Can our children still prosper in the age of AI?

{"text":[[{"start":5.92,"text":"The title of Daniel Susskind’s engaging book asks the question every parent is pondering. His answer is unsettling: “we cannot be sure the advice we gave our children last year still works for the next.” Thankfully, he goes on to offer hope that our children can prosper if they embrace the “extraordinary” opportunities that AI brings, if they bolster their critical thinking skills and avoid the distractions of social media."}],[{"start":30.32,"text":"As fears swirl about the all-destructive potential of AI, prompting calls even from within the sector for slowing of the development of the technology, this book offers a mixture of optimism and realism on the question of what jobs and thinking humans may be able to do. There are no easy answers, but there may be plausible paths forward."}],[{"start":49.88,"text":"What Should My Children Do? is a warning not to resist the forces of change or underestimate AI’s potential. Even creativity is not safe: generative AI can design beautiful buildings, draft ingenious legal arguments, and generate stories that can make us laugh, not by copying humans but by “working in very different ways,” writes Susskind, an expert in work and technology with posts in Oxford and Stanford."}],[{"start":74.76,"text":"Many parents, he suggests, have taken for granted the rise of white-collar jobs. But AI is especially good at white-collar tasks. Crisply, he suggests that “the level of formal education that a person requires to do a task is a diminishingly useful insight into whether that task can be automated”."}],[{"start":92.36,"text":"That sentence made me gulp. As entry-level tasks are automated, he suggests that to ensure a continuing pipeline of future professionals, the white-collar world should adopt some classic blue-collar training techniques, notably the kind of apprenticeship where you shadow a seasoned mentor, and pick up complexity and nuance from the beginning. He advocates using generative AI to train junior professionals through the kind of simulations deployed in sectors such as engineering and Formula 1. “If simulated learning is good enough to train the next generation of nuclear power plant managers,” he writes, “then it ought to be able to do the same for the next generation of, say, accountants.”"}],[{"start":130.48,"text":"Further down the age scale, Susskind, a father of three, describes how his children and he used ChatGPT to generate a passable Dr Seuss-style story which they then had fun embellishing. This particular example felt overly enthusiastic: personally, I’d prefer to make up a bedtime story with my child without a screen."}],[{"start":150.76,"text":"Still, the book overall is a nuanced mixture of realism and optimism. For all AI’s capabilities, Susskind thinks we will prefer to watch human athletes and musicians than robots, trust human judges and politicians with moral decisions, appreciate handcrafted things, and value human empathy in healthcare, social work, psychotherapy, spiritual guidance and teaching. Humans are, after all, still playing chess tournaments, 30 years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov."}],[{"start":179.24,"text":"Susskind is passionate about overhauling education, arguing that using AI effectively is a new core skill. He calls for an AI curriculum that explains the history of the field and its originators, which teaches ethics and describes the very real limits of the different models, so that we do not blindly trust their output. We must learn to be “active critics”, because AI is very prone to errors, with uneven capabilities."}],[{"start":203.68,"text":"The author agrees with Tyler Cowen that one-third of every university course should be devoted to AI. When Susskind taught economics to Oxford undergraduates, he says, he would take about a third of their time to teach them mathematics alone — to give them critical skills they could apply in whatever else they chose to study. The biggest challenge, he thinks, will be to teach people to flourish using AI without setting them up to forget crucial basic skills, such as reading, writing, maths and scientific analysis."}],[{"start":232.48,"text":"He thinks AI will reinvent and radically improve personalised learning, and will do so throughout life. I hope he’s right, given how disappointing “edtech” has been."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":241.4,"text":"An argument which resonated strongly with me, and which parents can act on now, is the need to shore up our children’s ability to focus. A third of Americans aged 13 to 17 are on social media “almost constantly”, Susskind writes. Earlier generations had similar worries: when England introduced the universal postal system in 1840, people feared constant interruption with 12 deliveries of letters a day (the mind boggles!). But today’s technologies pose a whole new challenge because distraction is not a byproduct: it’s the business model."}],[{"start":276.76,"text":"Such sobering thoughts should not lead us into the defeatism of pushing the young to pursue whatever roles AI can’t yet take on. To do so, Susskind argues, is not only impractical, given how fast technology is evolving — it also diminishes what it means to be human. He urges each of us to focus on “who you are, not what you do”. We should think about education not just in terms of churning out more productive workers but also better citizens. That feels daunting, but also liberating."}],[{"start":305.76,"text":"What Should My Children Do?: How to Flourish in the Age of AI by Daniel Susskind Allen Lane £20/Penguin Press $30, 240 pages"}],[{"start":315.04,"text":"Camilla Cavendish is an FT contributing editor and columnist"}],[{"start":318.92,"text":"Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X"}],[{"start":329.76,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1789542135_2759.mp3"}