A Parent’s Guide to AI:

How will artificial intelligence impact my child’s education and career?

We recently sat down with Jake Donham, a veteran computer programmer who now works on Artificial Intelligence tools, to ask him about what role AI will and should play in our children’s education going forward. It’s hard to open the news these days without hearing about ChatGPT and other AI tools, so we wanted to understand an expert’s take on what critical thinking and technical skills are vital for our children to learn and remain in control of in their work versus where AI can legitimately be helpful–plus, should cats be concerned about AI? Take a listen.
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Hi Jake. Welcome. Please share with our readers your educational and technical background, and specifically your expertise with both AI and the humanities. 

Hi, Kit. Nice to be here. I studied computer science as an undergrad, and I’ve been working in the software industry for about 25 years. I worked at a number of different companies. Currently, I’m working at a company called GitHub that has some AI products. One is called Copilot, which is a code-generation tool that uses AI. I don’t have any particular expertise in the humanities, but as an undergrad, I thought about studying philosophy instead of computer science, and I took a lot of humanities classes, so they’re definitely important to me.

Wonderful. So let’s dive right in. What is AI? Explain it to us so we can explain it to our young children without them telling us that we don’t know what we’re talking about.

When people talk about artificial intelligence, it’s going back to this very old dream of computer programming, that we could make an artificial brain that could talk just like a human and maybe solve problems for us, and also maybe be our servant and do things for us. But when people talk about artificial intelligence today, what they’re mostly talking about is machine learning. That also sounds a little grandiose. But really all that’s happening there is people are using very fancy statistical models to predict things. So you might use a statistical model to predict if someone is likely to buy a certain product on a website, and then you might show them that product because you think it’s likely that they’re going to buy it. 

One form of AI that you may have heard a lot about recently is text generation, and so you might have heard of a system called ChatGPT that appears to be a robot that you can talk to. You can write English text to it and it will write you answers back. And what’s happening there is really just another form of statistical modeling. These systems have a very sophisticated model of how English text works and what words and letters are likely to follow other words and letters. So, just like if you were to say to me, “I’m thinking of a letter in an English text, what letter is that?” Well, I would say it’s most likely to be E because that’s the most common letter. And if you were to say, “I’m looking at the letter T and there’s a letter following it, what letter is that?” I would say it’s most likely to be H because that’s just how the statistics of the English language work. So, a model like ChatGPT is just a very sophisticated extension of that; it can predict text from a prefix. If I write a question or part of a sentence, it can use a sophisticated statistical model to produce more text.

Okay, but break that down for me a little bit more. Pretend that you’re at bedtime and you really want your child to go to sleep, but they say, “Hey, dad, I have a question. What is AI?” What do you say?

My kids always ask questions like that when it’s time to go to sleep. AI might seem like magic, it might seem like you’re talking to a person when you’re using an AI system, but it’s really not. It’s not magic and it’s even intelligent. It’s really just a lot of numbers and a lot of math and taking a lot of data and trying to predict something from it.

So, as you know, AI has been in the news a lot recently, especially ChatGPT. Perhaps you can clear up some of the common misunderstandings about what AI and ChatGPT in particular are and are not.

Yes. If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, it’s a system where you can ask questions about almost anything and get answers generated by a computer. And the thing to understand about ChatGPT is that it’s not actually intelligent. There’s no mind behind it, and it has no idea of truth or accuracy. It’s really just a system for generating text according to the statistics of the English language. So, when it gives you an answer, it can look very plausible. But you need to keep in mind that there’s no mind behind it. It’s just a big calculator and it isn’t something that you can trust without checking that the answer is correct.

So, trust but verify?

That’s right.

Let’s turn to our kids now. How is AI already impacting the educational experience of children? For example, are Grammarly, autocorrect, or prompts in things like Google Sheets and Gmail considered AI? If not, what’s the difference?

That’s a good question. Certainly, all those systems are using statistical models just like ChatGPT. They’re just generally not as powerful. So whether or not you want to call that AI might be splitting hairs, but the facts are that these systems have been part of our computing lives for quite a while now.

Okay, now let’s turn to the big question. How do you see AI shaping the future educational experience of children, as well as their adult job experiences? You have children yourself, so I’m sure you’ve thought about this. What’s the optimistic take and what’s the pessimistic take?

Well, the first thing I want to say is that, as with so many technologies, it’s often hard to put the genie back in the bottle. And there are lots of very well-funded companies pursuing AI in different forms. So, I think we can expect that it’s going to be part of our children’s lives and our own lives in the future.

I’ll start with the pessimistic take. I think that in a world where it’s very inexpensive to generate text, we’re going to be living in an environment with a lot more nonsense, a lot more falsehood, a lot more automatically generated advertising copy–things like that. And it’s going to be a more difficult environment than ever to understand what’s going on and get the truth. Another thing I worry about in this future is that the financial benefits of AI will not end up being very evenly distributed.

Let me turn to an optimistic take. I think we’ve seen over and over again that our kids have much more interesting and creative ideas of what to do with new technologies that we do. So, I think we’ll probably see–or I hope that we’ll see–a flowering of creativity and wild ideas in a world with AI. I also hope that in a world with so much automatically generated text, the ability to read carefully, think clearly, and write well will be more important than ever.

So, as a parent yourself, what skills do you want your child to learn and own in their education and work?

Well, I think the most important skills haven’t changed, and that’s to be able to think critically, to read carefully and skeptically, to think clearly, and to be able to do your own research.

It sounds like those skills become more important than ever.

I think it does.

Okay, but what would you feel comfortable having your kids delegate to an AI? Does this change as they get older?

I think it can be a lot of fun to play with ChatGPT and other AIs, and I feel totally comfortable with my kids doing that. But in a school situation, the goal is for them to learn, not to produce writing. And so I really wouldn’t want them using AI for any kind of school work.

It sounds like writing and critical thinking will remain key skills for children–and all humans in the AI future. How important have these skills been in your career as a computer programmer? Why should STEM-focused kids care about their writing?

Yeah, as a computer programmer, I actually spend relatively little time programming the computer. A huge amount of my work is communicating with other people, whether that be through email or Slack or writing design documents or documentation. So, it’s really important to be able to write well and clearly, and also to be able to read well and understand things.

I think STEM-focused kids should care about their writing because good writing is a way to make an impact. The best scientific work has no impact if it’s not communicated clearly.

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts, Jake. Before you go, we have one more question, from a June Writers student: Do you like cats and should cats be worried about AI? What do you think?

Well, first I want to thank that student for asking the tough questions and say that, yes, I do like cats. And I don’t think cats should be worried about AI because AI isn’t cute, AI doesn’t purr, and it’s not floofy.

Want your child to learn those critical thinking, research, and writing skills? Sign them up for June Writers Academy today.