Why a chatbot can’t raise your kid with Dana Suskind

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1:32See offer page for details. The way we learn to be human, the way we learn to connect is exactly through the friction-filled human interaction that you get with good enough parenting. I was one of those good enough parents that had lots of missteps and ruptures, but that is exactly how we teach children how to survive and navigate a human world. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:18Dana Suskind is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, a researcher and professor at the University of Chicago, and a best-selling author. Her pioneering work on childhood development led to her first book, 30 Million Words, on how early exposure to language influences brain development. AI has evolved. We have not. We want to just connect wherever we can. Dana continues her exploration of childhood development in her new book, Human Raised. It's a science-backed guide to parenting in the age of AI. Dana is an expert on early connection, and I can't think of a better voice to help us figure out how to not screw up our kids.

2:59There's been a lot of discussion about AI companions romantically. I've heard less conversation about how AI might interfere with our parenting or might substitute for our parenting. But I have to tell you, as I started reading your book and I started thinking about what are all the ways that AI raised kids could be disadvantaged or deprived? It did cross my mind that there are some upsides. I think a good AI chatbot would never be an abusive parent. I think you could get unconditional love. You could have a parental figure who's always available, always responsive, no matter what time of day is, what the issue is.

3:44And then I think about the evidence that people feel more cared about and empathized with and seen when they interact with a chatbot than a human, at least by text. And I think maybe this isn't so bad. Tell me why I'm wrong. What you just described is exactly the seduction of these AI companions, the frictionless openness, sycophantic. You're always right. You're always seen. And there's obvious seduction of that. So, yes, you can imagine why people are flocking to AI companions, but it is exactly how we will sort of de-skill ourselves from being able to connect to other humans. The stance that I take is that there is so much that we don't understand about how children learn those important soft skills, empathizing, critical thinking, curiosity, all those skills that we want them to have.

4:42And we may provide what we think is the perfect coach, but there's a lot that we don't know. And sort of in the similar ways that social media at some level makes a whole lot of sense, right? You're being connected to all these people around the world. Why wouldn't you feel more connected? But it's because there's so much that we don't understand about that connection that the active ingredients might not be there and you end up being left not developing those skills. So I think science needs to be part of it. I mean, certainly AI is an incredible technology, but we need to be very thoughtful in how we go forward.

5:22So talk to me about what it looks like to be human raised in an age of AI. Yeah. So what does it mean to be human raised? Human raised isn't a rejection or an embrace of tech. It's really understanding what do children need to develop fully as humans, fully from a cognitive standpoint, all those things that we've been optimizing forever, but also those important soft skills. How do we raise children so they can have critical thinking, be empathetic, connect, all of those skills that you're going to need to have in the age of AI. And really, it's through human presence and human connection. You see, when you're born, human babies are born incredibly underdeveloped.

6:06They're like little helpless blobs. And that's why parenting is so incredibly hard. But that helplessness is actually the origins of our brilliance because our babies are born too early. So in those early years, the brain is built. 85 % of the physical brain is built. And it is literally built by human interaction, talking, nurturing, joint attention, physical touch. That is building that brain. And based on those early years, that predicts not just how people do in the workforce, how they do intellectually, how they relate to others. Those early years are critical for that. Dana, I'm curious about how this interfaces with your day job as a surgeon.

6:50Why is this such a salient issue for you? Yeah, I'll tell you, it is exactly because I'm a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon that I'm so enmeshed in this world of the importance of human connection in the early years. So to contextualize how I got into this area, it was actually my experience in implanting children with hearing loss with a cochlear implant and then seeing huge disparities in outcomes of those patients who look like they should both be thriving after implantation, really learning on par with their hearing peers and others same time out, barely being able to communicate. And it was that experience in seeing that that really took me on this journey of the importance of the early years, the importance of human connection, talk and interaction for building a child's brain.

7:39Because for my own patients, it wasn't the difference in the surgery or the technology. It was the differences in how much interaction they were getting. And understanding that has become my life's work, really the power of human connection for not just building cognitive skills, but building those human skills. Hearing you say that, it's really easy to connect the dots from your work as a pediatric surgeon to the important work you did popularizing 30 million words to now this work on being human raised. I've always been curious. I remember when I first heard about the finding that kids who go on to basically better lives in many ways are exposed to more words from an early age than kids who struggle.

8:28And I've always been so curious about whether that's a causal effect or whether those are also kids who happen to have more educated parents who might have parents with genetic advantages intellectually. and it's a selection effect as opposed to something that's actually shaping them. What do we know at this stage? Has anyone randomly assigned kids to be exposed to millions of more words at a very early age? What does that do to their development? Like walk me through the science there. Yeah, no. So you're talking about the Hart and Risley study that basically followed a relatively small number, about 42 children up until the age of three.

9:08And what their research purportedly showed was that by the end of the age of three, children, especially children born into poverty, will have heard, quote, 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. And this predicted not just test score and IQ, but really their academic trajectories. In truth, there are many issues with that specific study, but I view that as really just a first sentence in a robust literature showing the power of interaction in the early years for building a child's brain. I sort of look at the way milk feeds the body, talk and interaction feeds the brain. And really understanding the neuroscience, I think, gives a clearer view into it.

9:51See, when babies are born, they're born with brains just the third the size of adult brains. That's unlike any other species. They're born with like, I think, 100 billion neurons, as many stars in the Milky Way. And really, those early years are the time when your early experiences, that talk and interaction, wires up the brain. It's the instruction guide for the brain. And that is why early interaction is so critical for not just building language and literacy skills and those hard skills, but building those socio-emotional skills that allow us to connect as humans. And I could go into attachment theory and the like, but that's really how I view it.

10:34That makes sense. I guess the follow-on from attachment research is if it's helpful for early developing brains to have more interaction, if it's helpful for infants and very young children to have more communication, what's the difference between having that interaction with a generative AI chatbot versus with a real person? Yeah, I would sum it up in one word, friction. The messy human interaction that is, you know, imperfect, that has ruptures and repairs, that experience initially through good enough parenting is how humans learn that the world is not just about them, but about sharing the space with other humans.

11:28We talk about attachment theory in Ruth Feldman's work showing babies literally have neural synchrony with their adults in their lives, where their brains sync up. And children with more secure attachment have brains that have stronger tracks in the social part of the brain, if you will, although the whole brain is social. And insecure attachment has less integrated tracks. I then bring up this idea of artificial attachment. How does that change human development when you have, as you say, an AI chatbot that is perfectly responsive, always there, never missteps, never looks away? And that is the concern.

12:13What are the things that you're most worried about are going to get lost in the early years? Because, you know, I don't think it's going to be in the near future that two-year-olds are interfacing with ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini. I think I can imagine a farther future where there are AI-enabled robots that the kids might interact with instead of parents. But if you think about the coming decade, what might AI take away from us when it comes to human connection while the brain is still developing? Yeah, actually, AI is much more in children's lives than you might imagine. So, yeah, well, it looks much more like screen time, but 40 percent of two-year-olds have iPads.

12:58And on those iPads, that sort of AI slop that has proliferated, I call it AI misinformation, children are being exposed to it in a significant way. So it's not quite the generative AI that we're talking about, but slowly that's going to be embedded into these screen times. But even beyond that, I mean, you go to Walmart or Target and on the shelves are these plush animals that are embedded with LLMs. They're embedded with those chatbots that we're talking about. They look more like teddy bears than actual AI agents. So they are slipping in. But to your point, my concern is that we'll sort of sleepwalk into it.

13:40It won't be like, oh, all of a sudden children are being raised by robots. It will be, you know, a slow sort of march to having some of that human presence being taken over by technology. Again, taking just a skeptic's lens, at some level, isn't that better than the status quo, though? Wouldn't you rather have generative AI interacting actively with a toddler than them zoning out passively on another episode of Teletubbies? The way I view it is this. AI is this miraculous technology. We need to be thinking creatively how AI can allow more human presence, to allow more human connections. So you're exactly right.

14:24I mean, parenting is hard. And you can imagine an overly stretched parent turning over an iPad. I mean, certainly my kids did watch some Baby Einstein, I must admit. But the truth is, is that if we're going to really leverage this incredible technology, why don't we leverage it in ways that take off the burden, you know, the administrative burdens or the invisible labor of parenting? Why don't we leverage it to allow more human presence rather than saying, oh, well, you know, isn't a generative AI interactive robot better than an iPad, which is how it's been sold at some times? like, isn't this better than screen time?

15:02But this sounds sort of provocative, but it's sort of like saying, oh, well, if you take some cigarettes, you'll eat less. You know, it's like we don't need to replace one not positive child-centered thing with another. That's very well put. So I guess, you know, one place where I would love to see value added is I think almost everything we want to get better at, we get feedback as an essential part of that process. I think about sports and music and work. Every skill you try to develop, you have other people who are more knowledgeable than you observing you and then trying to coach you. Parents get almost no feedback whatsoever.

15:41And I've started to wonder whether this might be one of the more constructive use cases of AI is like, imagine that you got daily or weekly input on, you offered your daughter solutions and she was just looking for support again. Or you missed when your son started complaining that he was actually asking to play. I would love those kinds of notes as a parent. And often I pick up on them too late or Allison and I are both too busy parenting to notice things that each other could do better. Do you have any good news on this front? Do you have any hope on this front? Or is it going to end up creating all kinds of problems and unintended consequences?

16:24The truism with tech is there are always unintended consequences. We need, and that's what we need to be wary of. But at the same time, I'm a big believer in innovation and I'm a cochlear implant surgeon. So I believe in the promise of tech to allow human flourishing. But your example of like, how can AI be sort of a co-pilot or a backup support? I consider that a constructive potential use case of it. And so actually, even in our lab at the University of Chicago, we've built a computer adaptive tool that measures what parents and teachers know about child development because the science is ever evolving.

17:03It's not about substituting them, you know, as parents, but really supporting them as parents. And I think that's a really important way to think about this technology. How can it make us better at the things that we want to be better on? How can it support us rather than replacing us? So you're not freaked out by a future in which we would get AI-supported feedback on parenting? I think that can be a positive use. With that being said, you know, talking about unintended consequences, you want to make sure that it doesn't crowd out the village that we want families to have, the connections to other humans.

17:40So, you know, everything has potential upsides and downsides. So, but at three in the morning, some of my friends probably wouldn't want me calling them to ask for advice. So, you know, wake up that LLM. Fair. So, we all have decisions to make about what technology to give our kids access to. You say we have a parental GPS. What's that about? And how do I upgrade mine? Yeah. Listen, we all have a parental GPS embedded in our DNA through millennia. We are able to understand our child better than any LLM can. LLMs can understand the world at large and has all the knowledge of the world, but only you can really understand your child.

18:27And so as parents, we have a parental GPS, and I really want parents to not just rely on it, but to believe in themselves. So, you know, using experts to give us advice, absolutely. Gaining knowledge, absolutely. But your understanding of your child supersedes any LLM. It's especially true as a parent when your child is wired like you are. I found it so much easier to make parenting decisions when I'm looking at like, oh, yeah, I'm an introvert. I'm shy. So are two of my kids. With our extroverted child, much more challenging for me because it's just harder to put yourself in those shoes when you haven't lived that experience.

19:14And I think that it's almost like, okay, I've got a parental GPS, but unfortunately the map it came with is for Moldova instead of America. And so I don't know exactly where I'm supposed to turn. What do you advise doing when you discover that your GPS is not equipped with directions for the particular constellation of traits that your child has or even just the situation that your child is in that you might handle differently? Yeah, I mean, that is exactly where turning to your village and gaining advice from them. And also sometimes riding the tide. I have three children who have commonalities, but oh boy, they are so different.

20:01So, you know, what do you do when you have a child that you don't totally understand? I think probably the best advice I got was from my mother. You ride the tide. you don't always have all the answers, but sometimes just listening, your children will tell you exactly what they need. I think that's great advice and makes me think a little bit that sometimes when I've remembered to do that, I feel like George Costanza in Seinfeld. If you remember the opposite day episode where it suddenly dawns on him that every instinct he's had in his life was wrong. And so if he just does the opposite of his instincts, maybe it'll be right.

20:40And I do you think that in certain situations, if you have a kid who's a polar opposite to you, asking, okay, what's the reverse of my instinct is at least a different place to start. And if you make a mistake, at least you're making a new mistake as opposed to repeating the same old patterns of the past that you were supposed to have rethought and unlearned. What do you think of that as a strategy? I love that. Although I'll tell you one of the most liberating parts of writing this book was around this idea of good enough parenting and realizing that my mess ups, which were so many, were really my opportunity to teach my children that the world isn't perfect, that parents can love you and still not be perfect.

21:22So I love Opposite Day, but I also love, I'm just trying to figure you out and I'm going to love you, you know, the best that I can and support you the best that I can, but I'm a human. This episode is brought to you by Best Western Hotels and Resorts. Summer's here, which means it's officially travel season. Road trips, last-minute flights, weekend escapes. It's time to get out of our regular routine and into the world. And when you're making plans, you need somewhere reliable to land. That's Best Western. Comfortable, dependable stays that give you one less thing to think about and more time to enjoy your trip.

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23:11Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get today at business.att.com. This episode is brought to you by Tonal. When life gets busy, workouts are usually the first thing we sacrifice, but our health shouldn't be. Tonal makes it easier to stay on track. It's the ultimate strength training system that provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer, anytime, right there in your home. After a quick assessment, Tonal sets the optimal weight for every single move and adjusts in one-pound increments as you get stronger. So you're always challenged, but never overwhelmed.

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24:27When I shudder at the thought of anyone in Congress legislating around AI and how to make sure that we don't make some of the same mistakes with AI that we have made with social media consistently, this is the kind of framework that should start the conversation. So walk me through hope. Absolutely. So I'm a surgeon. I love frameworks. So what is hope? Hope is an evergreen framework that we can all use for understanding how to go forward as we navigate this age of AI. And H is human connection is irreplaceable. It is not just a nice to have. It is a biologic necessity. O is owning your imperfections.

25:07You know, it's going back to that good enough parenting that we learn through our imperfections. And the productive struggle is exactly how we both learn and learn to be human. P is really protecting the early years. I think we need to be thinking really intentionally about AI throughout the life course. But as I mentioned, the early years are different. It's when we're building the hard drive of the brain. And we've got to be really thoughtful about how we allow AI into those early years. And then E is enhance, not replace. I am not at all anti-tech. I am a cochlear implant surgeon. I know technology can make our lives better.

25:44But if we're going to use it, let it enhance us. Let us enhance the human experience, enhance our connections, not replace us. I love the framework. I want to talk about each of the elements a little bit more. We've touched on some of them already. I think we covered human connection being irreplaceable. Yeah. I think just to build on that a little bit, there are a lot of so-called rules that new parents are given. I know we got them when we first had kids. You need a certain amount of skin-to-skin time with your newborn. and make sure that you have X hours per day of face-to-face interaction.

26:20I think anybody who understands human development knows that those kinds of fixed rules are not realistic, but it is helpful to have guidelines. How do I know if I'm getting enough of that organic face-to-face time with an infant, with a toddler, with an adolescent? How do you think about that? To your point, there's no absolute number. And we don't even know, right, scientifically. That's why you can't create AI to replace us because we don't know. But as parents, we just instinctively know, being present, being connected. So despite being a surgeon, I really go with the good enough parenting.

27:02Go with what feels right and knowing that your presence is what's most important. You know, I'm a working mom. I'm a surgeon. I had a whole community, a whole village helping raise my children. They did great. Other parents, some parents stay at home. There is not one way to parent. There's only one way to build that child's brain. It is loving your kids and being present, but there's no rigid rule. Okay, owning the imperfections. Give me some examples of what that might look like. And feel free to draw on your own parenting experiences if you want. Oh, you know, there are two sides of the equation, right?

27:44There's the imperfections of the input, the good enough parenting where we misstep. And then there's the other side, the productive struggle, the learning. So I'm going to sort of address both sides of the equation. I'm going to actually, I've talked enough about parenting. I'm going to talk about friendship formation. And John, I think you pronounce Gotsman, you know, the researcher who does a lot around marriage. He actually had early research that looked at how kids become friends and who becomes the strongest of friends. And you would think, you know, at some level, it's like people who just have strong affinities that just get along.

28:21But actually, the tightest friendships were made through that sort of friction, misstep with rupture, repair, and that beautiful cycle. that deep friendships aren't made with perfection. They're made through imperfection and finding our connections. On the friction, you know, the imperfection side of learning, we all know the MIT studies that show that people who write essays with LLMs, they remember less because there's no friction in the writing and the effort. It's the effort that builds the muscle. And I tell a story of John, who is my partner. He's a behavioral economist. And when he was little, and this was in the 1970s when there was unstructured free play and before there were video games or maybe in the beginning of video games, he had an older brother who didn't always want to play with him.

29:14So he would play football by himself in the backyard and he would don himself in full Packer gear and he would apparently play both sides of the team. On one side, he was John Brockington, who was a Packer, and the other side, he was the Bears. And this imaginary play, if you will, the struggle of trying to figure out how to actually play this game by yourself, I show as an example of how curiosity and creativity aren't built by AI plush toys saying, oh, let's imagine X, Y, and Z, where they feed you the information, they feed you creativity. But really, it's an internal experience where you have to, in John's case, play both sides of the team.

29:58Of course, the Packers always won. But the fact that in these experiences, it's having to deal with boredom, create your own games that you really learn and you become the full human that we want all of our children to become. Well, that's actually a great segue to protecting the early years because there are a lot of parents looking at plush toys right now, trying to figure out which ones are good for my kids, which ones are safe, which ones might be problematic. Do you have advice on how to evaluate AI products that are made for kids to love and marketed to them on TV, on YouTube ads? What should we look at?

30:42Yeah. I want to take a step back and say, when I think about AI products, I think of them as sort of the spectrum of processed foods. So, you know, on one side of the processed foods, you have whole wheat bread, which, you know, is healthy. You don't want to go grind your own wheat. On the other side, you've got the ultra-processed foods, which are sort of like the Doritos and Twinkies, you know. And I see AI in the same way. Those AI plush toys that are for nothing more than entertainment, I view on the ultra-processed food side of things. On the other hand, there are AI examples, both for supporting parents in their parenting, or even what Maya Matarek calls socially assistive robots that are developed for specific reasons, not just for entertainment, but for helping children with autism learn social cues or helping children learn to read.

31:38When you have tools that are used for specific developmental reasons, that's a totally different game. Just for fun, with all the things that we talked about, the impacts on attachment and learning how to socialize, I would, for now, steer clear of those. I think that's probably wise advice. And then let's see, on the EE front, you mentioned, well, actually, I'm going to read you to you. I thought this was profound. AI should assist the caregiver, not give the care. Yes, that would be the bottom line of what I view most of AI. So much of AI that's being produced is about replacement, replacement in the workforce, replacement in the schools.

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35:18Okay, let's go to a lightning round. What is the worst parenting advice that you see given regularly? That you have to be a perfect parent and the stakes are high with every single action that you give. And your best advice for parents? The advice that I got from my mom, that no action is that big of a deal and sometimes you just have to ride the tide. It'll be okay. You're putting together a dream dinner party of people whose parenting you would love to observe and learn from throughout history. Who would you invite? Or whose parents would you invite? I was thinking whose parents that I'd want to invite.

36:05I would like to meet Jeffrey Hinton's parents. I would like to meet Ada Lovelace's parents. I would love to meet Martin Luther King's parents. I would love to meet Adam Grant's parents. That one can be arranged. Okay. What is something you've changed your mind about recently as a surgeon? As a surgeon or as a physician? Oh, either is fair game, actually. Okay. The fact that AI can actually allow for greater human presence, I think I first saw in the clinic. I don't know if you know much about Ambient AI, but Ambient AI used in the clinic has given back physicians' presence with their patients.

36:57So in the old days, we'd go into the clinic and we would be so focused on our computers filling out the electronic medical records. And now with Ambient AI, it does it all in the background so I can be completely connected with my patients. So that is a really constructive, powerful example of the use of AI. So you're saying you don't have to take notes because you have an AI tool listening and capturing. Absolutely. Absolutely. Does that raise privacy concerns? Do I want to be recorded when I'm meeting with a physician? Yeah. I mean, that's a really important question. And I, you know, going back to the idea of unintended consequences, I was talking to someone who brought up the point of patients if they're undocumented and being afraid of that.

37:44And that completely makes sense. So that's something to be considered. With that being said, it has changed the game and allowed much more human presence by physicians. Sounds right. Okay. I'll take it. Yeah. I think it's probably in most situations a net positive. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Office hours time. What is the question you have for me? Ah, I've been waiting for this. So even though early childhood is incredibly important, we have consistently failed to sort of invest in other people's children. And I think part of it may be biological, how we're wired to invest in our own children and tribe.

38:24And you've spent your career trying to understand what moves people, how we shift motivation. So my question is, can we actually help people widen this circle? You know, love all children as your own. Is that even a potential or should I stop trying this approach and maybe design a system that works around their evolutionary defaults? Oh, it's such an important and complicated question. My first reaction, Dana, is that it's noble and also unrealistic. And maybe not even desirable. Because if everybody loved everyone's children equally, everyone would neglect their own children. We'd all be busy caring a little bit for every child and not enough for any of them.

39:09Yeah. I don't think children were meant to be fully raised by villages. I think it's good to have a village supporting, but I think primary caregivers are really important. So we actually do need some selectivity, I guess is what I'm saying, right? You want differential care and attachment. That's a good point. But how do we get them to, so we invest a little bit more in others or? Yeah, no, I think that's where we want to go. And I think that, I think most people have trouble with the kind of scale you're describing. And so I think we need to bound it and say, who are the children that are closest to you that aren't yours that could benefit from a little bit of extra care?

39:49Who are the children in your neighborhood, in your community that might be falling through the cracks? I think that conversation is much more palatable in the same way that people might adopt a pet if they saw the opportunity locally, but they're not necessarily crusading or campaigning for animal rights. I think expanding the circle of concern as Carl Weick would have said with small wins is probably the easiest way to begin and I think one of the ways that I've gotten through with this message a little bit is to just remind people look there are certain things you cannot do as a parent for your own children because they consider you too biased or lacking credibility I think every parent learns at some point usually by the time our kids are teenagers oh the best thing we can do is help them find a great mentor who will deliver a version of the message that we would hope they would hear from someone that they think is better suited to share it with them.

40:43And I think if you recognize that your own kids need that kind of support that you can't provide, you also realize you are in a position to provide it. And I would hope that would be a two-way street. That's my first reaction. What do you make of all that? No, I like that. Support our children, expand our circle a bit. If we all did that, then we'd have good coverage. So I love that. And then may I ask one other question? These are real questions that I'm curious about your thought. So we're seeing an uptick in sort of the public resistance to AI, the booing at commencements. And I'm curious if you think, are these driven by like political ideology?

41:22I don't know, economic concern? Or is it something deeper? I don't know, a deep fear of replacement? Or is it a combination of all of it? And I've been wondering about that too. And I don't have any easy answers to it, but Dana, I have to tell you, I was surprised when I first saw a couple of commencement speeches get booed where the speakers were basically trying to say, AI is coming. Here's how to think about preparing yourself for it. and I've watched my students use AI to the point that I'm afraid they're not thinking for themselves like wait you're booing the very thing that you are adopting what is going on here I'm trying to get you to not use it in your writing to engage in more critical thinking and more independent creativity and what is going on here and I think I've actually asked a bunch of students what's behind this and the most common answer I've gotten and I think we need more systematic research to get to the bottom of this.

42:19But anecdotally, the most common response has been, well, we're booing the generation that built it and dumped it on us and doesn't have any plans for how we're going to subsist. And most of it seems to be driven by, with a graduating class, fear of, am I going to be employable? Am I going to be able to support myself and my family? And so I think it's a combination of psychological and economic and political reactions. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I've thought a lot about it. I think you're right. It's probably not one answer, but I've thought about also this idea of erasure, that our identity is whether it be, do we have a job?

43:02Do we have a partner? Are we parents anymore? Like our identity as humans and what it means to be human is sort of this larger existential threat. In the book, I told this story where this big tech executive said, oh, you know, we're going to replace your mom. And then also this little girl, when she was shown this robot, she said, oh, are my parents going to love it more than me? Something to that effect. And I thought, you know, are we, what does it mean to be human. And maybe like, could the fact that we've created this incredible technology that is, you know, built in our image, but clearly not us, be sort of the coming together of like, oh, now we see what brings us together, you know, the response to the other.

43:53I think your observation about erasure is really powerful. And I think the idea that not only might I struggle to find a job, but I don't even matter as a person. My identity is being replaced in addition to my social value. That's a scary thought. And I think it's easy to scapegoat a speaker who's representing a generation or an industry that has driven some of this technological change. I think the fear though is real. And I don't think any of the so-called experts have given useful responses. But I think it, if anything, I think the silver lining is it has forced some of the tech overlords and AI pioneers to sit down and really start thinking systematically about what are we going to do to preserve work?

44:44What are we going to do to preserve opportunity? How are we going to make sure that the tools we're building, because we say they're going to exist anyway, and so we're trying to build them better. How are we going to do that in a way that serve society, not just technology or not just us. Yeah. We will see in these next few years, but I'm hopeful that parents, because of their drive to protect their young, will be the guardians at the gate, I hope. I hope so too. And I think Human Ray is going to help all of us do it and do it better. So thank you for writing it. I think it's such a moving and also practical book about how we can maintain our humanity in the age of AI, which I think should be our, if not our central concern, one of our top priorities.

45:29Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

45:35Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hailash, Ban Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

46:05Did you watch the movie Her? Absolutely. Yeah. Felt like a distant, didn't even feel like a future. Felt like pure science fiction. Obviously now it feels different. It does feel different. I remember watching it and thinking, who would ever do that? And here we are. It is wild.

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