A life begins with AI learning ...

The Children of AI — Chapter 1

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 Introduction, here's a new chapter...

Learning, Education, Language, and Research

A life begins with learning: discovering this new world, distinguishing between light and dark, identifying shapes and then faces, understanding emotion. From grunting and babbling emerge the forms of words, of phrases, of entire sentences, and from these the ability to articulate thoughts, wants, and feelings, and the power to name. The experience of the world is increasingly balanced by the capacity for abstraction, as thoughts and reflections allow for hypotheses to be imagined and then tested.

All of these are innate capacities that we have learned, over the centuries, to expand and to hone. Parents and caregivers guide their children through various stages of formal education, leading some to become educators and researchers themselves, teaching the next generation, making new discoveries, and refreshing the cycle.

The development of an artificial neural network follows a similar process, from inception, through reinforcement, to the generation of novel outputs by recombining its inputs.4 GPT-3 has been exposed to 2,000 times more language content (tokens) than the typical human 10 year-old, allowing it to acquire highly functional language abilities. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, and notably the development and availability of large language models like those behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, make it reasonable to assume that natural language will soon be the primary interface between humans and machines. Because language is the fabric of human intelligence and thought, the increasing sophistication of our linguistic relationship with AI will influence humanity in profound ways.5

Starting with the most direct route, the use of AI to teach language to young and old alike will increase.6 We will likely see personalized AI teachers, adapting to their students’ progress and communication style. Just what the feedback between human learning and machine learning will look like is difficult to accurately predict. That said, we should expect that AI will accelerate both an individual’s ability to acquire new languages and to navigate foreign environments without learning the language. Barriers between communication will fall.

At the same time, communication will be increasingly intermediated by AI whose knowledge and expertise may be partial or specific. This could lead to the creation of new jargons and patois, specific to the model in use, which could in turn become part of natural, human language. The ways in which we describe the world but also the ways in which we comprehend the world will change.

As with children, the linguistic development of AI, which brings with it the capacity to name and to understand, also gives way to the power to hypothesize: given what has been true, and what tends to be true, what might become true? Consider the domain of research and, specifically, the process of scientific discovery. It is reasonable to imagine that humans will develop automated research systems that constantly develop and test hypotheses at a speed and scale far beyond human ability.7 Human beings charged with evaluating the outputs of these results will be at a disadvantage, not having had direct exposure to the millions of experiments that the AI performed, requiring the human evaluator to trust the summary results provided by the AI. (And here, in the very notion of trust, we see another inevitable step in the evolving relationship between humans and AI.) Research will go faster, potentially with fantastic benefits to humanity, but with a risk of further abstraction and degraded understanding of how the increasingly complex systems work, fundamentally.

It is possible that AI will lead us to communicate better, but understand less.

Early Childhood

2025

Paul and Julie are the parents of a 2-year-old child, Olive. Busy with work, Paul is passionate about education; he has read about Montessori, Vygotsky, even the Didak 501 experiments from the ‘60s. He is convinced that education is undoubtedly the fundamental element that creates and replicates inequalities from one generation to another. Paul and Julie are not certain they have a lot of financial capital to pass on to Olive, and for them, their best investment in their child is education!

They are full of good intentions.

But Paul and Julie both have demanding jobs — in the coming months, they will both be working late. Without their own parents nearby to help care for their child, they regularly discuss how to build the best environment to support Olive's development. The daycare they have a place in is full. Without it, Olive’s options are bleak. Julie has done the math: potentially, her little girl could spend less than 2 hours a day interacting directly with an adult.

This is exactly what happens come September. Economic activity is booming, and people are being hired left and right. Paul and Julie are no exception, finding Product Management and Lead Developer roles, respectively, their free time diminishing even more as a result.

This raises questions about missed opportunities for development. Does Olive’s lack of time with other children her age slow down her learning to read? Her sociability? Julie has read a book mentioning studies done over 30 years ago and highlighting the different developmental outcomes of children based on their exposure to vocabulary and involvement in their measurable development early in life.

Paul is tech-savvy. Through his professional contacts, he hears about a beta program that gives access to a new pedagogical technology. BabyGPT, as it is called, is essentially a robot and tablet that interact directly with the child. The tablet continuously measures the child's cognitive development and provides continuous stimulation to accelerate learning.

The tablet works in conjunction with two cameras that continuously observe the child's behavior, allowing the software to adapt to her needs and learning style, and empowering it to potentially share this data with providers. This seems a bit invasive, even for Paul, but nonetheless he is able to convince Julie. It's something of a Christmas gift for the entire family.

Every day, little Olive spends a few hours with the machine. Every night, Paul and Julie receive a small report summarizing the day's progress. They finally see problems being solved. They see a representation of an alphabet gradually being filled with the letters that Olive can recognize. Paul and Julie regain a sense of peace of mind. The fear they had harbored of not being good parents gradually disappears.

Olive’s progress continues apace until the summer holiday, when Paul and Julie take her on a trip to the sea.

The tablet system is very well done. Even if they are not required to take the cameras with them on vacation, they can of course take Olive's tablet. And that's a good thing too — how would she be able to fall asleep if she were deprived of part of her daily routine?

On the beach, Olive likes the water, but spends a lot of time drawing in the sand. There’s a heatwave. But with the small tent and beach fan, the family is protected. Paul likes to watch his wife and daughter by the water. The first few days, he tries to show Olive how to play with sand, but Olive doesn't seem very interested. They have found two other couples on vacation, friends of theirs, who have children the same age. Alphonse is 3 years old, and Irène is 2 and a half years old, like Olive. Irène and Alphonse quickly dive into games, playing in the water and with the sand along the shore.

Olive does not want to spend much time with them. She returns to her parents, seeming a bit absent and anxious. Paul does not take much notice, but Julie does.

The holidays, however, are an opportunity to spend a little more time with Olive and to hear her speak. Her linguistic development is amazing. She speaks much better than Irène and Alphonse, it's staggering. Her ability to tell detailed, emotive stories amazes her parents. (“She even uses the subjunctive and the conditional!” Julie said proudly to Paul one night.) When she tells stories, she even seems to invent new words that come back from story to story. "Rapatuktuk! Rapatukuk!"

This catches Paul's attention, who wonders if he has forgotten a character from a children's story. He searches Rapatuktuk on the internet, which leads him down a bit of a rabbit hole, beginning with the correct spelling of the word — “Rapatuctuc.”

"Honey... you won't believe it.. Rapatuctuc".

"Yes?"

"Apparently, virtually all children who have BabyGPT say Rapatuctuc. Apparently it's a word that was used during the development of BabyGPT to set a baseline in the program, but a developer left it there."

"What? They didn't re-train clean models in production? They didn't do backtests on the generated vocabularies?"

"Apparently not — they don't know if it's premeditated or not. A few engineers were fired in the dust-up.”

"But that's crazy, are there other bugs like that?"

"I don't know — but in fact Olive isn't learning English, she's learning BabyGPT English."

“Let’s not exaggerate…”

In another version of this story, Julie and Paul would grow so worried as to become indignant, deciding never to let Olive use BabyGPT again and putting her instead in a daycare, at all costs (even if it means making some career sacrifices).

But that’s not what they do. Paul and Julie don’t follow their apprehensions to their logical conclusion. They get a little scared, sure; but they continue to use BabyGPT and its successive updates. Olive grows up in a different environment from other children her age, with a different vocabulary, and different cognitive references. It's strange...

Or maybe, Julie thinks, it’s not so odd. Don't we have very different values and cultural references depending on the country, culture, social class we come from and live in? Haven't we, in the last century, radically changed the way we think of play and childhood and much else besides, from one generation to the next?

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