Helping Parents Navigate Our Kids’ Strange AI Future
So, why should parents care about AI? The last few years have been a wild ride for the AI industry. Even if you have no interest in the tech, you’ll be hard pressed to buy anything with a screen without getting hit by a wave of AI buzz words.
It’s so ubiquitous that it can be hard to tell what’s a real advancement and what’s just a rebranding of something you were already using. In truth, most of it is just hype, at least for now. But make no mistake, there’s a big shift happening all around us, and it’s moving forward at a breakneck pace.
If I had told you just a few years ago that you’d be able to type a description into a text field and generate an image of almost anything, it’d sound like wishful thinking. Not only is that possible today, but those images can be indistinguishable from reality.
This might seem like an amusing party trick to you, but you’re probably thinking:
What’s this got to do with parenting or my kid’s future?
Down the Rabbit Hole
I’ve always been interested in the latest tech, and I have a vested interest in keeping up. I’ve worked in high-tech entertainment and animation for the last decade and a half. With the latest wave of AI advancements, I was surprised at how little most people seemed to be thinking about the implications for their children.
For better or worse, AI will forever change a great many jobs. Or eradicate them entirely. There will also be some new ones. Regardless, this will effect what kinds of work you encourage your kids to aim for. At least if you’re paying attention.
A perhaps more immediate implication of AI is on your children’s education. No need to tell the teacher that the dog ate your essay when ChatGPT could spit out one in seconds. And don’t get me started on the implications for chatbot “relationships”. Sound silly? You’d be surprised.
So, you should ban your child from using AI, right? Not so fast. There are a multitude of conversations that need to be had about responsible uses. However, cutting your child off from these tools might have a similar effect to banning a teen from using the internet in the 90’s.
No Turning Back
It’s hard to even find a job today that you could do entirely disconnected from the internet. It’s a lot more work. But, as parents, we need to think of AI as a tool that our kids need to understand. They need to understand how it can be used well and how it can be misused.
For that to happen, we have to understand it ourselves. It’s hard to even talk about because things seem to advance daily. The image generation I talked about earlier may be cool, but we’re already moving beyond that into video and music generation.
There’s a whole host of ethical and legal ramifications with these particular applications of AI, but it’s hard to imagine Pandora’s box getting closed. Regardless of where things land.
With a field moving this fast, the best thing you can do is give yourself a good foundation to understand the basics of AI and the likely implications for you and your kid’s futures.
The Mamasaur has you covered. After enough AI research to bring on a minor existential crisis, we put together a bite-sized guide to give you a place to start without getting completely overwhelmed.
You can preorder A Parent’s Guide to AI and read it for yourself July 7, 2024.
The future is both exciting and terrifying. However, we hope this gets you thinking and gives parents a clearer view of our AI future.