Put down your tablet please!
Siri doesn’t answer such questions!
why to you keep on watching such shows all the time?
Aren’t you bored?
How do you manage to always find silly shows all the time!
I think these questions are familiar to everyone who has kids born and raised in the 21st century, we all agree that technology is not the best way forward for raising healthy kids both mentally and physically, but have we thought about how AI is shaping their personalities and intelligence?!
AI is all around us, in voice recognition, face recognition, social networking, movies and TV, the list can go on, it is a world by itself.
Netflix recommends movies for my kids, Youtube suggest shows of similar content to them, my daughter’s newfound friend is Siri, and I don’t want to even start talking about TikTok. With the Covid-19 crisis and online learning, kids are consuming content more than ever, their screen time is up by a 100% , and this comes along without mentioning its effect on their eyes and their behavior.
We have all read articles of how creepy this is and how negative these effects are but what if we start thinking in a different way and embrace this technology. The good thing about the technology of artificial intelligence is that it is very predictable, it checks what you see, works out the algorithm in the world wide web and then provides you with suggestions and recommendations of similar topics that have been watched by people with similar interest, it is just calculation of clicks on certain domains and time spent on them, so it is up to us, humans to decide what AI will recommend for us and for our children.
To make it simpler, Cataleya my 5 YO likes to watch shows on Youtube that has kids playing with their toys, and she always manages to find similar shows, she is using my google account so I can see all these videos that she is viewing on top of my feeds. Same type of artificial intelligence works with Netflix.
What if we as parents, since we are consuming content also more than 10 hours a day change the suggested videos to our own preference by clicking and watching more educational videos!? The algorithm will stay the same but it will suggest more education content for them, I know most of you like myself might not have time or patience to watch these videos or even search for them..
Well we do..
Trust me we do..
I spend 60% of my screen time on social networking, if I can specify 30% of this time to try to enhance the quality of content my kids are consuming, so can you..
Technology is here and it is moving fast, so are our kids, nothing will wait for us to comprehend the speed of change happening around us, we need to understand, embrace and use our god given intelligence to outsmart AI algorithm. We are still parents and we still have a big obligations towards our kids both on and off screen. And its about time we use AI to our benefit and have our kids embrace the digital universe AI is opening for us.
Although the world wide web has huge data, AI has a narrow perspective, it decides based on you and it suggests based on you, let be unpredictable, lets be curious to see and show different perspectives, and then we can choose to gain a deep understanding for chosen topics by spending more time on them.. the possibilities are endless, and technology is and will always be complimentary for the enhancement of the human race and will ignite a human revolution.
