What to Teach Kids in the Age of AI? New Skills Aren't Key

Should you introduce your child to artificial intelligence if you, as a parent, don't understand what you want to teach them? In this conversation I look at how parents choose education for their children and what goal they set for themselves. What do you want to give your child when you send them to courses? How is a training session different from time with friends? And what changes when artificial intelligence becomes just one more way to look for information?

Using examples from family life, I talk about basketball, programming, children's expectations and parents' responsibility. And about why it matters to understand technology yourself before deciding for your child.

Introduction. AI for Children

– Should parents introduce their child to artificial intelligence themselves, explain its possibilities and value, if school doesn't teach it?

– This is a very interesting topic, considering that just yesterday we were discussing some question together with Igor, my son, who is ten. For the viewers: you, of course, know who he is. At some point he came back to me and showed me ChatGPT open on my wife's phone — he had got an answer in it. And then he says: "What else can I ask?" I told him something, and he dictated that further into ChatGPT. That was yesterday, some question. And we drove on.

You know what's most interesting? If you look at the fundamental question — our editorial team framed this question. In general, you're interested in the topic of how children interact with technology, with everything. But the editors put the question: should parents tell their children about artificial intelligence, since school doesn't teach it systematically?

So, in essence, whoever originally wrote this question has a feeling that the parent knows better than the school. That's the first thing. Because how do parents often think? That what we can't teach at home, school will teach. Or they say: "School today isn't modern. Go and study on some other course."

Five years ago I ran GeekBrains, and maybe ten thousand children were studying at GeekBrains. Those ten thousand children studied in programmes. For example, a programme was called "Game Programming", or 3D modelling, or developing some kind of graphics, or blogging. And what was actually happening? How do parents make the decision? A parent often doesn't understand the subject, doesn't know what programming is. Or, as in our case, doesn't know what artificial intelligence is, doesn't fully know what blogging is, what this whole saga is, how it is built structurally, from a business point of view.

Because why send a child to learn blogging and pay money for it, when Instagram has more than a billion users who learned to use it on their own, without any courses? If you send a child to some courses, you probably want to give them professional knowledge. To put some right things in. People send children, for example, to study graphics or design. So there's a feeling that on these courses the child will be taught something.

The Goal of Learning. What We Want to Give a Child

It's comparable to my son going to a basketball club. I don't like clubs at all, you know. There are a few, the only ones, that I agreed to by chance.

If we look at the example of basketball, we will see a very interesting picture: people want to send a child to some club because supposedly he will get something there. For example, the skill of playing basketball, or he will socialise with friends, or something else. This is a very important construction.

Remember, yesterday, on the way back from the beach, my son asks me: "Dad, can a teacher come to our house every day to work with me?" I tell him: "I need to think about it." He says: "Well, let them come once a week." I say: "Once a week is useless." And the first thing I told him: if you want results, practise every day for three hours at home, yourself, personally.

Number one in this story: you have to start doing it yourself, start living it constantly yourself. It's not a question of the club.

And when we say we sent someone to some club or told someone about artificial intelligence or about design, we need to look at what exactly we told the child.

At GeekBrains I didn't support the idea of children's education at all in the sense of sending my own children there. This is a very well-known topic, I spoke about it openly. At some point I enrolled Iolanta — in blogging, I think. No, it seems to me it was 3D modelling. I enrolled her just to see her reaction. Not so that she would get some result, but simply so that she would have some reaction, to see what reaction would arise inside. Your children didn't come to me, did they?

Clearly, there is a market where parents want to put their children into various educational programmes. Since this market exists, there's a company that sold this for many years. Well, okay, let's keep selling it.

But if we actually look at this question today on our channel, then fundamentally it stands like this: how do you, as a parent, basically realise, understand and perceive the subject you want your child to know? For example, if you believe your child must learn to work with artificial intelligence, then first of all let's look at what working with artificial intelligence is and why. And then, understanding these goals precisely and understanding the impact of artificial intelligence or new modern technologies on the child, we'll come to what the steps for learning these things should be.

Training or Socialising? What Result Are We Paying For

Take the example of basketball. My wife told me: "It's useful to learn a sport, basketball." I kept asking her: "Polina, what is your goal in the child going to this training?" And I showed her and explained that a one-off session at school in a mixed-age group, where kids come and simply play basketball for an hour, is just a joke. And for this joke you have to pay, I don't know, three or four hundred dollars.

She said: "But it's not a question of basketball, it's that he likes spending time with other children." And when she said that, I replied: "Listen, if it's for time with other children, I won't pay four hundred dollars for it. He spends time with children at school from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. If they want more time together, let them simply meet and spend it for free. Why pay for it?"

But if we start from the position that it leads to forming a concrete skill, a skill specifically in basketball, then that's another matter. If it's just spending time with friends, then friends come to our house every other day. We have several basketball hoops on our property, and they go out and play there all day, play football at the same time, jump, run, climb the rope, do something else, ride their bikes. So they have all sorts of activities.

The Parent and the Future. When We Don't Know the Answer Ourselves

A modern person asking what to teach their child in terms of technology is so lost in understanding artificial intelligence that they don't know what will happen to them, to their profession, to their life, or what lies ahead.

This is the main story in the question of artificial intelligence, or in the question of technology. What's more, it's not just that he doesn't know — all the people around don't know either. Literally yesterday Sam Altman spoke, and in one of his interviews he said: "I hope artificial intelligence will lead to such and such consequences." He said: "I hope." That is, he didn't express one-hundred-percent guaranteed certainty that this would definitely happen. He had a certain hope.

Or he was talking about raising his child together with his husband, and this is very important. He said: "My husband and I are raising a child, he is eight months old, or however many." And he said: "I don't know how people raised children before without ChatGPT. I couldn't figure out how he should hold a pizza, so I asked ChatGPT how to hold a pizza." He had a big question: eight months and pizza. But the story isn't that an eight-month-old was holding pizza in his hands. The point is that, in his system of perception, ChatGPT must take part in the upbringing and life of a child.

Then the question you could fundamentally formulate today would sound like this: not what we ourselves should tell a child about artificial intelligence, and not what they should be told about artificial intelligence at school. Because, obviously, in a huge number of schools, in most educational institutions in the world today, what they say about technology and artificial intelligence does not correspond to reality.

We have watched this over the last twenty years of very strong technological progress: people are told things that are unimportant, unnecessary, outdated, or told without an understanding of the structure. I studied programming from two thousand to two thousand five, that's twenty-five years ago. And I remember very clearly how twenty-five years ago I was taught programming from the eighties or seventies. You listened to that teacher and thought: why would I need to know all this? And at the exam you simply had to mechanically, thoroughly cram a book, on algorithms, for example. Cram it — not understand it, not figure it out, not apply it in life, but cram it.

Knowledge in Life. From the Museum to Electricity

As it happened, I taught programming to people on a mass scale — precisely where children studied, at GeekBrains. And one of my favourite tasks was this: those learning programming go to a museum, break down everything they see in the museum into entities and normalise that data.

Just as we are sitting in this room, and there's a huge number of different objects in it: different furniture, flowers, a person's sensations, some expenses that are needed for all of this. These are all different entities with different parameters. And you need to normalise these parameters in order to describe this space, lay it out, make connections: how the costs of plants are related, the costs of furniture, how furniture is related to plants. For example, can furniture be damaged by plants? Maybe, they could knock into it and so on. What animals are there in this space? What renovation has been done here, what are the costs of electricity, of light? There are also costs that aren't direct monetary ones but some other kind: something wears out, or, for example, the sun affects the furniture. So that a person anticipates a huge amount of this data in advance and lays out the structure of this database in order to manage it all.

By the way, I want to tell you: this task is very trivial for me, but basically, out of a hundred people who work in automation, one can do it.

– At best.

– At best, right? Because you yourself may not be directly in automation, but you've dealt with people you personally managed. You managed hundreds, thousands of people in this field. And you saw how they can't put this together and can't connect it. They'll ask: "And how is your dog connected to the sofa?" Directly! It rubs against a particular side of the sofa, that needs to be taken into account. Or it leaves hair. And also in this room we, for example, decided to film, and this is where electricity was spent.

I've always liked things that are applicable to life: so that a person applies it in their own life and truly feels what's happening. So that they remember that electricity is paid for. Otherwise you then spend thirty years of your life not switching off the light, because what's the difference — it's paid somehow.

In my family — four children and my wife — everyone is probably deeply convinced that electricity somehow pays for itself. I'm exaggerating, of course. I think some of the children think that: they don't even think about the fact that it exists and has to be paid for. And some don't think about how it happens, what the process is. And the process is serious. For example, in America you can choose the provider who supplies you with electricity, the provider who carries out the delivery, and the provider who originally produced that electricity. These are different things.

And in general it's good to have a basic understanding of this and to know how a house works: what an external switchboard is, what the five panels inside the house are, what breakers are in each panel, what a service breaker is, whether a breaker covers all the sockets, and so on. Look, I'm talking about simple, dumb technical or engineering things right now. How many people in the world really understand this? Not many.

So what are we saying today about artificial intelligence? Here's a thing people basically need. They could have told me about it at school. Maybe somewhere someone did, but what I clearly remember from school is something else: there was a bare extension cord in our classroom, and I put my hand on it. And what I remember for sure is how I nearly died because I touched the bare extension cord that was in our classroom. In tenth grade. In tenth, mind you, not in first or second — at an older age.

Technology and Its Source. What Lies Behind the Familiar Screen

So why am I giving such simple everyday examples? They may seem very elaborate, and everyone will say: "This is all obvious anyway." Because when we approach studying such complex things as artificial intelligence, we don't even get as far as understanding its energy, its energetic space.

We've had videos on my channel and on the meditation channel — about technology, about energy and the source of artificial intelligence. What is this source anyway, what does it hold inside itself? And how much do people who raise children think about what the source of energy of the internet is, what the source of energy of a computer is, or of Roblox?

There's the Roblox universe. How many children have learned to program in the Roblox universe? And why did they learn it? I have a big question: why, over the last five years, did children aged ten to fifteen learn to program in Roblox, if it's an absolutely meaningless skill that nobody needs and that only led to children staying in 3D worlds and in games? Why learn to program that? Look at it as a game. It's the same game, the same console.

And behind it, people wanted to hide the idea: my child spends time at the computer anyway — let him spend it at the computer usefully. He sits at the computer anyway, and here he'll be making games too. And in the end the child keeps playing and keeps spending time with the computer on what he has an impulse for.

If you look closely, there are children who have an impulse to study physics, maths and chemistry with the help of a computer. But the main impulse children have is to chat with friends, sit on social networks, watch videos on YouTube, go to some websites and read very strange, uncontrolled information, and play.

Most children, if you look closely, play. And most children in the world today won't be able to reinstall macOS — the system installed on their computer. They won't be able to do it.

– So the question isn't whether to use artificial intelligence and new technologies or not, and from what age, but what for? From what I heard from you, the most important thing in a person's life is to learn to understand everything in detail. And if you give a child artificial intelligence, even from a very young age, so that he can learn to understand everything that's hard to understand — you can't buy that many books — and artificial intelligence helps him understand, then on the whole it's a healthy thing. But if you use even the most advanced technologies simply to consume, it's harmful at any age. And the third thing I heard — it really struck a chord with me: parents need to learn themselves. Because right now I often pay for some courses for Kirill, sometimes without fully figuring out whether it's needed or not and what I want to achieve. Apparently parents need to teach themselves — what to say about the child, what to say about artificial intelligence. Parents need to figure out for themselves what energies reign in them here, why they want to give or not give a child artificial intelligence?

The Parent's Choice. Figure It Out or Just Pay

– You and I have spent a huge amount of time going through different methodologies for teaching children. Overall you've spent more time with specific methods and specific children. I've also spent quite a lot of time studying this, and we did it in our own way, through conversation.

And I want to tell you about the story you just gave, when you say: "I don't fully understand why I'm paying for some course." Some things I pay for or do for my children, or don't pay attention to at school, because I know I don't understand them. And sometimes it's easier not to pay attention, sometimes it's easier to simply spend three hundred dollars on basketball without fully figuring out what is actually wanted and what will really happen, and not to try to discuss it with the child properly, in a healthy way.

Because Igor's question, when he asked about basketball yesterday, was very simple: "I want to play in the NBA," he told me. But obviously, if you want to play in the NBA, then…

– You need ten hours.

– …then every day you have to do nothing but spend time with the ball. The ball has to become an extension of your body, the way a phone is an extension of the body for most people. That's exactly why they don't drop it, type easily and so on. The ball has to become an extension of the body. You have to become an incredible person with the ball.

He often comes out and says: "Dad, I just dribbled a hundred and fifty times with one hand, then with the other hand." I tell him: "We have a big slope there — run down that slope with the ball, with one hand, with the other hand, with two balls. And when you can run down the hill perfectly at high speed — and our kids can run down the hill at high speed without falling — while dribbling two balls, that will show your level." Then it's not a question of having gone to some teacher and practised. Then it's a question of what you can do with the ball, how you can move.

Plus, most of sport is a question not of basketball but of how developed your body is. How agile your body is, whether you can, I don't know, do a somersault. How flexible, supple your body is, how strong you are as a person. Yesterday we were at the beach, and Igor fell while doing a somersault when I threw him the ball, playing football. True, he cried a bit afterwards, he hurt himself somehow. But if I jumped like that and fell now, this interview wouldn't be happening. And I don't know what would happen. It would be a big misfortune and a big problem.

I had a very serious story in my childhood. I'll explain now in terms of artificial intelligence and children, I'll give parents a direction of thinking — I'm leading you to it very strongly.

I had a powerful story with my nephew. He was ten or twelve, he filmed a lot of videos, and at some point he would come home and say: "Now I'm going to make videos for YouTube and earn money." There was that trend — that you could earn money. And he kept broadcasting it very strongly. And I kept telling his mother and my grandmother — he was already spending a lot of time with my mother: "He will never earn money from this now, at this age, the way he is going about it. Don't deceive the boy. Why are you deceiving him?" Like, "oh, what a great idea he's come up with." It won't work like that. He won't earn money. It's deception, simply deception.

It's like a huge number of people opening their own business. Now it's clear about this — it's talked about from every corner. But twenty years ago, when people opened a business, others were often delighted: "Oh, you've opened a business!" And even now, by the way, there's a feeling that if a person has a business, they have a certain freedom or it's easier for them to earn money.

I was driving with Polina, and she says: "Listen, people live over there who simply don't have a business, they have a job, and it's hard for them — they could be fired." I say: "Polina, listen, if a person has a business and the business runs into a problem, then they're done for. Not only do they have a problem in the business, they can't open this business again, they're left with nothing at all. If you're fired from a job, you can go and get another job, but in business it doesn't work like that."

I see she doesn't have that connection, doesn't have that construction of perception. She has a slightly different construction of perceiving business. Why? She perceives business, maybe, from my side or from the side of some other people. Some other part of perception. And that's why often, when someone says: "I'm opening a business," people think it's a positive effect, but in many places it will be a negative effect. Just as in many places getting a job or doing something else will have a negative effect too.

And, of course, nothing worked out for my nephew back then, he didn't earn money, and at some point he gave up on that editing and on something else too. I'm not saying that some skill didn't emerge in him — of proper video shooting or certain actions. But he was definitely fed a certain deception. And this can leave a very clear, specific psychological trauma. I won't now use his example and say: "Look, here's his psychological trauma." But there will be a certain illusion here.

The main problem is that parents themselves don't understand this technology. Then teachers don't understand this technology, and people don't identify what goal they want to achieve with its help.

Access to Information. The Technology's Name or the Goal?

You gave the example that artificial intelligence can help find information or be useful in searching for information. Okay, then let's forget that it's artificial intelligence. Let's simply say that information can be found with the help of other people. Information can be found on the street, looking ahead. When you listen to the radio, YouTube, Apple Music. When you listen to friends, a teacher at school, a neighbour. Typed it into artificial intelligence or typed it into Google Search — it's not a question of artificial intelligence.

Then let's not look at it as artificial intelligence at all. It's simply where a person has access and the ability to find information, and what impulse they have: whether they wanted to open something, find information or not.

Did my son do the right thing by opening ChatGPT and asking a certain question? Yes, it's an absolutely normal thing. Someone will say: "No, that's not normal." So what should he have done then?

– Google it.

– Google it? Or go to the library? Do what?

– Do an experiment, some research.

– Or do an experiment, some research. But we can't do experiments and research everywhere. And he asked some question. Yesterday he came and asked: "Dad, how did the Warriors play?" They played yesterday, I don't remember against whom, our stadium is in San Francisco. I say: "I don't know. Ask Alexa or ChatGPT. It makes no difference to me whom you ask." He says: "Can you ask?" I say: "I don't have a phone." He goes: "Mum, give me the phone." And he asked — ChatGPT or Alexa, it doesn't matter. He went up and asked. What difference does it make what he asked how the Warriors played? Or he could have got a newspaper and read it in the newspaper.

Bans and Consequences. Who Is Responsible for Technology

And today this is one of the most fundamental questions there are. In many schools, for example, they ban the use of artificial intelligence, and around the world they now ban children from touching social networks. The question is: where were you before?

Why, in two thousand five, when social networks more or less started developing around the world, did you not introduce laws that would clearly and plainly state all over the world that children must not touch social networks under any circumstances? Everywhere. Instead of holding discussions for decades while everyone dived in.

And now they've passed a law, for example, that in Australia children under sixteen, or whatever age, can't be on social networks. In England, I think, a new law is coming out now too — it has almost come out, our editors will correct me: you won't be allowed on social networks until sixteen. Here they passed a law that is directly restrictive. You know that new laws were passed for Instagram now? I think they went through in the summer: Instagram has time limits, and Instagram is obliged to limit all that time itself. And, for example, my daughter can't go into Instagram at night and can't receive notifications.

But if we really look at an Apple phone, parental controls practically don't work on it. They work very poorly. Roblox, for instance, isn't subject to parental controls on Apple. And why is it done this way? Because all these systems want to make money, not to help a child develop. Their task isn't to help your child do something.

And fundamentally, in the social environment, across the whole world, the problem is that people are playing it out now — with artificial intelligence, or once with social networks — and don't try to understand in essence the reason why certain things appear and what will really happen decades ahead. People want to lean on some scientific experiment that never existed, on research that never took place. They want to lean on it.

Sam Altman's statement, by the way, a few days ago: most likely, people who are now thirty-five to forty-five will be able to steadily extend their lives to a hundred. Can you imagine what a problem that is? Nobody in the world still understands what to do with the billions of additional people, uncontrolled. Nobody understood why so many people appeared. Why a hundred and fifty years ago there weren't an extra five billion — or however many people, again, the editors will correct my numbers. Why did so many people appear? And now, it turns out, everyone has also decided: why don't we live to a hundred?

Or he also puts forward the idea that there will be no concept of pension, of retirement age. But you and I understand that our countries' systems have been built for decades, even centuries, so that pensions exist. That's how the system is built. That's how people's thinking is built: everyone has built an inner plan that they will have a pension, that they will stop working. That's exactly why they need to earn money, for example, for a flat, or to save money.

I was flying here on a plane with a man, and he was telling you that by retirement he would save six or seven hundred thousand dollars. Where was he from?

– From Novorossiysk.

– From Novorossiysk, yes. And he's a captain or what is he?

– A deep-sea captain.

– A deep-sea captain, yes. In Novorossiysk he'll save six or seven hundred thousand dollars for his retirement. So he has a plan. What do you mean, "there will be no pensions"?

– He actually lives by that.

– That's what all people live by. What's more, all states govern and manipulate through this construction of perception — through what will happen to pensioners.

How to Find Footing in Chaos. Start Figuring It Out Yourself

So what is happening with us now? Children who are being born now, or children who are now ten or twenty — we're talking with you about roughly this age — how will they feel at all when complete chaos and complete unmanageability are broadcast to them from all sides? At the same time, the state, parents, school, universities, politicians, economists, trendy, interesting people — everyone around says they know the answer. Scientists, doctors — they all know this answer. They say they know this answer.

Artificial intelligence, when we approach it from the point of view of teaching children, is above all an opportunity for parents to start waking up.

Whether it's great that they talk about it at school or not great; whether trendy teachers talk about it or about some absolutely old systems of development — or not. Otherwise you will find yourselves more and more in a system of absolute chaos, of absolute incomprehension of what is happening.

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