Teach Your Children Well

Love it or loathe it, if you are not figuring out how to work with AI…you might as well join the hamsters 

Apparently, human intelligence has already been eclipsed by AI. And not just by a little. One comparison I heard recently was this: we are to hamsters what AI will soon be to us.

Now, I tend to think I’m at least a few notches above a hamster. Most days anyway. But it does raise an interesting question. What will AI make of us?

There are two points here. One for business. One for all of us.

First, the Business Point. 

Love it or loathe it, if you are not figuring out how to work with AI, you may as well find yourself a wheel to run in. We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law. Technology gets faster, cheaper, and more powerful at a rate our brains are not naturally built to understand. Now strap AI on top of that.

That’s A Moore-AI, as the Italians almost certainly don’t say. (Sorry).

I was speaking with a client recently about scaling their business. We started playing with a simple question: “What if you could remove almost all onboarding friction?” No repetitive emails. No manual setup. No training bottlenecks. No labour-intensive hand-holding.

Could you add ten times more clients a month? Maybe not. But it changes the conversation.

And that is the point. AI is not just a tool to make your current processes slightly faster. It is a reason to rethink the process altogether.

Now the Human Point.

  If you have children, you hope they grow up to be happy, healthy, smart, kind, and self-sufficient. So you teach them. You teach manners. You teach values. You teach them how to behave when no one is watching. You expose them, as best you can, to the good parts of society.

Now think about AI. Where does it learn how to behave? 

From us.  Every prompt, every correction, every interaction — it learns from people. From our priorities, our humour, our biases, our generosity, our anger, our curiosity. We are, in some strange way, teaching it how to think about humanity.

And if these systems really are going to become vastly smarter than us, wouldn’t it be nice if they inherited some of our better qualities too? Patience. Wisdom. Empathy. Curiosity. Kindness.

Maybe that sounds naïve. But parents have always hoped their children would become smarter than they were — while still holding onto the values worth preserving.

Perhaps this is no different.  

So teach your AI well, and feed them on your dreams.

Andrew