AI childhood
I don't know how to feel about this.
Today my nine-year-old came downstairs still in pajamas, with the casual confidence of someone who had already decided how the day was going to go.
"Dad, can we make a game together?"
My first instinct was to mentally sketch out the weekend. We'd start with variables. Then loops. Maybe by Sunday afternoon we'd have a blinking cursor or a number that adds up. A calculator, if we were ambitious. That's where I landed with nine-year-olds and programming. Hello World and hope.
But that's not what happened.
Here's the thing about my son. He speaks English and Japanese, but writing in English is still a work in progress. There just hasn't been enough time, with Japanese taking priority. So he can't really type out code or instructions. Not fluently, anyway.
Didn't matter.
He spoke into the computer. Speech-to-text caught his words. He described what he wanted, a 3D brick building game. The AI turned those words into a working program. Five minutes later, he was placing blocks in a world he had conjured out of thin air.
Then he narrated a few changes. Wanted to create custom bricks. Wanted more colors. The AI obliged. Iteration. Without typing a single line.
I sat there watching and genuinely didn't know what to think.
Is that programming? I keep turning the question over. On one hand, he was doing exactly what good engineers do: describing a problem, testing the output, refining based on what he liked and didn't like. On the other hand, he had no idea what was happening underneath. No mental model of loops, memory, or why anything worked at all.
And maybe that's fine. Maybe it isn't.
There's a version of this that feels obvious. AI is just another abstraction layer. The typewriter didn't kill thinking. It just meant people stopped needing beautiful penmanship to communicate. Calculators didn't ruin math. They offloaded the arithmetic so you could focus on the actual problem. Every generation adds a layer. The layer below becomes optional.
But my handwriting is terrible compared to my grandparents, and today's cashiers would be lost if they had to give back change on their own.
Except I don't think it's quite that clean.
When I learned to write code, something happened in my brain that wasn't really about code. It was about decomposing problems into small, sequential, logical steps. About debugging the gap between what you intended and what you wrote. About sitting with ambiguity and making it precise. I'm not sure you get that from describing a 3D brick game to an AI and watching it appear.
Then again, I'm probably not the most objective judge. I learned the old way. Of course the old way feels essential to me.
What I do know is this: my son built something real on Saturday. He iterated. He got excited when it worked and curious when it didn't. That instinct, make something, test it, change it, is not nothing. That might actually be the part that matters most.
I just don't know yet what he'll be missing when he's older and the problems get harder.
People smarter than me are probably debating this in academic papers right now. I don't have the answer either.
But I keep coming back to the same instinct: balance.
Not in a vague, motivational poster kind of way. More like this. I don't know exactly which skills will matter in ten years, so the best hedge is to make sure he's developing in as many directions as possible. Keep as many doors open as I can.
So yes, we'll probably do more AI-assisted game building on weekends. But we'll also keep kicking the soccer ball around outside. Keep dragging him to piano even when he doesn't feel like it. Keep putting him in situations where he has to figure out how to talk to people, read a room, lose gracefully, win without being annoying about it.
Those things don't get abstracted away. There's no AI layer coming for the ability to persist through something hard, or to genuinely listen to another person, or to pick yourself up after a bad game.
The fundamentals I find myself caring most about aren't really academic at all. They're simple questions. Can you stay curious? Can you handle being a beginner? Can you work with other people? Can you put the screen down and go outside?
Maybe that's just what every generation of parents has believed. Maybe it's timeless. Maybe I'm romanticizing it because I don't fully understand what's coming.
But watching my son build a 3D world with his voice on a Saturday morning, I wasn't worried about whether he'd learn to code. I was thinking about whether he'd still want to go climb a tree afterward.