Thinking Out Loud

The Question They’ll Ask

The question I most want my grandchildren to be able to answer isn’t what can AI do. It’s what should it do. And why. And for whom.

What can AI do is a technical question. It has technical answers, and those answers are changing so fast that anything true today may be obsolete by the time my grandchildren are old enough to act on it.

What should it do is a human question. It requires judgment, values, an understanding of what kind of world we want to live in and what we’re willing to sacrifice to get there. It requires the ability to weigh competing interests and sit with difficult trade-offs without rushing to easy answers.

That question doesn’t have a syllabus. It can’t be taught through a worksheet or assessed through an exam. It’s learned through conversation, through exposure to difficult ideas, through being encouraged to think rather than just to answer.

If we don’t give our grandchildren the tools to ask it, we’ve failed them. Regardless of how good their AI skills are.

Mike

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