The first generation raised alongside AI tutors, companions, and storytellers is growing up right now. Their ideas about independence, authority, and imagination may look very different from ours.
By Futurist Thomas Frey
Children are beginning to grow up with AI tutors, companions, storytellers, and advisers. What happens when a machine helps shape their earliest memories, beliefs, friendships, and ambitions?
Every generation has had its classic excuse. “The dog ate my homework” worked for decades because it was simple, believable, and impossible to disprove. Today’s kids have a very different problem. The homework might not be eaten at all. It might have been written, explained, and checked by an AI before the dog ever got a chance.
But homework is the small story. The big story is that we’re raising the first generation of children whose childhood itself is being co-written by machines.
Every era has shaped its kids through technology. Radio gave children shared stories. Television gave them shared heroes. The internet gave them a window to the world. AI is different because it talks back. It answers questions, remembers conversations, and adapts to each child individually. For the first time, a technology isn’t just entertaining children. It’s having a relationship with them.
Continue reading… “The Dog Ate My Homework, but AI Wrote My Childhood”