The Young Minds

If we learn to see things around us from the eyes of a kid, we will be more open minded to new things, and more realistic as well - no panicking, and no hype.

I have two kids - a 9 year-old and a 6 year-old. Every morning, I take them to school and on the way, we either chat, or listen to some music that they choose.

One day, my 9 year-old asked me to play the song “valhalla calling” (I have no idea how he got to know the song). I handed him my phone, and he searched on YouTube and played the first one on the search result. As we finished the song and YouTube continued to play the next one, he said, “oh yes, this is the version I heard. It is sung by the computer and it sounds so much better.”

My eyebrows rose. The song didn’t sound like a computer synthesized one, and I didn’t know why he thought computer synthesized ones sound better. But what surprised me most was that to him, computers being able to make music and make better music than humans does not seem surprising at all. “Intelligent machines” are a natural part of his “internal model” about the world.

On other occasions, I have shown them videos of robots from Boston Dynamics - how they dance, do backflips and wander in the wild; I have shown them tomato picking machines and robotic arms used in fully automated assembly lines. They were very interested and amused, and they asked lots of questions, but not once did they seem “shocked”, or say something “this is unbelievable!” When I told my 6 year old yesterday that someone just invented a machine called “sora” that can convert any text into a video, she said excitedly, “This is awesome! I want to make a video of Papa & me!” She was disappointed when I told her the machine is not accessible to us yet. But, she wasn’t shocked or surprised at all.

Seeing how kids look at things always gives me fresh perspectives.

My first perspective from connecting the above mentioned examples is about parenting. Kids take things they see, they have for granted. As a parent, I often am annoyed by this, because they don’t see the efforts by their parents, by the society behind what they currently have. Instead, they just want more of them. But kids take things for granted for good reasons. Firstly, they don’t have the history of how things evolve, and how you get to where you are, so it is unfair to ask them not to take things for granted. Secondly, taking things for granted allows them to learn & build on top of new things much quickly, without being trapped by history or parents’ past experience. So instead of telling them how much effort is behind everything that they have, I should do less of them, but give them more challenges to build on top of what they have.

My second perspective is that, maybe these technologies are indeed not wonderful at all. Sure, these are amazing achievements by adults’ standard, but compared to what the kids have in their world - animals that can talk, Jedis who can control objects with their minds, Santa who just knows what they wish for and delivers what they wished for through the chimney, Monkey King who can change into different things with a pole that can become as tall as the sky with a simple instruction - they really look dumb & clumsy. You can argue these are just things in the imagination, but how can you call something wonderful if they are well within your imagination? And look at the world around us - rainbows which are an arch of different colors hanging above you in the sky, flowers with different colors, shapes and sweet smells, and the feelings of running your fingers through the skin of a snake, a rabbit or a sheep - are these more wonderful & magical than we consider them to be? We are shocked by new technologies because our experience has constrained our imagination, and while at the same time, blinded us from the true wonders around us. If we learn to see the things around us from the eyes of a kid, we will be more open minded to new things, but more realistic as well - no panicking, and no hype.

As a parent, sometimes I am anxious about my kids’ future - will what they learn become obsolete in the future? How can I better prepare them for an unknown world? But you know, my new perspective is that as long as you teach them to be resilient, independent with good social connections, we should just let kids be kids - let them try and let them explore. Unlike current AI models which are trained by optimizing objectives defined by some adults and thus constrained by them, these young minds are driven by their own curiosity about the world around them, and they explore without being constrained. Someday when they grow up, they are going to make true wonders.

I am pretty sure about it.