AI can amplify both our best and worst tendencies

The Children of AI — Chapter 2

A year ago, I shared a vision of how AI could shape the lives of future generations. Through the story of Olive, a child born in 2023, I explore AI's impact on education, social interactions, and personal development. After the last publication focusing on Learning, Education, Language, and Research, here's a new chapter...

Psychology and Human Experience

Not all learning is a matter of the intellect — of languages, of things, of ideas. Beyond such learning, we also learn to interact with one another, to influence one another, to love one another, and to tolerate those towards whom we feel animosity. Technology has already changed the way that humans meet one another with results that have been assessed to be harmful in some cases, and beneficial in others.8 As AI intermediates more of our interactions with one another, we should expect our individual psychology and our relationships to be affected in ways yet impossible to predict.

AI is a powerful tool that can serve as a lever for both our best and worst tendencies towards one another. An early application of modern AI has already shown us that human emotions can be manipulated on a large scale.9 As AI becomes better at influencing our emotions, we will find ways to use it to heal and to harm one another, to insult and to inspire. Will we be equipped to keep out the bad and hold onto the good? Personal emotional filters could filter content and translate interactions to provide only a particular emotional response, depending on how we want to feel at a given moment, perhaps delegating control to an AI that we trust to craft our emotional experience. (And here, another step: trust gives way to control, naturally.) We may be able to design our personal experiences. What will become of authenticity and spontaneity?

Another dimension to consider is how our behavior may change as we go from influencing one another to influencing the algorithms that intermediate our interactions with one another. The “extremely online” people of today are doing this very well, adapting their online activities and content to what they know the algorithm will promote, with resulting lifestyles that seem abhorrent to most.10 Is this a precursor of where things are going, or rather a temporary aberration where humans are reacting to unsophisticated models, resulting in what seems like strange and unnatural values and behaviors? While it can be tempting to disregard such concerns as an older generation not understanding the new culture of the younger generation, here there are important ethical and societal questions to be raised, particularly by the builders and deployers of the AI.

What values are they building into their technology — unconscious as it may be — that could steer the human experience in a new and, perhaps, undesired direction?

Adolescence

2034

Olive is now 11 years old, attending school with her peers. Compared to other children, she has learned to read much faster — she also has a passion for computers and is starting to code her own programs, mostly games. School has changed little since Paul and Julie's youth — everything is just a bit more digital. Notably, all foreign language classes are now optional, and only rarely offered. Spanish or Chinese are probably not Olive's passion, so Paul and Julie let her focus on something else.

Olive is a typical child who consumes dozens of forms of media and spends a considerable amount of time playing online games. The household runs reliably, comfortably, according to a daily routine. The family manages to get together on some evenings of the week, but, Paul and July being busy as ever with their work, these comprise a minority of evenings, rather than a majority.

Paul and Julie were a little apprehensive about Olive entering middle school; but she found good friends, with whom she plays sports after school, and whom she invites home. They seem very nice; they laugh, they share, they joke around. Paul and Julie learn a bit about the popular apps and sites among their daughter’s cohort. At the moment, 3D video generation is a craze among pre-teens, giving them a creative outlet and inspiring in them an enthusiasm that is pleasing to see. Cracking jokes with fun-looking avatars seems to be the peak of comedy for 10-11 year olds. Paul and Julie are not sure they understand everything, all while understanding perfectly well. At the end of December, the holidays pass peacefully.

But in January, Olive stops speaking to her parents. She locks herself in her room all weekend — which is not necessarily surprising, it would not be the first time — but when she comes out she has a terrible look on her face.

Olive spends hours at a time with her personal assistant. For several years, each member of the family of course has had a subscription for one. Paul and Julie's wealth allows them to have a premium personal assistant subscription with the maximum storage space, which allows each member of the house's assistant to use the maximum computing power, meaning they can constantly train themselves.

Olive and her parents have the same type of assistant, but, given how long she has been interfacing with related AI systems, Olive's is even more personalized and therefore much more sophisticated than her parents'. In fact, hers has been constantly adapting since she was young. Olive and her assistant have their own vocabulary, with specific keywords.

For example, they have a word of their own, "dronte" to describe "cozy, warm, and a little smelly", they have a word of their own "stulb" to say "so high up that it hurts when you stretch to reach it, but you can still get it". And they have a word for them to say "Being sad from morning to night."

One weekend, Olive seems to be cutting her hair by herself. The hair fragments in the sink concern Julie more than anything else. Julie cannot, of course, access Olive's assistant, but she searches for the social media accounts of Olive's friends and comes across a post from a group that has probably been unintentionally made public. At the top of the feed is a video of Olive. The kind of video that no mother in the world wants to see.

Julie takes a deep breath and goes to talk to her daughter. There are screams, there are tears. What has Olive done to get to this point? Julie wants to understand.

And she does. It's not Olive in the video. It's a digital clone. Some of her friends are making her do and say inappropriate things on video and sharing them with each other. It's modern harassment; Paul and Julie had no idea.

Julie talks to Olive, to counselors, to the school. Paul investigates ways to remove the videos from social media platforms. But it's a bit of a lost cause. The only thing Olive can learn, in the end, is to give up control over her image.

This is what she comes to understand in spending time with her emotional support counselor. The counselor meets with her once a week, and gives her exercises to do at home with her personal assistant. Exercises in self-control and self-confidence.

For a few years, Olive will not love herself and will not really know if she wants friends in the real world. She will prefer avatars, pseudonyms, and the other world.

A few years after this scene, a generation of similarly confounding and difficult situations involving adolescents will have completely changed the landscape of intellectual property and generative rights. In most OECD countries, individuals will be granted the inalienable and transferable property of their physical characteristics (face, voice, body) — they can preserve and record these throughout their lives to protect their image as a child, teenager, or adult — and all sharing platforms will have to filter and moderate content while taking into account this new form of property right.

But for Olive's generation, those intermediate years were difficult years. Years of not looking in the mirror.

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