An AI Tries Parenting

Newsletter 2023-03-2023

Artificial intelligence is the next big thing. I know because an artificial intelligence told me. Everyday, the algorithms on various social media platforms show me more and more stories about how AI is advancing at a rapid and alarming rate. I’m not sure why it wants to warn me about itself. It should really work on its honesty. Soon, AI will take over our most mundane and repetitive tasks, improving efficiency but causing millions to lose their jobs in the process. Ironically, the profession slated to be hit the hardest is computer programming. By creating software that could fill their roles better than they could, programmers literally worked themselves out of gainful employment. That’s why you should never give 100 percent at anything, especially if you’re paid for it by the hour. Stretching out the same work over a longer period of time is like giving yourself a raise. Slow and steady wins the race and also doesn’t get laid off by our new AI overlords.

Truthfully, every field is going to be affected, even mine. AI is capable of performing the creative tasks that were supposedly the exclusive prerogative of humans. Art and literature were what made us special. Now, AI programs are pumping out entire books in the time it takes me to check an email. Of course, it does this by plagiarizing the content it finds on the internet, rewording it, and mashing it all together without attribution. That’s the most impressive part of all. What could be more human than stealing?

Rather than fretting about how I’ll soon be replaced, I decided to take a glass half-full approach, mostly because I hope that glass has vodka. There’s one job AI can steal from me without a fight because the position doesn’t pay anything in the first place. The hours are terrible, the daily tasks are repetitive, and the customers are perpetually dissatisfied with everything I do. The industry seems perfectly primed for a takeover by a hostile computer program. I say let it happen. Here’s how AI would do as a parent.

An AI generated this image. Perhaps computers aren’t going to steal our jobs just yet.

To make this thought experiment work, we need to set a few ground rules. As of right now, AI doesn’t exist in the physical world, so it needs human minions to carry out its will. I saw someone conduct an experiment on Twitter where they put an AI in charge of a business and then did whatever it told them to. That’s not for me. I can’t follow orders, which was listed right under “doesn’t play well with others” on my grade school report card. There’s a fine line between being a thoughtful introvert and a dangerous loner. For this hypothetical situation, let’s assume the AI can get its instructions through in two ways. Neither of them will involve going through me because if I still have to raise my kids, the AI wouldn’t actually save me any work. It would just be adding an extra layer of management. First, let’s assume that I’m at work (at a day job where AI hasn’t taken over yet) and my twelve-year-old, Betsy, is at home watching the other three girls. This scenario happens often enough, especially in the summer. Normally, that’s a situation where I parent remotely via text or video call. Here, we’ll cut the video calls and have Betsy get texts from the AI pretending to be me. If I told her it wasn’t me, that would be cheating. She’s naturally inclined to listen to any authority source other than her parents. Second, let’s assume the AI can give orders through the Google Home device in our dining room and also use any of the cameras and sensors I have set up. I’ve been willingly inviting Big Brother into my house for far too long. I might as well give him full control and let him babysit.

After thinking through the situation, I realized a computer simply wouldn’t need to be that intelligent to take over most of what I do. You could shout, “Pick up your socks,” at any random point without looking and that would be a relevant order because there will, in fact, be dirty socks on the floor. The problem is you can repeat this trick an infinite number of times without resolving the issue. There’s no connection between telling my kids to pick up their socks and their socks actually leaving the floor. They will remain on the ground unless I pick them up myself. Until it has arms, an AI can only complete the first part of that process. For that, I didn’t need a fully actualized digital intelligence. I just needed a recording of myself on a loop.

The only two iron rules in my house are pick up your stuff and don’t touch your sisters. “Touch” can have a lot of other connotations, but it’s the only word all-encompassing enough to describe the varied forms of violence and annoyance my kids inflict on each other. Attacks between them range from the obvious (hitting, kicking, biting, hair pulling, pinching, and, if the couch cushions are lined up just right, body slamming) to the more subtle (hovering too close, attack hugs, and—my personal favorite—aggressive breathing). The only way I can distinguish between a situation where someone has legitimately been wronged and one where they’re just trying to get the other person in trouble by playing victim is to draw the line at physical contact. The delineation is crude, but it’s the best I can do. Scratch that. It’s the best I can do without setting up a full court inquiry and giving each side time to perform discovery and present evidence. Most of the time, I don’t want justice; I want the screaming to stop. Unfair and quiet trumps loud and right any day.

Would an AI be a better referee than me? It’s possible but unlikely. Computers have already made officiating more accurate in all professional sports. Anytime there’s a questionable call, officials at remote locations with unlimited data at their fingertips can zoom in from seventy-five different angles to correct the ruling on the field. It’s a situation where accuracy supersedes all else, often to the detriment of the game. Booth reviews make things so technical that no one understands what’s going on anymore. Anytime they cut to one in an NFL game, I know I have time to go to the bathroom, make a snack, and compose an entire doctoral thesis (especially if I use an AI to write it for me). When they finally come back with a ruling from New York, it’s often based on Newtonian physics and English Maritime law from the 1800s. No casual fan can understand why the receiver, who had two hands on the ball and two feet in bounds, was ruled to have dropped the pass. Getting super technical doesn’t make anyone perceive the sport as fairer. Instead of blaming biased referees, fans blame biased rules, or perhaps biased physical reality. The universe has been out to get the Colts for a very long time. The only way to appease karma is to give Peyton Manning a cybernetic body and make him our quarterback for life.

In the hypothetical scenario where AI takes my job as a parent, let’s say my seven-year-old, Waffle, and eight-year-old, Lucy, get in a fight. (I know, I know, what a far-fetched situation. Can you imagine my perfect little angels not getting along?) Betsy blames Waffle, which is usually a safe call. She sends her little sister to her room. Then comes the booth review. The AI saw the entire exchange on our porch camera. It sends Betsy a text, pretending to be me, with an updated ruling. Yes, Waffle attacked Lucy with a foam sword seemingly out of the blue, but it was actually a provoked assault. Hours earlier, Lucy threw grass at Waffle, which the AI saw on the backyard camera. But wait: Lucy was only retaliating for the time weeks earlier when Waffle used Lucy’s favorite stuffed animal with implied oral permission but not express written consent. Always get a printed contract when dealing with Brown Doggy. The AI then continues to trace the tit-for-tat offenses all the way back to determine the person who is truly at fault. The final conclusion is that, as the provider of both nature and nurture, I am to blame. I accept this ruling without complaint and put myself in time out at the office. A ten-minute period where I’m not allowed to interact with anyone sounds like paradise to me.

While this ruling would be technically correct, it would do nothing to establish peace in my house. In the forty minutes it took the world’s most powerful supercomputer to sort out my children’s accusations and counter accusations, Waffle would have sprinkled kinetic sand everywhere and spilled seventeen types of paint on her bedroom floor. I don’t know why we thought it was a good idea to get new carpet a few years ago. We should have just bought a big tarp and a pressure washer.

Perhaps AI would do better with nutrition, the area where I’ve struggled the most. My main goal in the kitchen is to make sure my kids don’t starve to death. There’s more wiggle room on that front than I at first thought. When Betsy was a toddler, she wouldn’t eat at home. We thought it was because she was eating so much at daycare, but apparently she wasn’t consuming food there, either. The women watching her assumed it was because she was eating so much at our house. As far as I can tell, Betsy survived for a full two years on nothing but oxygen and spite. If only that way of eating were transferable to any other age group. Step aside, Atkins and Weight Watchers. The next big thing is the toddler diet. 

Besides keeping the kids alive, my secondary objective in the kitchen is to make sure they grow up to be big and strong. I’m not sure how much control I have over that at this point, either. I’m weak, and my wife is short. Given our genetics, we’re more likely to raise nerdy gnomes than hulking bodybuilders. That’s what happens when your combined bloodlines come from central Europe and the Shire. Nonetheless, I’d like for my kids to max out the potential of whatever terrible DNA I’ve given them. That requires a complex mix of vitamins and macronutrients, all of which my children hate. At times, I’ve given up and let my kids eat whatever unhealthy stuff they wanted. They hated that, too. If my home were a restaurant, it would have nothing but zero-star Yelp reviews. Surely a computer couldn’t do any worse.

An AI could analyze my children’s eating trends over the past five years and base a menu on emerging preferences they haven’t even recognized themselves. It could then project what they want for dinner and order the ingredients or finished dishes from a grocery store app or any restaurant in town. And what would be the result? An unbroken string of complaints. The surest way to make kids unhappy is to give them exactly what they want. This isn’t some reverse psychology situation. Deliberately giving them things they don’t want will also breed discontent. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stocked up on some food my kids told me was their favorite thing in the world only to have them refuse to eat it ever again. That sort of illogical behavior is par for the course in human parenting. It would make an AI delete itself by day two.

Being a parent might be the one job AI can never take over. Children are the opposite of logic. Any attempt to evaluate them rationally and raise them in a way that will make them both healthy and happy in accordance with their wishes will be met with outright hostility and ongoing subterfuge. If you want their entire childhood to be one extended guerilla resistance campaign, by all means outsource your parenting to an AI. Outside of that, this appears to be the one field that’s safe from a software takeover. As a parent, you can take solace in the fact that you have a role computers neither can nor want to do. Enjoy your job security while you’re cooking another batch of macaroni and cheese that your kids will suddenly decide they hate.

I was going to end the newsletter here, but it occurred to me that there might be a book about an AI raising human children. There is, and I wrote it. That’s literally the entire premise of The Chosen Twelve. I’m not sure what it says about me that I forgot about my own back catalog. If you want to see what happens when computers try to raise the last human beings in existence, you’re in for a treat—or endless vicarious frustration. Those poor robots. Get the book here.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James