The Nonlinear Library LW - Raising children on the eve of AI by juliawise
Feb 15, 2024
07:10
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Raising children on the eve of AI, published by juliawise on February 15, 2024 on LessWrong.
Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise.
I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don't know if it's about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter.
Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently.
What might the world look like
Most of my imaginings about my children's lives have them in pretty normal futures, where they go to college and have jobs and do normal human stuff, but with better phones.
It's hard for me to imagine the other versions:
A lot of us are killed or incapacitated by AI
More war, pandemics, and general chaos
Post-scarcity utopia, possibly with people living as uploads
Some other weird outcome I haven't imagined
Even in the world where change is slower, more like the speed of the industrial revolution, I feel a bit like we're preparing children to be good blacksmiths or shoemakers in 1750 when the factory is coming. The families around us are still very much focused on the track of do well in school > get into a good college > have a career > have a nice life. It seems really likely that chain will change a lot sometime in my children's lifetimes.
When?
Of course it would have been premature in 1750 to not teach your child blacksmithing or shoemaking, because the factory and the steam engine took a while to replace older forms of work. And history is full of millenialist groups who wrongly believed the world was about to end or radically change.
I don't want to be a crackpot who fails to prepare my children for the fairly normal future ahead of them because I wrongly believe something weird is about to happen. I may be entirely wrong, or I may be wrong about the timing.
Is it even ok to have kids?
Is it fair to the kids?
This question has been asked many times by people contemplating awful things in the world. My friend's parents asked their priest if it was ok to have a child in the 1980s given the risk of nuclear war. Fortunately for my friend, the priest said yes.
I find this very unintuitive, but I think the logic goes: it wouldn't be fair to create lives that will be cut short and never reach their potential. To me it feels pretty clear that if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it's better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born. When we asked them about this, our older kids said they're glad to be alive even if humans don't last much longer.
I'm not sure about babies, but to me it seems that by age 1 or so, most kids are having a pretty good time overall. There's not good data on children's happiness, maybe because it's hard to know how meaningful their answers are. But there sure seems to be a U-shaped curve that children are on one end of. This indicates to me that even if my children only get another 5 or 10 or 20 years, that's still very worthwhile for them.
This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven't properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you're on the fence you should think more about it.
What about the effects on your work?
If you're considering whether to have children, and you think your work can make a difference to what kind of outcomes we see from AI, that's a different question. Some approaches that seem valid to me:
"I'm allowed to make significant personal decisions how I want, even if it decreases my focus on work"
"I care more about this work going as well as it can than I do about fulfillment in my personal life"
There are some theories about how parenting will make you more productive or motivated, which I don't really buy (especi...
Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise.
I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don't know if it's about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter.
Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently.
What might the world look like
Most of my imaginings about my children's lives have them in pretty normal futures, where they go to college and have jobs and do normal human stuff, but with better phones.
It's hard for me to imagine the other versions:
A lot of us are killed or incapacitated by AI
More war, pandemics, and general chaos
Post-scarcity utopia, possibly with people living as uploads
Some other weird outcome I haven't imagined
Even in the world where change is slower, more like the speed of the industrial revolution, I feel a bit like we're preparing children to be good blacksmiths or shoemakers in 1750 when the factory is coming. The families around us are still very much focused on the track of do well in school > get into a good college > have a career > have a nice life. It seems really likely that chain will change a lot sometime in my children's lifetimes.
When?
Of course it would have been premature in 1750 to not teach your child blacksmithing or shoemaking, because the factory and the steam engine took a while to replace older forms of work. And history is full of millenialist groups who wrongly believed the world was about to end or radically change.
I don't want to be a crackpot who fails to prepare my children for the fairly normal future ahead of them because I wrongly believe something weird is about to happen. I may be entirely wrong, or I may be wrong about the timing.
Is it even ok to have kids?
Is it fair to the kids?
This question has been asked many times by people contemplating awful things in the world. My friend's parents asked their priest if it was ok to have a child in the 1980s given the risk of nuclear war. Fortunately for my friend, the priest said yes.
I find this very unintuitive, but I think the logic goes: it wouldn't be fair to create lives that will be cut short and never reach their potential. To me it feels pretty clear that if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it's better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born. When we asked them about this, our older kids said they're glad to be alive even if humans don't last much longer.
I'm not sure about babies, but to me it seems that by age 1 or so, most kids are having a pretty good time overall. There's not good data on children's happiness, maybe because it's hard to know how meaningful their answers are. But there sure seems to be a U-shaped curve that children are on one end of. This indicates to me that even if my children only get another 5 or 10 or 20 years, that's still very worthwhile for them.
This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven't properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you're on the fence you should think more about it.
What about the effects on your work?
If you're considering whether to have children, and you think your work can make a difference to what kind of outcomes we see from AI, that's a different question. Some approaches that seem valid to me:
"I'm allowed to make significant personal decisions how I want, even if it decreases my focus on work"
"I care more about this work going as well as it can than I do about fulfillment in my personal life"
There are some theories about how parenting will make you more productive or motivated, which I don't really buy (especi...