My grandson Henry is not quite three. When he goes to the park, it’s not the swings that he’s looking for. He looks for kids who have broken toys that need fixing. He doesn’t want to play with those toys. Henry looks for warranty work. A dead battery, a loose wheel or a dump truck that refuses to dump is a service call. His business model has one weakness—he fixes things for free—but otherwise he seems ready to open a repair shop. He also knows the difference between a tow truck and a flatbed, and I have learned that calling either one “a big truck” merely identifies me as an unserious person.
Henry loves classic Lego, the kind that does nothing until the child does something. Sometimes he studies the pictures, finds the correct pieces and builds exactly what Denmark intended. Then he pushes the instructions aside and makes whatever he sees in his own head. The booklet teaches him how the pieces work, but it does not tell him everything they can become.
His brother Hunter is eleven months old and already watching. His first teacher is a two-year-old mechanic who occasionally ignores Danish engineering specifications.
Neither has any idea that there’s something called AI. But I’ve already begun thinking of them as GenAI. They may be among the first children with no meaningful memory of life before machines that can answer questions, draw pictures, explain homework, and compose a tasteful apology on behalf of someone who is not especially sorry.
I remember computers arriving. First they filled rooms, then desks, then laps, then pockets. Now the machine in my pocket can explain quantum physics and help me sound more emotionally mature than I have any intention of becoming. Henry and Hunter will not experience AI as an arrival. It will simply be there, like Wi-Fi—noticed mainly when it stops working.
But AI is different from most of the technologies that came before it. They helped us do things.