gradually doing away with it. Why read a lengthy text when a 60-second video or a meme will do the trick?
Yes, yes, it’s a shame to lose out on Dostoevsky and Cervantes. But their stories will always live on; the classics aren’t going anywhere. If anything, we’ll have more time and appreciation for them when we no longer need to slog through a 60-page industry report or a high school textbook. Media adapts, but that doesn't mean the crème de la crème lose out on their status just because society moves past their given medium.
And similar to the above, I always like to give future generations the benefit of the doubt when any alarming statistic makes the headlines. I refuse to believe the chain of society will be broken by an “incompetent” generation, because we’ve all been that by the previous generation’s metrics.
I sure wish my elders had given me a chance to prove my point when I was growing up. How many of us growing up in the 90s-00s wished we didn’t have to justify using a calculator or googling the answer to a question? They always said you wouldn’t have a calculator in your pocket, or access to the internet at any moment - cue the smartphone.
Even my dad used to tell me stories about having to hide comic books under his mattress in the 50s because his dad thought they’d ruin his brain.
TV, Radio, Pulp Fiction (not the movie), the internet. This century has seen such a rapid pace of technological development that practically every generation has had to deal with entirely different circumstances from the previous.
And there’s always some technology that “puts them at risk”.
Why don’t we cut them some slack?
I spoke about much of the same in my last piece, but that’s to nail the point home. Every generation has been underprepared for the baton they got passed, and every generation somehow manages to make it work in some way or another.
Sure, it’s never perfect, some generations do better in promoting culture while others do well in the economic or political sense; that’s just humans for you, we’re never gonna do a perfect job at anything.
But what matters is our ability to participate in our society has nothing to do with the technology of our times, and that ability is what ends up mattering in the long run.
So, how does a generation stack up in terms of how active a role they play in shaping the world? That’s where we come full circle.
There are only two things in my mind that affect a populace’s ability for agency:
Nutrition: as in, the capacity to fulfil their core needs, be satisfied enough yet hungry enough. You can’t start a revolution if you’re too malnourished to fight or too derelict to think of a better future.
Socialization: The drive to coordinate, to build together, to learn from one another or to butt heads with those who disagree. The Renaissance happened because we finally got to say no to institutions; the Enlightenment arose because of people sitting down in cafés and arguing until dawn.
It’s been recorded that, even when properly treated and provided for, so-called “Feral Children” (i.e., raised in the wild, be it by wild animals, or in isolation), have never managed to integrate into society.
There seems to be a missing link in these children’s development because they didn’t get to interact with other people, to practice what’s a no-no during playtime, biting another child’s arm, and getting scolded in kindergarten. It all matters a lot more than we realize.
It is a theory of mine, that I’ll do my best to elaborate in the future, that this initial socialization through experimentation and mimicry is where children first develop what we call “consciousness”. But this is a topic for another day.
The point is. Children need to be around other people, as often as possible, and with as much diversity of experience as possible. That’s what truly hinders a child’s ability to develop and integrate into society as an adult.
Japan’s generation of Hikikomori, adults who can’t cope with their society’s expectations, is another example of how being able to play a role, to participate, and to understand how you fit in your community is probably the most integral part of a generation’s abilities to shape the future and be well adapted.
I could get political and talk about the American isolated youth, or how the need for public transportation and third spaces also plays a role in this, but that’s a point I feel has been driven home by now.
Same as it’s always been, a society thrives when its members feel like they’re all participating. That’s what I mean when I emphasize socialization as the biggest driver of mental prosperity on a societal level. We’re social beings, we need to be around people, doing stuff that we feel is useful, it’s hard-coded into us.
(Do not check how many times I said “society” in this section.)
Bringing it back to LLMs and a hypothetical “AI”. The children of today do have an interesting challenge ahead of them.
Not only did they spend their most foundational years in isolation thanks to COVID, they’re also being raised with an endless stream of YouTube and TikTok shorts, unrestricted access to chatbots, which they treat like their closest friend and confidant, and a society fixated on being perma-online on social media. To use Gen Alpha slang: they’re cooked.
No one’s denying how dire things look for today’s children. The part that I doubt is whether we’re being too pessimistic with their ability to step up to the occasion and grow past these terrible shortcomings in their development.
When I was a toddler, there used to be a phone line set up by a local newspaper called “Solomon”, after the biblical king. You could call this phone line at any time of day and go through a pre-recorded catalogue of daily news, history lessons, philosophy, and even bedtime stories. I remember being two or three, and my parents dialing up Solomon to ask it to read me Little Red Riding Hood. I think about Solomon often when I use ChatGPT.
Solomon is a cherished memory from my childhood, much like ChatGPT will be for today’s children. My nieces and nephews know all too well to say “please” and “thank you” when asking, “Chat,” which Pokémon would win in a battle, or how to get Santa to bring them their favorite toy early this year.
My generation was the first to have access to the wealth of human creation, knowledge, and vitriol thanks to the early internet. We grew up in esoteric personal websites, 4chan forums, and online porn. We did fine in the end.
My dad’s generation grew up under constant fears of nuclear war; the economic landscape was terrific, but the world felt like it could end at any moment. He did fine in the end.
We were all cooked in some way or another, some people struggled and still do to adapt and participate in the world, but most do fine.
Today’s children may be brain-fried to next Tuesday thanks to social media and LLMs. But they’re also being exposed to the same wealth of knowledge, they’re being raised by a generation that’s clawing back at in-person social life and spaces for discourse, they were born past the internet’s shiny object phase and will probably understand how to balance it out with touching grass better than any of us every could.
To our own credit, the one good thing Millennials and the older Zoomers are doing for today’s children is to show them what the utmost extreme of tech dependence looks like, and they’ll probably grow to reject it for nothing if not teenage rebellion.
We under-appreciate that while the younger generations are more tech-savvy than any of us, this also means that IRL activities will be seen with the same nostalgia and prestige as we see cassette players, vinyl, and running clubs. They have a very unique combination on their hands. I’ve obsessed over the “Human Centaur” concept for years, the practice of technology and humanity coexisting and amplifying the best sides of each. Call me overly optimistic, but when I think of a centaur, I picture a four-year-old knowing to ask Alexa or ChatGPT whenever they want to feed their curiosity.
It fills me with hope to know the next generation will all be the storytellers I preach about in every one of my pieces. Because they’re not worried about LLMs taking their jobs, or ruining their society. They’ll be raised under a system where these things are second nature; they’ll know when to use them and when not to, which is more than I can say of 99% of the adults today.
I feel that while we should definitely be doing our best to give our children a fighting chance in tomorrow’s world. Getting them to make friends, to resolve conflict, to understand not everything they see online is trustworthy.
But that doesn’t mean we should be afraid on their behalf because of technological change. They’ve got the same fighting spirit and desire for prosperity as every other generation before them has.