Ask HN: How do you raise your kids in the age of AI?
What do you tell your growing kids in this age and time? How do you give your kids some certainty in an age that is lacking certainty?
What do you tell your growing kids in this age and time? How do you give your kids some certainty in an age that is lacking certainty?
> How do you give your kids some certainty in an age that is lacking certainty?
I don’t think this has much if anything to do with AI. It’s like my parents asking for advice on raising a kid during the age of the Pentium chip.
You teach them to be comfortable with uncertainty. One of the most valuable skills that a huge number of adults lack.
Show them that most things don’t matter a great deal in the long run. Let them do what they want in most reasonable cases.
Tell them you don’t know when you don’t now. Show them that being wrong is good.
At the time of the Pentium people could work as graphic artists, without competition from generative AI models. Education was the differentiator, that used to be a settled question.
People can still work as graphic artists, there will likely just be fewer of them.
Same as how Pentiums ended up reducing the number of some jobs and increasing the number of other jobs. Newspaper related jobs went down by a lot while computer programmer jobs went up by a lot.
There’s always competition coming from somewhere — and there’s always opportunity to be found.
What’s in your head (call that education if you like) remains the differentiator.
There are certainties only adults need to understand, such as we will die. However, my close friend's three little girls understand this following his early death.
The certainty that kids require is to know know they are loved and provided for.
As humans we all have to chose at some stage a worldview that believes we are material objects or there is a God. I have chosen the latter and brought my children up with the knowledge of the Bible. I am certain God is with me, this life will have challenges, and I will go to a better place when I die.
>The certainty that kids require is to know know they are loved and provided for.
I think kids start to ask more complex questions around the age of fourteen. Maybe it's now their turn to find out, maybe it is still our role to guide them.
Thanks for your answer.
My kids are hitting 30 now and I am adjusting to the change between being more of a coach than a teacher. They ask me questions about their work but mostly how to fix boilers and practical issues. I have pizza and walk with my son every week. It is in this place concerns are aired and discussed.
My wife and I most definitely guided them through their childhood and youth. You wouldn't give a child a car with no training. We all learn from someone or some media. My family provided for me but were not very close and they taught me very little. The fact you are asking this question Michael shows me you will be a big help to your children.
> and I will go to a better place when I die.
Just a nit: that's depending on Judgment, there's also a worse place afterwards.
Or nothing, but let's just respect the guys beliefs and leave it at that.
"Lacking certainty" seems to me to be very different from "age of AI" (unless you mean that AI gives confident answers of uncertain truthfulness).
There are two problems that you should address that I see.
First, how do you teach them not to believe everything an AI says? Well, how do you teach them not to believe everything a politician says? An advertiser? A peer? Do that with AI, too. It's not a new problem.
Second, how do you keep them from being emotionally attached to an AI? Give them hugs. Give them eye contact. Give them genuine attention from an actual human - lots of it - and pray that it's enough.
> Second, how do you keep them from being emotionally attached to an AI?
You can't. We (including people's kids) will at some point, to some degree, become emotionally attached to an AI.
The thing is to be clear about what that 'friendship' does for you, what you put in & what you get out of it. Be aware of downsides, privacy issues, etc. And then: enjoy.
On the flip side, such bonds are not exclusive with human-human bonding. You can have both. So hug your kids often while they play with their AI-powered toy doggie.
Every modern chatbot has a web search option. With ChatGPT you tell it to “verify that” and it provides live web results.
For mathematics, you tell if to “verify that with Python” and you check the code it runs.
> First, how do you teach them not to believe everything an AI says?
critical thinking is a thing, certainly. I am thankful to my late father, for having me taught the art of questioning stuff.
Education is incredibly important. Giving your kids al the freedom with AI without really showing its proper use is a big mistake especially at this day and age.
Teaching your kids about how AI is a resource, a tool, something revolutionary, or similar is the best approach.
I agree with you. Wish I could pass this message with a straight face and with absolute certainty.
We don't have AI. Nor do we have a path forward to AI. Feedfoward matrix multiplies are never going to be AI, no matter how much manual shit you wrap them in.
All we have is a more efficient search engines.
Id be more worried about your kids falling down conservative thought pipelines than AI.
Are all of the ai model benchmarks just made up? https://epoch.ai/data/ai-benchmarking-dashboard https://ai.azure.com/explore/benchmarks
The problem is that the benchmarks essentially test "is this data in the training set?" This methodology will never achieve any form of AI that is useful past a search engine.
A true AI shouldn't have any sort of informational knowledge about any domain, as it should be able to figure out how to get that knowledge (which includes building internal simulation if necessary), when asked a question.
> How do you give your kids some certainty in an age that is lacking certainty?
Lie?
Pretty much. Since "lacking certainty" has been the status quo for 90+% of the past few millennia of human history.
i don't think that this is going to be an effective strategy.
[random advice from the internet]
How do you give your kids some certainty in an age that is lacking certainty?
Good luck.“I’ll be there for you when you need it” is more than many ever get to hear. It’s not like the only thing, but there’s a big difference between those that say it and those that don’t.
Thank you. Good luck to all of us.
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