My son was born at the start of the CoViD* Pandemic. I literally taught my first class remotely from the hospital the next day. My students logged in to see the sight of my first child just chillin’ and being a day-old person. The shock and wonder of how I was going to possibly explain anything about this world to him overwhelmed me.

I do remember puppeting his little arms at my students through the zoom meeting and admonishing them to avoid watching videos or playing games during our class sessions. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’ I said in a cartoon baby voice as I shook his little fist at the camera.

I had to. When else do you get to properly use that joke?

The best thing about the pandemic was the time I got to spend home with him in the first year of his life. My wife took maternity leave while I put him in the bassinet next to me as he dozed peacefully while I explained the important parts of the day’s lesson.

I didn’t expect to live through that year. And I’m savvy enough to know how precarious our global civilization is. I sent quite a few emails to the account we’d set up for the kiddo sleeping next to me. They had a very disturbing “Sarah Connor” vibe.

My small family dodged the worst of it; a reasonably acceptable vaccine was developed a year faster than I thought it would be. Long story short, I suddenly had to start adapting to the idea that I might live a full human lifespan.

And then AI happened.

And suddenly everyone was talking like it was the “End of the World” again and none of my efforts losing 50 pounds, re-archiving those e-mails and moving to a new place to be closer to a more ideal set of schools mattered anymore because this “new” technology was going to ruin everything.

AI is not shocking to me. The first ‘genetic algorithm’ to tackle the 3-body problem came up with F=ma back in the early Onesies** with a seriously small data-set, at least by today’s standards.

CGP Grey’s video on the basics of how these things work was Six-years old when Chat GPT hit the public consciousness.

And the Idea of the singularity was mature enough to be derided as “The ‘Rapture’ for nerds” well before that.

So…

Why does this feel different now?

Some sort of watershed or threshold moment occurred. We multiplied our understanding of reality by its complex conjugate and suddenly: *it just got REAL.

What happened?

Why now?

No one knows.

Why me? That’s easy. I learn by teaching. And I’m grappling with this as hard as I’m grappling with every other important parenting issue:

Smart phones; social media; climate change; global wars; stranger danger; not-stranger danger; too much paw patrol; too much sugar; dumb phones; too much video games; did-I-subscribe-to-the-right-engineering-toy-box-thing; Am I effectively moderating my child’s exposure to “woke-ness;” Am I a bad parent for not giving him sugar when he really asks nicely. Am I a bad parent for not teaching him how to properly sword-fight with a robot.

That last one started as a joke, but now I wonder…

Whatever the world is going to be like when he graduates. It won’t look familiar to those of us who are in it now.

Worst case scenario: Something horrible happens that were not prepared for, and all the Doomsday expecters get a few years to feel good about how well they planned for the apocalypse they helped to occur.

Best case scenario: Society is shocked, but whatever the new thing is still has international trade and a concept of humanity as a collective striving to mitigate all the terrible stuff that the hateful universe keeps throwing at us.

I don’t think it’s going to be either of those, but from what I’ve seen so far, it is going to be very weird.

I have a typical three-year-old trying typical three-year-old tricks on me, and he’s pretty good at manipulating me. Even though I have a lot of child psychology under my belt and I have extensively studied for this, it’s a constant balancing act between setting clear boundaries and making sure to fairly accommodate his needs. When he says he needs to go potty soon after going to bed, and I know it is far more likely that he’s just trying to extend bed-time and doesn’t actually need the toilet, I have to weigh his need for clear bedtime routine boundaries against his tiny, fickle bladder. I have made mistakes in both directions.

If an AI used it’s incredible brainpower to pull a manipulation like that, I’d be perfectly helpless.

This Strange New World is far beyond our capacity to predict or prepare-for, but I am certain that a decade from now, when my son is old enough to start high school, algorithms built by machine learning will have transformed the world. Probably as dramatically as it changed from the start to the end of the 20th century.

Will it solve the climate crisis, make the world more just and equitable and usher in a Star Trek like utopia?

Or will it’s insatiable demand for processing push us over the climate cliff and lead to a dystopian surveillance state in which even our thoughts are constantly monitored.

Probably a bizzare combination of the two, but ultimately, it is up to us.

The world as we know it is inevitably ending. We all need to step-up and work toward making sure Earth 2.0 is safe and just place to raise a kid.

*Ever since I found out what COVID was short for, capitalizing the o and the i just seems wrong to me. Also, why isn’t there an e at the end?

**It is the editorial policy of this blog that we will refer to the first decade of the 21st century as ‘The Onesies,’ and the second decade as either ‘The Tensies,’ or sometimes ‘The Teensies.’ If these decades ever need to be referred to in any previous centuries or centuries to come, the entire year range will be included to avoid confusion.