Do kids need low-tech childhoods to reach their potential?
ChatGPT for Teens is latest reflection of a quiet consensus that kids need more cognitive strain than our world provides
The headline story is that OpenAI has announced ChatGPT for Teens. By default, ChatGPT now tracks “more than 2,000 signals” in conversations to assess whether it might be talking to a minor, and onboards identified teens into the new mode automatically. Teen mode is intended for ages 13–17.
What’s different about it? Opt-in parental controls, strict blocks on romantic conversation, a study mode that doesn’t just feed answers to questions, and stronger injunctions against the bot suggesting it has consciousness or emotions. An OpenAI spokesperson says it is trying not to give cues that “might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it.”
Most of the coverage is focusing on the many cautionary tales that have brought OpenAI to this point: ChatGPT telling 13-year-olds how to get intoxicated, helping with suicide letters, etc.
Less discussed is the enthusiasm I’ve been seeing about “homework mode” or “study mode” settings for chatbots in general. Without ever having much of a fight about it, society seems to be converging on the idea that a product designed to give you answers should make you work for them if you’re a kid, even if the questions aren’t about sensitive or dangerous topics. If misplaced, this is a cruel notion: We don’t think kids should have to work to get a meal, an umbrella, or a song. Why should they have to work to obtain literary analysis or math results?
It seems to be because adults are extending concerns about “cognitive apathy” from overreliance on AI to argue that children handed easy answers will never learn essential thinking skills. Is this justified?
Though I’m not sure how far to take it, I lean toward “Yes.” Language acquisition provides convincing evidence of a “critical period” of brain plasticity that starts in infancy and closes in the teens. A lack of exposure to language early in that window is associated with lasting difficulty acquiring it later, and adults are far less likely to reach full fluency with languages they did not begin learning as children. (Fun fact: While brushing up on this topic, I learned that various historical rulers attempted to determine the one true language by commissioning language deprivation experiments on infants and waiting to hear what language their first words were in.)
More evidence for early brain plasticity is seen in how peak performance in sports, games, music, and mathematics tends to come from those who were fully immersed in these during the same critical period as language.
This made me wonder if, when I was a kid, adults would have preferred it if calculators could assess the user’s age and not give 4th graders the answers to division problems except to confirm results already produced via long division on paper. I think the answer is “yes,” which makes me wonder what the optimal type and amount of childhood cognitive strain is supposed to be.
Is it context dependent? I grew into a world where the ability to work out long division by hand was never really needed. But at the same time, learning long division probably helped me gain an ability to think algorithmically, a skill that has very much advantaged me as an adult. If we avoid making AI that takes our world from us, do our kids grow into a future where they never need the ability to think algorithmically — or, more generally, to methodically grind away on hard problems, chase down leads, and recover from dead ends?
If we find the loss of these skills unacceptable, how far should we extend this principle? What am I missing from never having learned to darn my socks or chop firewood? Perhaps we are all critically underdeveloped from never learning to knap handaxes, pick lice out of our peers’ hair, and chase down gazelles on foot. These would no doubt have taught us essential metacognitive skills!
If we should win a future where nobody needs to work — a future so abundant that no skills are actually necessary — which skills should we value anyway? What kind of childhood would best nurture these? I think our ideal might be a lot more rustic and rough-and-tumble than we give kids now.
Chatbots with a “homework mode” are new, but worrying that the kids are turning out soft — that earlier generations were made of sterner stuff — seems to be as old as written history itself. What if the worry has been a little bit justified every time?
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.