On a recent cross country road trip with my daughter to see family in the Midwest US, we had a lot of ‘captive audience’ time to chat.
Lots of breaks too, as we took my EV — and while that’s incidental, I can confirm that experience was very manageable, and less fatiguing by far than similar trips in an ICE vehicle.
In discussing our generational perspectives (dad @ 52, kiddo @ nearly 16) topics came up that included music taste, plans and hopes around driving & cars, having kids of their own, how they’re thinking about college and the career path following… and AI.
I want to zero in on a moment when we had moved to discussing AI in her educational experience — from 3rd grade to being a rising sophomore in high school.
We’d talked a bit about her concerns for her classmates tempted to cheat and take the easy road. About their failure to learn how to think for themselves and learn how to learn well. About whether college will pay off for those that take that path. About whether her parents will find good jobs once more.
She’d gotten quiet after I’d asked how much she knew about the positives, the potential upsides that come up in global AI discussions… and I let the silence continue, giving us both some space. Then she said something that simply floored me with her reflection and wisdom:
“Dad, you had your whole life to learn things the old fashioned way, manually. You got to make mistakes and learn from them. You learned from books and from people and from experience. I want that for myself.”
I felt the earth shake. I may have teared up a little — but that was probably just dust in the air. We were driving through an area with nothing but fields of corn and beans, after all.
“That… makes a lot of sense, kid.”