Friday Q&A: Bringing Kids Up on AI with Daniel Susskind

0:00Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's G-O-O dot G-L-E slash workspace with Gemini.

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1:10I feel like I'm really, really warmed up for this chat. I haven't got Zoe with me today, which is a shame because I think me and Zoe always have really opposing views on this particular topic. Although maybe she's come around, so we don't know. So I'm not going to speak out of turn. But joining us on the podcast today, someone who really knows his stuff. He says he's been talking and writing about this topic for decades. Is that right? Something that when we talked about a couple of years ago on the pod, there were definitely two camps, lots of people who are against it, lots of people who are really intrigued by it and for it.

1:43We're going to be talking all things AI and particularly the impact that it has on our kids, how we could be guiding them, if there's anything we need to do differently. So joining us is writer and economist Daniel Susskind.

1:57Daniel Susskind: Such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I mean, I think you can probably tell I'm already so interested in this topic, as are the listeners from the amount of questions we've had. But just before we get into the chat, do you want to just give us a little bit of insight into who you are and how you came to start talking about this subject and then in turn writing your book? Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for having me. Real pleasure to be here. So I've spent the last decade and a half thinking about the impact of technology, and particularly AI, on the work that we do and how we all live together.

2:30Daniel Susskind: And I've written a few books on this over the years. But essentially, beginning in 2023, when ChatGPT comes out in January, it becomes the fastest growing consumer app of all time. And all of a sudden, everyone is taken aback by this new technology. the question I've got asked more than ever wherever I am in the world whoever I'm talking to it's always the same which is you know this is all very interesting but I've got kids at home what on earth should they do how do we prepare the next generation for this world that is just it looks like it's going to be so very different from the ones that we grew up in and you know all the advice that we were given about how to succeed and how to flourish and how to do well in this world, just it's not obvious at all that it applies anymore.

3:18Daniel Susskind: And it was also a feeling that I got asked this question again and again and again, and I maybe have, at best, a minute to answer. And I had a decade and a half of thinking that I wanted to sort of sit down and tell them about, and I couldn't do that. And inevitably, I went away feeling frustrated because there was so much more I wanted to say. They went away feeling frustrated because it didn't quite sort of crack the question. And so I wanted to capture it in a book. And so this is this new book that I've written, What Should My Children Do? Which is the question that get asked all the time.

3:49Daniel Susskind: Yeah. What should my children do? How to flourish in the age of AI. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, I've been feeling this even more so recently as you go to look around schools. And I'm sure people looking around primary schools, universities, sixth form colleges will all feel the same. When you go to look around, there are definitely two camps. there are some places that just don't address it don't talk about it don't listen in not in any of their speeches or any of that and then some who are really like make you know sort of saying we're aware that this is there is a new world coming we're aware that your kids are going to be growing up in a different place to we did and we focus on you know creating all-rounded individuals who've got great communication skills and basically the things that we're all like oh i can't replace ai can't replace those things um and you're like okay what do i like what's the right thing to do do we just go somewhere where they're all in really like focused on it or you know do you send your child somewhere and just pretend it doesn't exist i think there are lots of people you just don't know also lots of people talking about how um you know the brain patterns when kids are working on screens change and all of that kind of thing so then you've got schools where they're like oh you know we're mainly using books and writing great but then you think well you know in the real world I'm working on a computer all day and I'm you know you need the kids to be really tech savvy yeah um it's it's a difficult yeah absolutely place to be absolutely i mean i um i mean there's even there's an even stronger reaction which i see quite a lot which is you know that there is a sense as you're as you're saying that like we're floundering that we don't know what to do and and there is a response which is just just to say we don't want to have anything to do this at all so you know the mayor of new york uh a few weeks ago banned ai in all um for kids up to the age of 14 in all public schools in New York.

5:51Daniel Susskind: So that's one reaction, which is just to say, we just don't want to have anything to do with this. And the starting point of the book is that I just think that is a big mistake for some of the reasons that you're hinting at. I mean, one is, exactly as you say, this is just the world that the next generation are going to live in. And we're letting them down if we don't prepare them for that world, if we prepare them for the world that we lived in rather than the world that they're going to live in. But that always seems to me just to be a bit defensive. I mean, there's another argument, which is that, and this is what sort of drives a lot of my writing and thinking, which is that actually there's just something so unimaginative about it to think that we can't use these technologies if we get it right to help kids understand ideas, solve problems, and in time make discoveries that would have just been out of reach for previous generations.

6:44Daniel Susskind: And so that's the spirit in which I approach it. I think there is a way to to use these technologies that could be really imaginative and exciting and and uh promising for kids yeah um that's that's why i'm focused on how we do that i love that so i think we should get into the questions because i'm sure we're gonna cover lots of this stuff um i'm gonna kick off with this one oh was this me what i've got a 10 year old and a six year old and i genuinely genuinely worry that the world they're growing up in is changing faster than i can keep up with what should i actually be doing now to prepare them yeah so i i should say i come at this as well i mean i've got an eight-year-old a five-year-old and a two-year-old so this is so this is personal yes and part of the reason i wrote the book as well was just a feeling that yeah this is now yeah this really matters to me too getting it right and the point that that behind that question which is this that this is such an uncertain future it is so difficult more difficult than ever, I think, to anticipate exactly what jobs are going to look like in the future and say, you know, this is what you have to teach young people in terms of advanced skills.

7:58Daniel Susskind: And, you know, the great example for me of this is here, Britain, 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron says, we're going to become the first country in the world to mandate that all children, primary and secondary schools, have to learn to code. And this, you know, Michael Gove, who's then the education secretary, and you're smiling, you can see where this is going. Michael Gove, who's the education secretary, says, look, we've got to do this to provide the next generation with the technical skills that mean they can flourish in the 21st century. And it wasn't just us. You know, countries around the world thought this was genius.

8:28Daniel Susskind: It was creative. It was incredibly imaginative. Fast forward to 2023, ChatGPT. What does it turn out that these systems are not simply good at doing, but what are they absolutely best at doing? Writing code, right? Yeah. So something that was meant to prepare the next generation for their entire lives literally barely lasted until the end of school. And this wasn't a case of bad luck. This was just a sign of how difficult it is, even with the best intentions, to predict exactly which advanced skills are going to be most valuable and important. So I think the question we've got to answer is not how do we think cleverly enough about the future and resolve all this uncertainty, but how do we prepare the next generation for a future that actually we know very little about exactly as that question is you know getting at yeah how do we prepare them to flourish in an age of uncertainty i think one of the first things that we can do and this is the starting point for the book is just get back to basics literacy numeracy and critical thinking which a lot of the evidence suggests not just here but around the world are in the decline among young people and that's not just like a tragedy in itself but it's also you know if we're asking how do we prepare young people for the future, it's a complete disaster.

9:43Daniel Susskind: And the reason it's a disaster is essentially however the future turns out and whatever jobs turn out to be important and whatever advanced skills do turn out to matter. Maybe it will be creativity, maybe it will be judgment, maybe it will be empathy, interpersonal, who knows though. Those basics, literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking are going to matter however the future turns out. You are not going to regret it whatever happens and so that's one of the starting points i think which is um we've just got to get back to those basics because whatever again whatever the future looks like they're going to be really important yeah i keep hearing lots of people reference critical thinking critical thinking are they a critical thinker all the time what sort of things do you do with kids to help them be critical thinkers yeah so it's an interesting question you know what is critical thinking?

10:31Daniel Susskind: And I think it's just this idea that you always, you know, question and push back and challenge and, you know, ask if it's, you know, just don't take things for granted. And, you know, there are lots of ways we do it already in school. So if you study history, for instance, and you're given a historical source, you know, your teacher will encourage you to say, well, hold on, who is this person writing the source? You know, where did they live? What time did they live? What might have been their motivation? Are there things left out? Are there things – you're encouraged that that's part of being a historian.

11:06Daniel Susskind: And you do it in English as well. My argument is that actually with AI, there's now a really good opportunity to do it there too. It's not simply about – and this is another thing I think is really important and perhaps talk about it, which is that we have to teach people how to use these technologies, young people. But we have to teach them to use them critically. because as we all know if you use them they're not perfect they make mistakes they make things up they hallucinate um and so teaching young people if they're going to use these technologies to use them critically to push back to test to challenge to not just be sort of passive recipients of whatever they tell you i think is really important right okay so one of the things i say is just so back to basics but i also think we need to teach young people to use these technologies.

11:51Daniel Susskind: And to give you a flavour of how ambitious I am, I think we need to be spending about a third of our time now in primary, secondary, university, professional, in work, teaching people to use these technologies in all these different settings. But it's not just about teaching them to blindly use it. We have to be saying, you know, you've got to learn to treat these things critically. We'll be right back after this short break. But first, here's a little snippet of what we last chatted about over on Made by Mama's Extra. But what we want to bring is the real and the raw and the messy because sometimes we have these recording days and they're amazing but we've got guests to prep for and you know real things to think about whereas these episodes will be a little bit more candid and there we go you're gonna hear zoe burping there probably might be some farting hey we're nick and jack hosts of the best one yet behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.

12:49With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's go.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

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14:25Welcome back to this episode of Made by Mamas. Now, where were we? So when you say teaching them how to use it, what would be like the basics? So for instance, my son has a school iPad. they do all their work on there and that we have a little check through sometimes and they're using ai when they're doing if they've got to do like a presentation or do public speaking or something he'll like talk to his i don't know what it's called it's not chat because it's like a school

14:50Daniel Susskind: one yeah you know say what he the teachers are saying you you can use it yeah yeah especially for things like um like public speaking where they might only have 10 minutes to write something down and it's easier just to talk into it and to arrange your thoughts so he's using it like that which is is it quite basic i don't know yeah but what yeah what should they be using it for yeah because this there's a thing that sometimes it's used in the wrong way because i'll see what's 40 percent of yeah and i'm like that's just cheating yeah yeah so this is really this is really important this is really important and this is a big thing which is that at the moment in most settings if kids come home and say to their parents can i use chat gpt to do my homework there isn't actually that much clarity it's not yeah you don't you don't really know when you should be using it shouldn't and that's part of the what i think is the one of the big issues at the moment it's just it's just not clear when you when it's allowed and when it's not yeah exactly and my my um another big thing that i think is really important i have this strategy in the book that I call Teach Both, Test Both.

16:00Daniel Susskind: And this comes actually from one of the worries that people have, and it's exactly what you're describing when your son's using it to do the calculation for himself, is that there is a risk that these technologies just make young kids stupid. Rather than learning to do difficult calculations or learn the discipline of sitting with a difficult book, you just turn to ChatGPT because it does in a few seconds. And in the working world, people talk about cognitive offloading, the idea that we just put all the thinking into this. And that's a real worry. So the thought is, well, hold on, how do we teach the next generation to use this technology without also undermining those basics that we think are really important?

16:45Daniel Susskind: And what I find really encouraging is that actually we've been here before. We were here in the 70s and the 80s with the calculator. And it sounds ridiculous, but actually when you look back at the worries that people had, they are exactly the same as people have about AI today. Particularly the idea that calculator would just make people innumerate. They wouldn't be able to calculate the amount they owed in a grocery shop. And so what basically happens is this academic who no one has heard of, this guy called Wilfred Halliday Cockroft. He's a sort of academic up in Leeds. And he comes up with this idea where he says, what we've got to do is we've got to take maths education and divide it in two.

17:22Daniel Susskind: And we've got to spend part of our time encouraging kids to use this calculator so they can do stuff that just wouldn't have been possible. We wouldn't be able to. Exactly. Yeah. We've also got to spend part of our time without it so that they don't lose arithmetic. And crucially, he says, and this was the clever bit, we've got to examine both at the end. So and that's why I call it teach both, test both. And so most young people in Britain today, if they're learning maths, they'll study for a calculator paper. and a non-calculator paper. And that keeps both those things sharp. And I think the way to get clarity with AI now is we need to take everything that we teach and divide it into and ask, how can we use this technology in one part to understand problems and ideas that just would have been completely out of reach to write a speech in two minutes?

18:06Daniel Susskind: Well, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, because they're not judging you on the speech itself. They're judging what he needs to learn in the public speaking class, or whatever it is that it's about being confident. They're preparing them for doing a presentation. They're not bothered about the content. No, no. That's not it. So part of it has to be use this technology to do stuff that would have been unimaginable. But also let's protect a setting where you don't have it. And you have to learn to cope by yourself. And we at the end need to examine both. So, I mean, actually my vision for how we use AI in schools is not simply we need standalone classes where you sit down and learn how to write a good prompt, But we want to build it into all the subjects that we teach, English, history, art, music, wherever it might be.

18:47Daniel Susskind: And ask, yeah, like we did with the calculator, how can we use this amazing technology to do things that just wouldn't have been possible before? But also, let's not forget to protect some time without it as well. Yeah. That's what I think. That's how I think we resolve this dilemma about how we teach this technology without also undermining those basics. Yeah, I think there's – actually, this is a good question here. I have a son who's incredibly creative but struggles academically. Could AI level the playing field for children who don't thrive in traditional classrooms? And I think about this a lot because I think, for instance, writing the presentation, someone might have all those thoughts in their head and know what they want to say and be really confident when they're talking.

19:29But they would have stumbled over having to write that. And now they don't have to. Surely that's great.

19:35Daniel Susskind: There are questions about how this technology changes what we teach, but there are also questions about how it should change how we teach. And one of the things that I find really interesting about it is how you can use it essentially as a personal tutor to kind of tailor to your particular strengths and weaknesses. Now, we know that having a human tutor is incredibly effective. So basically, an average student who receives a human tutor will basically outperform everyone in a traditional classroom. It's just not affordable. We can't do it. And it's something that people in ed tech, education technology, have promised for many, many years.

20:11Daniel Susskind: And they've just been complete disappointments. It just hasn't worked. But I think technology in the last few years with these developments in AI is really very good. And I don't say this lightly, but I think the kind of personal interaction that you can have with these systems now is better than 95 % of the interactions that I see between teachers and their students. And I include myself in that as well. That's amazing. You know, I think it is. And partly what's amazing about it is its breadth, that it can, you know, personalize and tailor to your particular strengths and weaknesses in just such a huge variety of different areas.

20:47Daniel Susskind: So I think of, you know, putting my five-year-old to bed and classic piece of bedtime delaying technique. Just as I turned down the lights, he asked the biggest possible question he can, which is that night was, Daddy, where did the first human being come from? yeah oh my god yeah i don't dismiss it but on the other hand i'm exhausted i don't know anything about evolutionary biology what the hell do i do turn to chat gpt and i told it you know i'm here with my five-year-old it's bedtime i want to tell him a story that if i read it to him will capture like something about evolution he likes lego he likes hms belfast um he likes sacca you know help me and it did it and i read it to him and it was a you know it was a it was a a nice moment and but Then I think at the other end of the spectrum, how I might have taught graduate students in economics at Oxford, where I spent the best part of a decade teaching a difficult mathematical problem.

21:40Daniel Susskind: These systems can not only solve these problems now, which is kind of amazing, but then they can offer you lots of different ways of thinking about the same problem that maybe work for different people in different ways. If you don't get it, you can ask a question and it never gets bored, it never gets irritated, it's there at two o 'clock in the morning when you You know, it's, it's, and so I think one of the ways in which these technologies will be our most promising is exactly as the questioner is asking, like to sort of respond to the particular strengths and weaknesses of individual students in the way that a very good human tutor might be able to do.

22:18Daniel Susskind: But we just can't provide everyone with a human tutor. It's just not economically possible to do. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And also really positive. Someone here has put, I've always taught my children that if they work hard, they'll be successful. Is that still going to be true when AI can potentially do so much of the work? Yeah, I think it is still true. Yeah. But the way in which you have to work, I think, is going to look quite different. I mean, I think it's certainly the case that the advice that we would have given kids even a decade ago looks quite different from how it looks now.

22:51Daniel Susskind: but that's not to say that work and effort don't matter um i really do think they do i mean i think i think we have to i mean another thing i think is really important is when we think about the future we often think in terms of jobs and we ask you know what do you want to do when you grow up and actually i think that is a less useful way of thinking about um careers now you know i think if young people go into law because they like what they saw on suits or medicine because house was good or marketing because madmen look cool. They're going to be disappointed because what those jobs look like is already changing.

23:36Daniel Susskind: It's going to change so much more in years to come. But if you instead go into the world of work because there's particular problems that you're interested in, you want to help people feel better, improve their health, or you want to provide access to justice or you're interested in selling things, then I think the future is far more exciting because those problems aren't going away. It's just what it looks like to solve them is going to look very different. I think you've got to work hard and you've got to put lots of effort in, but I think your focus should be far more on what problems do you want to spend your life around and solving rather than what particular job do you want to have.

24:14We'll be right back after this short break.

24:47Daniel Susskind: We'll be right back. Availability. Terms at Lowe's.com slash shipping terms. Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work, around the work, and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

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25:47Daniel Susskind: Start your offer at opendoor.com slash ACAST. Profits calculated after fees and costs, eligibility and offer price may vary.

25:58Welcome back to this episode of Made by Mamas. Now, where were we? Someone who's put, I've got three children under 10, which careers would you absolutely not encourage them to pursue now, knowing what you know about AI? Yeah.

26:09Daniel Susskind: So again, I just don't think it's the right way of thinking about it. And And in a sense, it's not that new an observation, but I think it's really... So if you look at the US census of jobs over the last 70 or 80 years, only one job has disappeared in that entire time. It's apparently elevator operators. It's the only job that doesn't exist now, apparently, that did exist. Wow. Yeah. But that's not because the world of work hasn't completely transformed. It's not because what being a doctor looks like today isn't completely different from what it looked like 80 years ago. So it's just what it means, what is happening is that all the changes are taking place beneath the job title.

26:47Daniel Susskind: Yeah, I know. I totally get that. Yeah. And I think that's going to be more true than ever in the years to come. These technologies are just again and again going to change how it is we solve all these problems. But the job titles, in a sense, are sort of misleading. They give you a sense that things aren't changing when actually there's a lot of change happening. Yeah. it's similar to like i guess when factories brought in like machinery and things like that it's the same the the output is still the same still i'm making whatever it was but it was just made in a different way like it was you know that was a manual job and then it was just working a machine and the type of skills you need to do exactly yeah and it's and that's what it's going to look like but i think um it's why again it's just yeah it's not that choosing a career is wrong It's just that you might choose a career and find yourself doing something that's just completely different from what you imagined.

27:40Yes.

27:41Daniel Susskind: Yeah. And there's so many examples of it. You could see it a decade ago. There was a system that was developed by a team at Stanford that if you gave it a photo of a freckle, and this was back in 2017, so a decade ago, it would tell you whether the freckle was cancerous as accurately as the best dermatologist. Now, today, right, AI-enabled medical diagnostics is pretty widespread. But back then, this was extraordinary. What was so interesting, though, was the co-authors on the article that announced this breakthrough, which was the final co-author was this guy called Sebastian Thrun, who turns out was the guy who actually invented the first driverless car.

28:18Daniel Susskind: So here's a guy who knows absolutely nothing about medicine at all. Yeah. And yet he's able to use these skills to solve a problem that would have required decades of experience in medicine. And that's what we're going to see more and more of, that these technologies just don't have any respect for the sort of boundaries that we've drawn between different jobs and different areas of expertise. And so we're going to find ourselves pulled across all these different areas as well. So you could, so I don't know, I don't know anything about medicine, but I could end up working medicine because of technology.

28:45Daniel Susskind: because you could yeah you could find that um there are you know particular skills that you have either working alone or most likely alongside these technologies that allow you to solve a problem that would have just been you know wouldn't have been possible that's interesting isn't it because i hear like a lot of people saying oh you know i'm going to encourage my daughter or son to be a carpenter or an electrician because you know those things are not going to change but that well that is so that is interesting and this is a big thing which is if you ask the question what are these systems particularly good at doing uh to many people's surprise the answer is actually a lot of the work that is you know traditionally done by expensively educated white collar workers i was gonna say this yeah and that is and that has whereas the things that um these systems find hardest to do are many of the things that we do with our hands in the real world Progress in robotics is far, far slower than progress in – yeah, the challenge is that the view for most of the last 50 years, career advice was for many people here and around the world was just get more and more education, more and more expensive sort of professional education and move up through the world of white car.

29:56Daniel Susskind: That's the way to get a really well-paid job. And at the turn of the century, you could just hear, whether it's presidents in the US or prime ministers here saying, everyone needs a college degree. Everyone needs to go to university. Actually, that feels far less convincing as a piece of advice. Because these systems, in a way that many people have been surprised by, just turn out to be particularly good at many of the things that white-collar workers do. Turns out the level of education that you require, the level of kind of formal education that you require to do a particular task isn't as revealing as to whether or not that task can be automated as it was a few decades ago.

30:33Yeah. I had an interesting conversation with friends a few months ago. Their son, I think he's doing his GCSEs this year. And my husband said to him, oh, like, what are you doing? Like, what's, you know, have you got a plan? Like, do you know what, you know, you're thinking? He's like, yeah, I just don't want to work in an office. Yeah. and his mum and dad were like oh don't be stupid you you don't and i was like well like what do you want to do and he was like i don't know and james said my husband he was like mate why don't you go and like see what you know the the building company he's really interested in like architecture and building and he's like oh you know why don't you talk to them he runs a building company he might be able to give you some advice and they were horrified at the fact that their son might want to be a builder yeah and james looked at me and was like mate you've got this all wrong but you really need to let him like decide what, what he wants to do and what, and actually why are we looking down on these jobs?

31:25And it was all that really came up and it was all about like, to no fault of anyone's because that they have been, you know, educated to think that that's the way to a good job. That's the way to a successful job. You don't want to be like, I'm in a manual job. Oh my goodness. Like all of that. And actually that shift is already happening. and also you should never look down on other career times was there a reason

31:50Daniel Susskind: why he didn't want to work in an office was it or was it just well I think he probably also seen his parents and like you kind of don't really want to do what your parents do I think there's probably a lot a lot of that but I do think that that age group now I don't know if it's social media or whatever it is it isn't that cool no I don't think I think that unfortunately the attitude of the parents there is you know it's an old fashioned attitude It's really old fashioned. Yeah. Particularly in light of the technological changes that are happening. I don't think it's clear cut enough to say that technology means you should run away from white collar work.

32:26Daniel Susskind: No, no, no. But I do think it means that, again, in the spirit of this uncertainty, you just can't be dogmatic about this. No, no. Yeah. Oh, I've got a five year old. Yeah. Is there anything I should be introducing to her now? Or is she simply too young to be thinking about AI? Yeah. So one of the things about my book is I really wanted to show people what it could look like in practice. So it's full of, for better or worse, me and my kids and stories of how I use it with them. And I do use it with my five-year-old. I use it, as I was saying, to kind of come up with fun stories. And again, what's fun about that is that he can then interact with it and push it and take it in interesting directions.

33:11Daniel Susskind: Do you know what it's fantastic at doing? uh it's really very good at doing five five-year-olds it's the moment where you start to ask these like very uh silly but profound questions like what would win a thousand fire ants or you know a leopard yeah but if you put that to gpt you can get fantastic like playful answers and it's quite it's quite good fun i also use it a bit um you know if he does a little drawing i can take a photo of it and bring it to life. And that's quite fun. And I had always thought that, you know, primary and secondary, that was my starting point. But I wrote a long essay in The Guardian when the book first came out.

33:55Daniel Susskind: And I dropped my two-year-old off at nursery. And that morning, the nursery owner came out and said, I read your article. I want to become the the first um the first nursery in camden to have an ai strategy oh my gosh like a two but you know part of what i think is it's really fun to just you know experiment and you know just try and be imaginative with yeah and and i don't think um one of the worries i had actually one of the um you before you publish a book you often think about you know how might people respond? Where are the things that people are going to get? What's going to provoke people and where do you need to be?

34:39Daniel Susskind: And one of the ones I worried about was bedtime. It's a sacred time for parents and their kids. And the idea of bringing a screen into that, I think, I had this worry that people might find that. And I don't think these technologies have used in the right way take away from those relationships. On the contrary, I think they can enrich them. You know, one of the other examples I use in the book is, it's actually with my eight-year-old where, you know, growing up, my dad and I, so when I was eight, my dad and I had this idea for a children's story, which was called The Day No One Went to Disneyland.

35:13Yeah.

35:14Daniel Susskind: And the story went something like this, which was, my dad promises me we're going to Disneyland. We wake up in the morning and I look outside the window and the weather is perfect. Beautiful blue sky, sun shining. And I run downstairs and my dad says, look, there's just not a chance we're going to Disneyland today. The weather is too nice. Everybody is going to go to Disneyland today. I'm so sorry. And he looks at me and I'm devastated. He says, OK, we'll go. And so we drive and we set off to Disneyland and notice the traffic's a bit lighter on the road and we get to the car park and there's no cars in the car park.

35:47Daniel Susskind: And what turns out there's there's no one there because everyone had the thought that the weather was going to be too nice and it was going to be too busy. And and actually we have the part for ourselves. Now, I love this story. We never wrote it. It was always one of those things that, wouldn't it be fun if we did this? And then 30 years later, I was at dinner with my parents and my kids and my eight-year-old heard the story and said, I want to hear the full story. And so I put it to chat GPT and I said, you know, she loves Dr. Seuss. And it wrote in a few seconds the day no one went to Disneyland in the style of Dr.

36:24Daniel Susskind: Seuss. And it was amazing. And, you know, it wasn't perfect. But we had fun together, you know, refining the prompts and, you know, prodding it around. And it was just, it was a kind of, you know, it didn't in any way diminish my relationship with her. It was a great creative project that we did together. And so that's the spirit in which I think we can appreciate it. I was going to say, my dad was a headmaster. Yes. My parents recently moved over to be closer to me and the kids. Yeah. So he kind of takes, well, he picks them up from school nearly every day, which is amazing. but especially with my daughter who's seven he tutors her and her friend loose tutoring he picks them up from school they've got 45 minutes before they go to dancing and he takes them but in those 45 minutes he does creative writing with them and he says he's like i just so wish that this had been around when he was a teacher because he's like i can before he would lesson plan like ages in advance and have it all ready but those the kids might change and be interested in something else and he's like it's amazing how quickly he can turn the lesson into something that they're into that that day it's amazing so he and also he like they're i don't know they're into puffins and so he you know he wrote a story on chat about puffins then he printed off something they could color in then they made these wood things and then they you know they painted on the wood puff in pictures and then but there's it was never ending he said i could answer every question if they said can we do a word search i could create one based on this one topic in seconds he just he loves it for that yeah and also he's like in his 70s yeah he hasn't got the energy to be you know doing all this stuff but he's still got it in his mind and he can you know use chat to bond with his granddaughter i think another yeah i mean it's it's i think another um important thing to say is and that story makes me think of it is that ai is not the same thing as social media yeah exactly i think it's really important that which is you know i have i share a lot of the concerns that people have about social media and i'm pretty supportive of many of the restrictions that have been proposed in the last few years around you know no social media before no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16, phone through schools.

38:43Daniel Susskind: I'm broadly supportive of those, but AI is not the same thing. One of the things I worry about is that legitimate worries about social media and well-informed ideas about restricting their use in schools bleed into a kind of general technological conservatism that kind of bans on social media become knee-jerk, bans on chat GPT. can ai be dangerous oh absolutely yeah because that's something i literally don't know anything about yeah i've got you know so my so the one i write about a lot in the book um is um around distraction so one of the worries i have is that these technologies are incredibly good at you know grabbing our attention and not letting it go and we've seen that with social media and you know i I think there are similar risks around AI as well with respect to distraction.

39:42Daniel Susskind: I know, for instance, a lot of people use these systems, young people are sort of AI companions and AI friends. And I worry about that sort of thing. So, one of the things I write about in the book is that, look, we need to be able to hold two things in our head at the same time. One, that these technologies can be really powerful for good, but also that they have risks associated with them. And we need to be teaching young people about those risks, just like we're starting to do that with social media. So sharing images of yourself, sharing personal details, what to do with deepfakes and how to manage this.

40:17Daniel Susskind: There are a similar set of challenges with AI that we need to be thinking about. And the one that I'm particularly concerned with is distraction and attention and how to learn not only how to learn to put down this technology as well as to pick it up and make good use of it. Yeah, because you do hear about a lot of people using it as like an online therapist and stuff like that. Now, I don't know how good that is. One of the most common uses. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've used it a couple of times and I've been having an argument with my husband. And I've been like, who's right? And then his one would have said he's right.

40:50Daniel Susskind: Yeah, exactly. And then we realised, we were like, oh yeah, either of us could be right based on this. This is part of, you know, going back to the idea of treating these systems critically. knowing that they do have a bias towards like sycophancy and like saying you're wonderful and right and like only clicking back when you ask it to yeah that stuff is important to know yeah these things aren't the oracle they're not yeah fine okay yeah no it's interesting because i i really didn't yeah i hadn't thought of how it could be negative especially i guess for kids who might be quite lonely and not have lots of friends or happy having issues and then be quite set on their right because chat told them they were and then not being able to see other people's opinions and all stuff like that i guess yeah i mean i think there's um yeah any yeah parents will know that at the moment it feels like we're all engaged in this sort of search for the kind of goldilocks level of screen time not too much not too little just right and i actually think that's the wrong debate to be having the question is not how much time are we spending on our screens but what is actually on those screens what are we using them to do if it's social media i think we ought to be spending not that much time at all but if it's for the kind of stuff that you're you know talking about your dad doing yeah um or the ideas that i'm writing on the book then i think there is you know tremendous opportunity um so i i think those are the conversations we ought to be having about how what are the ways to use this technology um that is you know helpful Yeah, absolutely.

42:20Okay, yeah, let's look at this one. Do you genuinely believe our children will have better lives than we have? Or are we entering a world where the next generation could actually be worse off?

42:30Daniel Susskind: So I think there is definitely a sense at the moment for the first time in a long time among parents that their children's future is not necessarily going to be better than their lives. And I think it's a really dangerous situation when essentially people lose hope in the future, lose confidence that things will get better. I think that is a prevailing concern at the moment, but I don't think it's inevitable. I don't think it has to be that way. We live at a time when so much around us seems like it's stagnating. And so it's easy to sort of fall into despair. But I do think there is a way to use these technologies to make, I mean, not simply the next generation's life, but all our lives go better.

43:25Daniel Susskind: So I do think that possibility is available to us. um but it's not inevitable and um and part of what i'm trying to do with this new book since a lot of my work is trying to make sure that we you know steer our way onto the path where things are better um which i think again given there is a sense of worry and anxiety about the future it's really important yeah great thank you so much and just for everyone listening where can they find your book in all good bookshops what could my children do thank you such a pleasure

44:08Daniel Susskind: We'll be right back.

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