How do you prepare your kids for a world filled with artificial intelligence?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

In order to write her new book, I am not a Robot, my year using AI to do almost everything,

journalist Joanna Stern decided to invite artificial intelligence into every aspect of her life,

including her family life.

She has a wife and two sons, and on their spring break, she took them to Phoenix, where it's

easy to hail a driverless car. They rode in a bunch of them, including one that totally freaked out.

She brought home an AI-powered toy, which her four-year-old quickly tired of, and she says she realized

her kids will, quote, grow up never knowing a world without computers as smart as them.

I asked her how she hopes they navigate that world. Throughout this all, I was really paying attention

to the fact that all of this technology is going to get better and better for them. And in every part of

their lives, they're going to have less friction, that computers are going to do more for them,

and they'll be able to offload a lot of tasks to them. So in the case of driving, they might not learn how to drive. Or if they do learn how to drive, maybe they're not going to drive 80% of the time, right? That last 20% they'll take over, but the computer and the car will drive. Or education, maybe they're not going to be doing research

in the library like I was. They're going to just tell the chap about to do the research for them,

outline the paper, and write it, right? Because that's what my education chapter said. It's like,

yep, that's what these students are doing. And so there's less friction there. And so that was just

a theme that was really everywhere throughout.

Was there anything that was really a big hit in your family life? I, well, there were a few things.

I mean, there were certain things they hated. Like, my kids really did not like the AI toys. And I was so happy about that.

Like they turned it off, right? Like they turned it off. Like my four-year-old was like punching it.

So one thing that surprisingly stuck is we have this cooking robot.

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