I have to talk to my son about technology a lot. At eight years old, he uses tablets, headsets and gaming consoles that would have seemed like witchcraft to me in the early 1990s. He’s also more aware of technology in its broader, more cultural sense, often in ways I don’t particularly relish. It’s not ideal, for example, that he knows Elon Musk by name, nor that he sometimes asks what my favourite AI is.
He doesn’t have access to large language models like ChatGPT or Claude, but his favourite YouTubers do, and from them he’s imbibed a sense of AI as an important, perhaps even magical, thing – a notion I do my best to dispel.
As I’ve written about before, I think parents should resist the urge to beat themselves up over moral panics regarding the evils of technology. But I’m also innately suspicious about the motives and behaviour of the people in charge of said technology, nowhere more than when it comes to AI.
For all my tech optimism, I have yet to be convinced that the current zeal for AI is anything more than a bubble. At its best, as with machine learning’s applications in medical diagnoses or complex pattern reading, AI seems like a useful, even extraordinary, tool, albeit one vastly oversold as the solution to all life’s problems. At worst, as with its promises to make workers, scientists or artists redundant, it seems patently absurd, unless one views AI the way a billionaire seems to; as a tool for doing away with the difficult problem of paying humans for their labours, so that the wealthy may access skills, while barring the skilled from accessing wealth.
And, to put it mildly, when tech chief executives, politicians and journalists talk about the need to restructure education to facilitate AI, I’m afraid I hear the distant pop of a bubble bursting over all our heads.
I try to get the balance right. To tell my son the same thing I increasingly find myself telling my fellow parents: that our modern technological age is incredible, but not to believe everything one hears about its magical qualities.
I learned this balance when I was not much older than my son is now, since my dad was a PC hobbyist. His workplace didn’t have a dedicated IT department – few did in 1995 – so he eagerly served that purpose. This meant spending incalculable hours fiddling with dozens of machines he’d been made to take home, so he could discover what made them tick, and refurbish them back to broadly usable states.
From this, my brother Conall and I learned the exciting, frustrating rudiments of PC maintenance by the time we were leaving primary school. At 12, we were connecting servers via local area networks. Conall became adept at coding and still works as a software developer, whereas I used everything I’d learned to build a brief but lucrative mini-empire selling cracked copies of PC games to my schoolmates.
School was easy meat for such wheezes, since the education system’s approach to this same technology was so behind the times as to be laughable. My GCSE classes in ICT (the term IT hadn’t been adopted yet) were hilariously outdated. Large parts of our study materials concerned Electronic Point of Sale machines and how they worked. The primary use case of a computing GCSE – in 2002, I will remind you – seemed to be knowing how to fix supermarket registers and cashpoints.
To be clear, everyone in my class knew these materials were absurd at the time. I may have come from an oddly computer-literate household, but we were all online. Our main textbook included a quote that made the entire room roar with laughter, and which I’ve remembered, verbatim, ever since. “One day” it said brightly, in an exciting little stat box that crouched beneath a stylised image of planet Earth, connected with luminous green wires, “as many as five million people around the world will be using electronic mail”. This, less than five years away from the unveiling of the iPhone, was preposterously out-of-date as reading a science textbook expounding on the wonders of whale oil.
But I hark to it now – to the cautious, touching optimism of that statement, to the sprightly little graphic depicting an online globe. A futuristic thrill I’d like my son to feel, beyond slop-filled YouTube videos and frictionless, generative content. To remember that, for all its flaws, we now live on that planet, in that far-flung future, more connected to each other than its author could ever dream.