#GenAlpha, #AI and ME

They are beautiful, blessed and bright. Each one of them is a universe in themselves and I mean it the way I say it. They love technology and are extremely comfortable with this piece of machine. They are very creative, a powerhouse of ideas and extremely confident.

Here are my lessons learned in the first few interactions of teaching this young cohort the principles of Artificial Intelligence.

1. Age is just a number - Best teams are indeed formed when we have representation across huge variety of ages. With age comes experiences that can both be useful for sparking creativity or limiting it. Having a mixed group of children from elementary to middle to high school enabled lots of creative juices flowing in the class and one thought led to the other. I do intend to experiment further and also add some more adults to the team. Let's see how that goes...:-)
2. Tech is a team sport - Like any team sport, everyone in a team has a very specific responsibility. Not everyone is expected to be playing defense and shoot at the same time. Similarly, as we did our little projects, I realized how every team player had a very specific role to play. Since this was non-competitive I think it motivated them further to take several risks without the fear of failure and challenged each other constructively to bring the best out of each other. They automatically settled in their undefined zones and someone turned into a storyteller, someone took over the laptop to start coding while the others used their written creative skills to describe what they were going to built
3. Empathy is the driver of innovation - You can't solve for anything unless you feel it. Having good ideas is always great but what if it is combined with a real cause. Team A came up with an idea of vehicles that could fly to minimize road traffic so no one was ever delayed to their destinations. Team B was working on an idea to manage an emergency in a hospital and make sure no patient was delayed treatment. Team C was creating an idea for faster communications in the moment as needed without dependency on any kind of form factor. When all the three teams combined their ideas into a global vision what they came up with is nothing short of sicken fiction in our current times. They imagined a situation that if anyone ever needed immediate specialist attention, this magical device could send a signal and anyone flying in the air at that time could be directed to land on the place to provide assistance.
4. Focus and depth is mandatory - while we talked about various topics, it was impressive to learn how they enjoyed hearing different AI ideas but desired to dig deeper into select few to get a better handle of the concepts. In the age of instant gratifications and constant distractions through social media over mobile phones, this behavior at the end of a long day on a weekend further substantiated that this generation is great at prioritizing and ready to embark on a few things that matter.

No one on this planet should fear losing their jobs to technology in the times to come only if they are willing to learn. In my tiny universe, I will continue to relentlessly contribute back to the cosmos and train as many as I can.