AI is preoccupying us more, not just as a topic that dominates media headlines but as something which is beginning to have an immediate and personal connection with different aspects of our everyday lives.
Whether you are the owner of a large nursery group – using AI for managing data – or a room leader, using AI resources to support early learning, it is speeding up tasks and setting new expectations. I must admit that recently I have begun to think about it in a positive light – but am I being naive?
Last week the London Poverty charity, The Childhood Trust, launched its new study – ‘Exploring the implications of Non-Human Conversational Agents for the Wellbeing and Mental Health of Disadvantaged Children’ (see news online Jan 21).
What this very long title sets out is an intention to discover how pre-school children experience, and develop emotional relationships with, Generative AI toys. The study also seeks to establish how AI widens the inequality gap between children who are ‘digitally excluded’ and those who are not.
It brought back into my mind the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Starting off like a traditional children's story, with an ‘AI Friend’ waiting for a child to buy her in a store, it moves on to depict what happens when AI is integrated into relationships with humans. Exploring themes of empathy, loneliness and love, it creates a sinister picture of a society riven with inequalities and sickness as a result of technology out of control.
Putting this dystopian picture to one side, it's fair to say that at this moment we don't know where AI is taking us in terms of children's wellbeing. I am increasingly aware of an argument for children under the age of five not to be given AI toys, and I support it. What do you think?
