Randi Williams

What happens when technology becomes a black box and we stop being able to see what's going on inside?

We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices, and inside children's toys.

We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to write and even rewrite the rules of AI.

What children need is a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI.

They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.

In the 1940s, the radio was a transformative technology.

But it wasn't an immediate hit.

That's because the radios of the early 1900s looked like unwieldy contraptions of exposed wires and glowing vacuum tubes, like a science fair project gone wrong.

And it wasn't until 1929, when radios started to look like sleek bakelite, that's a kind of plastic, that they became insanely popular.

But at a critical cost.

Transparency.

What happens when technology becomes a black box and we stop being able to see what's going on inside?

Fast forward 100 years.

Today, the sci-fi artificial intelligence devices of our dreams have been woven into the very fabric of modern life.

But like the radio, these systems are bake-lighted.

We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices and inside children's toys.

Over the past decade, I've had a lot of conversations with kids about AI as an MIT researcher and founding member of Day of AI, a nonprofit creating opportunities for millions of children around the world to learn about how AI works.

And here's what I've been seeing.

These devices mimic intelligence and friendliness so well that children learn to trust them, sometimes more than they trust themselves.

And there is real danger of children becoming overly reliant on or inappropriately attached to their smart toys.