To the Young People Growing Up With AI

 To the Young People Growing Up With AI

I'm watching a documentary about AI, and halfway through, I had to stop.

I needed to have a conversation with AI about what I was watching, because something kept bothering me.

So this is what I want to say to the young people growing up with AI.

Please don't let AI become the thing that thinks for you.

Use it. Learn from it. Question it. Ask it to explain things. Let it help you discover information and ideas. But don't hand over your curiosity, your imagination, your judgment or your ability to figure things out for yourself.

Learn how to learn.

Once you know how to learn, you don't have to sit around waiting for someone to tell you what to do, what to think or what to believe. You can go looking. You can experiment. You can make mistakes. You can discover something nobody taught you.

That, to me, is one of the greatest gifts education can give a person.

And I'm worried about something else.

What happens when machines can do more and more of the work humans currently do? What happens when young people grow up thinking there is no reason to work, create, build, make art, grow food, repair things or learn a skill because a machine can do it?

We need to be very careful.

Because humans need purpose. We need something to get up for. We need other people. We need to make things. We need to struggle with something and eventually say, “I did that.”

We learned something about that during COVID. Isolation, boredom, loss of routine and disconnection were not harmless. Human beings need each other.

And while we're talking about the future, I want to tell you something about mine.

I was born in 1962.

My parents were raising a baby in Surrey during the Cold War. The Bay of Pigs invasion had happened the year before. In October 1962, when I was only about ten months old, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world frighteningly close to nuclear war—and Typhoon Freda hit the B.C. coast.

My parents couldn't possibly know what kind of world their little girl was going to grow up in.

And before them, my family had already lived through enormous upheaval. My great-great-grandmother, a Songhees woman, married my great-great-grandfather from the Azores. They had one child, my great-grandfather. He eventually had five children, and one of them went to war.

Another branch of my family goes back another generation: my third great-grandmother had 15 children and two husbands. On my grandfather's father's side, there were 11 living children. My dad was the youngest.

Think about that.

They brought children into worlds marked by colonization, the Indian Act, disease, poverty, war and uncertainty.

They didn't know what was coming.

And neither did my parents.

I had my own child after 9/11. I didn't know what the world was going to become either.

There has never been a perfect time to have a child.

There has never been a guarantee that tomorrow will be safe.

And yet people keep loving, creating, raising children, planting gardens, making art, building homes and imagining a future.

That's what humans do.

So when I hear people talking about AI as though it is going to save us, I have to stop and think.

Save us from what?

And at what cost?

We're building enormous data centres that require huge amounts of energy. We're mining more resources. We're consuming more. We're putting more and more of our lives into machines.

And at the same time, people are fighting those data centres because they are asking very reasonable questions about land, water, electricity and the environment.

We cannot keep saying “technology will save us” while ignoring the damage caused by building more and consuming more.

The Earth is not an unlimited battery.

AI isn't our parent.

AI isn't our conscience.

And AI isn't going to give your life meaning.

You have to do that.

So use AI as a tool.

Don't let it become your master.

Ask it questions—but question its answers.

Let it teach you something—but then go learn it yourself.

Let it help you brainstorm—but still have your own ideas.

And sometimes, close the screen.

Go outside.

Talk to someone older than you.

Talk to someone younger than you.

Grow something.

Make something with your hands.

Learn how to fix something.

Make art.

Get bored.

Be curious.

Fall in love.

Fail at something.

Try again.

Because the future has always been uncertain.

My parents didn't know what world they were bringing me into.

I didn't know what world I was bringing my child into.

And you don't know what world you will live in.

Nobody does.

But that doesn't mean there is no reason to live.

It means the future is still unwritten.

And maybe the greatest thing we can teach you isn't how to predict it.

Maybe it's how to think for yourself well enough to help create it. 🌎💙

#AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #FutureOfAI, #YouthAndAI, #CriticalThinking, #Education, #TechnologyAndHumanity, #HumanPurpose, #ClimateChange, #DataCenters