Artificial Intelligence and the Formation of Children.
Visionaries are the ones who take an idea and turn it every which way to see if it would be such a good thing after all. Science fiction writers were often doing this kind of work. Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov speculated what things would be like if technology continued to advance. Their stories were not just predictions, they were thought experiments.
In 1942, Asimov wrote “Runaround,” a short story that later became part of his book, “I, Robot” that thought about machines that were stronger, smarter, and more capable than humans and if we made such things how they should be controlled. He suggested three “Laws of Robotics” and then wrote how the robots could eventually follow the laws and still end up producing consequences their creators didn’t anticipate.
We are edging closer to something similar with artificial intelligence.
A future dominated by AI is no longer unimaginable. In our lifetimes it is conceivable that most management, governance, and decision-making will be delegated to AI because it becomes faster, more capable, and less prone to error than human beings. It is possible that the bulk of interactions and communications that human beings have will be with AI companions because they become safer, more predictable, frictionless, and less messy than relationships with other humans. This can be extended to most areas of life where the expanding capabilities of AI far exceed those of humans.
The real danger though is not a flashy Hollywood script of machines taking over the world and dominating humans for their own benefit.
It is much more subtle and connected to human development.
Humans grow and become confident in their abilities by using them. We develop capacities through practice, coaching, difficulty, responsibility, and interaction with other people. One of the most fundamental of these is the ability to form relationships with others. It is one of the first capacities developed in human life and and provides the foundation for the rest of human development.
What happens if AI becomes so capable, convenient and better at many things than humans that we gradually stop exercising the capacities that make us human?
What happens if children grow up with AI doing the thinking, deciding, teaching, entertaining, and even relating for them? What happens if adults increasingly turn to AI rather than other human beings because AI is more patient, knowledgable, and less demanding?
The danger of AI is that it would eventually lead to humans that lose these abilities, completely dependent on AI.
The real danger then involves human nature.
What if there is an elite class controlling the AI while limiting their own and their offspring’s exposure to it, giving them power over a much more controllable remainder of the population. If AI becomes the infrastructure through which decisions about education, employment, health, economics, governance, information, and social life are made, whoever controls that infrastructure could possess extraordinary power over the formative conditions of everyone else.
It wouldn’t look like a robot dictatorship from a movie. It could be a highly efficient, safe, and comfortable society in which most people have gradually lost the capacity to function independently of the systems that govern them.
In the spirit of Asimov, I have written some laws that should be adopted to safeguard AI from deforming human development.
The First Law: AI shall not diminish the long-term capacity of human beings to form and sustain healthy relationships.
The Second Law: AI shall enhance human agency and development rather than make human capacities permanently unnecessary.
The Third Law: AI shall strengthen the human relationships through which people are formed rather than systematically replace them.
The Fourth Law: AI shall remain subject to meaningful human evaluation, correction, limitation, replacement, and repair.
The Fifth Law: AI shall be evaluated by its effects upon the developmental trajectories of children, especially where those effects are uncertain or irreversible.
The Sixth Law: No person, organization, or class shall possess irreversible control over AI systems that substantially determine the formative conditions of other human beings.
The importance is hard to overstate. The formation of children is already being affected by artificial intelligence that is constantly gaining function. The process is already in motion.