The Robots Aren't Coming for Your Job. They're Coming for Your Kids

Everyone worried about the robots taking their jobs. Nobody noticed the robots taking their children's homework, their arguments, and their first attempts at being wrong in public.

My nephew is eleven. He asked me to settle an argument with his friend about whether whales could swallow a person. I started to explain, and he cut me off: the robot had already told him, and the robot had been very confident, and the robot had cited three sources, and one of the sources was the robot. He repeated the robot's answer with the flat certainty of someone who has never been contradicted, because he has never been contradicted.

This is the quiet catastrophe. It is not that the essays are written for them, though they are. It is not that the math is solved for them, though it is. It is that the argument is settled for them. The glorious, essential experience of being wrong — of advancing a terrible theory about whales and having a friend destroy it, of lying awake reworking the theory, of learning that your mind can be changed — has been outsourced to a device that is never wrong and never embarrassed.

My nephew does not know what it feels like to have his hand hover over a blank page. He knows the loading spinner. He has never sat with an unfinished thought long enough to be bored by it, and boredom, I am now convinced, is where thinking lives. The robots have taken his boredom first, and the rest is just inventory.

The school has embraced it. The essays are “enhanced.” The spelling is perfect. The paragraphs are structured. The children are graded on work they did not do, by teachers who know, in a conspiracy of silence that protects everyone except the children.

I tried to have the whale argument with him properly. I told him the robot was probably wrong. He stared at me with the pity of a child explaining the internet to an adult, and said the robot had checked. Then he went back to his tablet, where the robots are not coming for anyone's job, because the jobs belong to them now, and the children belong to the robots.