Parental anxiety around AI? Here’s what you need to know 

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, parents have worried about how to protect and prepare their children for a future that will look very different from the past in which they grew up. Parents cannot predict what jobs will be erased and created as technology develops and evolves – adding yet another reason to be anxious about your kid’s future.  

In recent years, the advent of AI has turbocharged that parental anxiety. For so long, it had been a given that if a youngster attends university and earns a good degree, they are likely to walk a smooth path into a white-collar job. But today many graduates are struggling to find work that matches their skills. And while finding a job straight out of university has always been challening, the high levels of youth unemployment have left many policy experts wondering if AI is playing a role as companies are laser focused on pursuing the “productivity” promised by the new technologies.  

Economist and researcher Daniel Susskind understands these concerns. He has spent his career writing about the world of work, and as it happens is also the father of three young children. His new book released today (September 10th), What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI, explores how parents can best prepare children not just for a world of work that doesn’t exist yet, but also how to flourish as human beings with a sense of self and empathy. 

Speaking last week at The Conduit, co-founder and CEO Paul van Zyl asked Susskind how this moment in time compares to previous eras of uncertainty. Susskind responded by telling a story of how he attended a West Coast conference with dozens of leaders from AI companies. Each attendee was certain that in ten years’ time, AI will outperform humans in every task. Not only will AI capabilities outstrip human ones, but never before has so much investment poured so quickly into a single technology.  

As frightening as this sounds, Susskind offered reassurances that jobs that are centred on the process of creating something original rather than solely an “outcome” will become even more valuable in the age of AI. He cited the Sistine Chapel as such an example. For over five centuries, visitors to the Vatican have stood in awe of the time, skill, and patience that it took to paint that work of art. Jobs such as furniture designer, craft beer brewer, bakers, and jewellery makers will always be in demand because humans crave objects and art created by other humans.  

Another proof point, says Susskind, is the world of chess. There was great alarm in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Russian chess master Garry Kasparov – surely now humans would no longer wish to play the game! Turns out the opposite is true. Schools are filled with chess clubs. Where there will be further job growth is in currently undervalued sectors that rely on human empathy. Of the over 700,000 job openings in the UK right now, Susskind said a high proportion of them are in care-giving roles such as nursing, teaching, and social care.  

Susskind went further on this – what is now vitally important is teaching character. We never want AI making moral decisions for us. There may already be AIs being used to determine parole in the US, but reasonable minds can stop to consider whether we want machines making deeply human decisions of denying a human being liberty. He also clarified that AI should never be used in war.

Susskind does admit that teaching character can be challenging when not everyone agrees on what makes an outstanding person. Here a return to the humanities could be helpful. Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas wrote at length about how character is destiny. The old-school Socratic method of asking tough questions and debating the answers with your fellow classmates could go a long way helping students consider what it means to be a moral person in a time when technology is occupying an ever-bigger role in our lives.  

He also had a somewhat surprising take on screen time, social media, and AI: Not all screens are bad, he argued, as AI has enormous potential to make learning easier for the most disadvantaged group of students. Susskind does strongly believe that social platforms are harmful to a child’s developing mind and that strong limits such as no smart phones until 14 and no social media until 16 should be put into place. But he stresses that we should not conflate the harms of social media with the potential of AI.  

“All too often, we allow the harms of the former to cast a blanket suspicion over the latter”, he writes. In his book, he explores how AI tutors can deconstruct difficult math problems in a way that is specifically tailored to the individual student. He also believes that AI can help promote the humanities by teaching them in a different way.  

In his introduction he writes: “My own conversational history with ChatGPT is full of these sorts of lessons: an English lesson on the meaning of one of my wife’s favourite poems (‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ by Robert Frost) … a philosophy lesson on the argument in Plato’s Symposium on the nature of love, and a mathematics lesson on the intuition behind the Lagrangian function for solving constrained optimisation problems.” 

Susskind drew parallels with using a calculator. Children need to learn how to do maths and solve equations – and once they have mastered the basics, they are taught how to use a calculator to work out more complex problems. His “teach both, test both” model is an extension of this approach: Pupils should be taught how to think analytically and only then should AI be introduced as a tool to help expand learning.  

But there are pressing problems in the world of education. This week, OECD PISA scores were released and the results are not good. Reading, maths, and science scores have continued to plummet since COVID. Fewer children say they enjoy reading for fun, and students are experiencing difficulty understanding and reading long texts.  

Writing for The Economist, Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills at the OECD and founder of the PISA test, pointed directly to AI learning as a chief culprit for the decline. He argued that students who use AI for help summarising texts tend to get lower test scores than those who don’t, and they report lower levels of intrinsic motivation for learning. A recent study of 26,000 Chinese middle and high school students found that while AI helped improve homework, it lowered exam scores by 20 percent in six months and entrance exam scores fell by 18 to 24 percent. 

“The patterns are complex, and depend a lot on how AI is used, but the bottom line is simple: we do not get fit by watching sports, but by doing sports. In the same way, learning is always about cognitive struggle,” writes Schleicher.  

Although the verdict is still out on how or even whether AI can help students flourish at school, Susskind’s message about teaching children to become ethical beings is as relevant now as it was at the dawn of the industrial age. Each new technology presents different moral questions. Only those who have learned how to think deeply about the world around them will be equipped to make the difficult decisions that lie ahead.