Preparing our Children for the AI World
Preserving the Arc of Humanity
Bottom Line Up Front
The AI rhetoric has reached the proverbial kitchen table where parents are now wondering, “what do we do to train and prepare our kids to use AI in the AI-powered future? What careers and jobs do we prepare them for? How do we make sure they are ready for the future world they will live in?”
The short answer is, you double down on the traditional values and ways of being human and empower them to pursue their calling; you double down on the arc of the human story that has always been.
Why? Because if the AI story is true and plays out as planned, then the AI systems themselves will end all work and most current activity of humans. There will be no need to know how to use AI to do work, because everything will be done for us.
If that comes to pass, humanity will face a meaning crisis that makes the past 5 years and its preceding identity crisis pale in comparison. Far more important than knowing how to use AI will be understanding their identity, purpose, and value in this world; why we exist and what life is for.
But even if that doesn’t come to pass and AI is simply a platform that creates tools that augment human activity in specialized ways, then our kids still won’t need to know how to use AI today. Those specific use cases will be learned when needed and in augmentation to the foundational skills that can be learned today absent AI.
And regardless of both of those reasons, part of the value statement of AI and its agentic form, is that it requires no specialization to be used. You speak in natural language, and it translates that to orchestrate what needs to be done. What is to learn?
Yet Oxford, MIT, Harvard and other institutions have conducted studies that have concluded that the use of AI has a negative impact on our cognitive abilities and our psychological health. So it seems the data implies the introduction of AI into education and life is problematic in deep ways.
What about preparing our kids for careers in the future? That is something beyond our control or even our sight. The best we can and could ever do is help our kids understand their gifts, limitations, talents, calling, challenges, and opportunity in the context of their story, and to guide them to be productive adults that care for themselves and find true meaning and purpose in life, which is only found in Christ.
Some offer we should double down on the work least likely to be moved to machines, and that may be wise if we are looking at this through generalities. But I think that in the AI dominated future, human novelty will be the prize; man-made, human-led, human-produced, artisan, hand-crafted etc. The prize of the future will be the human of the past.
Now, possibly more than ever, I believe integrating intentional training in media ecology is critical for our youth along with building for them a strong foundation in and passion for deep knowledge, deep truth, and resilience to live it. We need to help them understand the proper role of technology in our life and how to integrate it to fit within our hierarchy of values, to be strong in mind and spirit to counter the negative effects of AI that will come. John Dyer’s book “From the Garden to the City,” is an excellent place where parents can start.
And most important of all, we need to build communities that reinforce this while enabling us to live it now.
The remainder of this article will dive into the details of this discussion, and we will review some published studies about the transformative effects of using AI before wrapping up with an expanded set of recommendations.
