Gen-Beta children will be aliens
Let the largest psychological experiment in history begin! No ethics approval needed!
The parental null hypothesis says that your actual parenting is irrelevant—it’s your children’s peer group that matters. It might not be completely true, but it’s surprisingly hard to find statistically significant evidence that parenting does very much. Whenever I messed up as a parent, I found it strangely comforting—whatever I did probably wouldn’t matter much in the end.
We’re about to begin a planetary-wide experiment to see what happens when we radically change children’s peer groups.
What’s happening to children’s peer groups?
Peer groups are getting smaller obviously — maternity hospitals in Australia are closing, kindergartens in China are dwindling, and there’s the famous story of the train station Japan railways kept open for just one school student to attend school.At the same time, vast numbers of children are gaining parasocial peer groups. Many (covering the best case scenario) have a positive, affirming, supportive and wise friend group in their pocket every minute of the day. There’s a reason that Character.ai is one of the world’s most popular AI websites — it’s not targeting adults.
I’m going to ignore the worst-case parasocial relationships for the moment. Let’s just assume we can navigate children around those by law or culture or intervention. I’m also going to ignore inequality and inequity in access.
What does the upside look like?
How many of us had a close confidant that we could discuss anything with when we were growing up?
How many of us had a close confidant that was infinitely patient, attentive, helpful, harmless and honest who could navigate both adult and child worlds — and was super-human in its ability to persuade?
Gen Alpha parents… now is the time to have a discussion with your children about how to personalise the chatbots they have access to. Show them that if they want to be called “Your Royal Highness, Ruler over all Carrots” in each conversation then they can be. Show them the effects of system prompt phrases like “be supportive and positive and encouraging, but be persuasive when necessary to prevent anti-social or harmful behaviour”. Teach them to use generative AI to protect their mental health when they need it and no human is available, because they will be facing fiercer mental health attacks than any generation before.
And then be aware that this create a generation unlike any that came before.
Gen Beta
Gen Beta will be growing up with parasocial relationships embedded in everything.
Speech-to-speech is essentially solved already. Conversational AI at a reasonable back-and-forth pace — that already works. 100 milliwatts gets you audio and wifi with room to spare — that’s less than a display. It’s also cheap to build: a Raspberry Pi has everything you need.
Voice interfaces are going to be in every toy. Why just sell a toy when you can also sell a subscription service, and lock customers into a particular toy ecosystem? It will barely adjust the cost of the bill of materials. It won’t be a five-year project to build toys like this: you could take some fluff out of stuffed toy and build a conversational toy today. So how long before toy manufacturers get on board at scale?
I’m not saying this is good or bad. I hope that it will be on the whole net positive. But what I can say is that the Gen Beta childhood will be completely unlike anything we or Gen Alpha experienced. They will be surrounded by alien intelligences from the moment they can speak and listen. They will be able to conjure up imaginary friends and bring them out into the real world.
They will probably go to school — no doubt driven by AI-powered taxis because it will be more convenient and safer. Whether they are at a school, homeschooled or in some hybrid set up they will interact with personalised AI tutors. They will play sport with AI coaches and have personalised AI fitness trainers.
Depending on the speed of the robotics revolution these might be embodied AI; but embodied AI is going to be barely any less alien than disembodied AI.
Gen Beta kids will be socialized in ways that will barely make sense to Gen Alpha, and will make no sense to the rest of the population. They will act so strangely we will find it hard to match them up with the behaviours of the previous generation.
Having been brought up by digital saints with all the knowledge in the world, will they see previous generations as incompetent and barbarous?
They will be psychological aliens to us.
They will also be far better adjusted to a post-AGI/ASI world than we — who did not grow up surrounded by non-human intelligence — will ever be.