But how do you know that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.
And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:
- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.
- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).
- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.
The point is that knowing what you don't know allows you to hedge your bets on events far into the future; my child will need to become productive 20 years from now and maintain it for 40-50 years. So, it's a bit like trying to educate a kid born in the 60s for the web era, you can't and you shouldn't even try.
What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.
It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.
How do you know it's a moral panic and it isn't actually causing brain rot?