AI Is About to Transform Childhood. Are We Ready?
With the introduction of GPT-4 and Claude, AI has taken another big step forward. GPT-4 is human-level or better at many hard tasks, a huge improvement over GPT-3.5, which was released only a few months ago. Yet amid the debate over these advances, there has been very little discussion of one of the most profound effects of AI large language models: how they will reshape childhood.
In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that.
As for the children, most of them will be willing if not downright eager. When I was 4 years old, I had an imaginary friend who lived under the refrigerator, called (ironically) Bing Bing. I would talk to him and report his opinions to my parents and sister.
In the near future, such friends will be quite real, albeit automated, and they will talk back to our children as directly as we wish. Having an AI service for your child will be as normal as having a pet, except the AI service will never bite. It will be carried around in something like a tablet, though with a design that is oriented toward the AI.
Recent developments suggest that AI models can be both commoditized and customized more easily and cheaply than expected. So parents will be able to choose what kind of companion they want their kids to have — in contrast to the free-for-all of the internet. The available services likely will include education and tutoring, text or vocalizations of what the family pet might be thinking, dancing cartoon avatars, and much more. Companies will compete to offer products that parents think will be good for their kids. Some of the AIs might even read bedtime stories (in fact, I've already heard of some of them).
Many parents may
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