THE TECHNO OPTIMIST'S GUIDE TO FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR CHILD

AI doomers and bloomers alike are girding themselves for what's coming-starting with their offspring.

- BENJAMIN WALLACE

JULIA WISE, a mother of three in Boston, published an essay last February that articulated a new kind of parenting anxiety.

Titled “Raising Children on the Eve of AI,” it set out to answer a pressing question that no bestselling child-rearing gurus had asked. “The families around us are still very much focused on the track of do well in school → get into a good college → have a career → have a nice life.” That reality, she suggested, would expire within her children’s lifetimes.

Wise and her husband, Jeff, think about this stuff a lot. They are part of a community, the Effective Altruists, that has spent years gaming out different AI scenarios, both the rosy and the highly destructive. For a long time, those scenarios didn’t feel applicable to their own lives. But as AI development has sped up, she and Jeff, who works in biosecurity and pandemic detection, have become more concerned about how their children (ages 4, 9, and 11) will fare. They worry about everything from AI making it easier for a bad actor to unleash a world-ravaging pathogen to their kids getting attached to an emotionally expressive superintelligence. “We and some other parents we know have been thinking, Okay, it looks like there may be big changes in the next decade or two. What does that look like for how we prepare our children for the world?” she told me.

When we spoke recently, Wise laid out several visions of the future awaiting her children:

1. They won't need careers because, well,

2. The world becomes a glorious post-scarcity utopia where no one needs to work and we all receive a universal basic income.

3. AI takes over most jobs, conventional careers cease to exist, and humans’ work is marginalized into limited roles.