I just had a conversation with my daughter about AI and how research meant differently during my teen years. She is 13 years old and is in Grade 7, and over dinner she asked whether AI can become more intelligent than human beings. I replied in the affirmative, and went on to say that if their generation does not develop a reading habit and feed their brains this early, AI is going to take over their lives in the future.
That was said in half-jest, but I was serious in explaining how it could happen. In truth, I am anxious over the implications of my own answer. The current generation is too steeped in online games and social media that they don’t bother to read books or long-form articles anymore, especially non-fiction and science-based ones. When they need to write something for school, they Google or rely on ChatGPT to do the job for them.
My child’s generation (Z) is lucky their research sources are nearly all at their fingertips. In my pre-internet, pre-digital teen years, we had to go to the library to conduct secondary research, and had to interview actual people face-to-face or by landline when primary data gathering is needed. That’s why we grew up socializing with real people and loving libraries, even liking the tedious process of going through card catalogues, the musty smell of ageing paper filling our noses and stimulating our hunger for learning.
The availability and accessibility of so much information in the age of internet can have two opposite effects. On one hand, it can help educate greater numbers of people on knowledge that previously belonged only to intellectuals and lovers of esoterica. On the other, the internet’s convenience has made people lazier in stocking up on knowledge that would help sharpen their cognitive abilities and improve decision-making, instead consuming vast amounts of fleeting entertainment and graphical stimuli that distracts them from real learning. It is certainly one of the greatest paradoxes of our time that in the information age, our youth are depriving themselves of intellectual tools that would ensure they – and not AI – would be in control of humanity’s future.
As parents, me and my wife have succeeded in limiting our daughter’s screen time, narrowly preventing the type of smartphone addiction that has turned legions of youngsters into nihilistic, semi-suicidal basket cases. We have been encouraging her to use her phone to read up on social science topics rather than to hypnotically follow the Pied Piper of fantasy and instant gratification that is the social media. She will be one of those who will face up to the plausible threat of an ascendant AI going rogue and enslaving humanity, and we want her to have at least a fighting chance in helping stave off that terrifying eventuality.