This fall, CHT will launch a campaign to Stop the AI Drift — the slow erosion of human abilities as AI takes on more of daily life. The more we let AI think, talk, create, and act for us, the more we lose the skills, relationships, and meaning that come from doing those things ourselves.
As part of the campaign, we’re publishing guest essays from experts on the human abilities most worth protecting in the age of AI. This one comes from childhood development expert Dr. Dana Suskind, author of Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI.
For decades, parents have engaged in an endless pursuit of optimizing childhood, deploying every tool, tutor, and coding camp at their disposal to prepare their children for a 21st Century knowledge economy.
Mothers in most Western nations now spend twice as much time with their children as they did 50 years ago. Fathers have quadrupled their involvement. Many parents are exhausted but still feel like they’re not doing enough. And in a world of narrowing pathways and widening inequality, their logic made perfect sense: Building cognitive skills early secures access to education, which gives your child a fighting chance at a stable, successful life.
Until now.
This “intensive parenting” model that took decades to build and millions of dollars to sustain? AI came along and, within an instant, turned it completely on its head.
The core product of intensive parenting has been automated. The cognitive outputs we’ve been striving to maximize are precisely the tasks generative AI now performs instantly, tirelessly, and at superhuman scale: factual recall, information synthesis, pattern recognition, analytical efficiency. The blueprint for raising children today has been scorched.
This isn’t the first time our plans have needed to be rewritten, of course. Throughout human history, as we evolved from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural communities to industrial economies, parents have always adapted to prepare children for the world they’ll grow into.
But when human intelligence no longer necessarily reigns supreme, what should parents strive to optimize? How do we prepare our children to thrive in a world where artificial intelligence far exceeds our capabilities in domains once considered uniquely human? And what happens if the tools promising to prepare children for this future begin displacing the relationships that are so central to being human?
In a provocative new essay, Bill Gates suggests we set aside certain jobs for humans only.
“I like the phrase Human Reserved,” Gates writes, “because it makes me think of nature reserves—places where we could put buildings and roads, but we choose not to because the loss would be too great.”
I’d like us to think even bigger: What human capacities do we want to deliberately protect?
In my new book “Human Raised”, I call this phenomenon the “Human Edge.” Capabilities that used to be dismissed as soft skills will become recognized as hard currency: The ability to read a room. The critical thinking to discern fact from fiction. The intelligence to question bias and assumptions. The ability to connect, collaborate and repair relationships when things inevitably go wrong. Creativity. Moral judgment.
University of Chicago economist Alex Imas argues that as AI commoditizes cognitive work, spending and employment will increasingly migrate toward the “relational sector.” Think nurses, teachers, therapists, and other workers who spend their days face-to-face with other humans. The workers who survive and thrive, he argues, won’t be the ones who think fastest. They’ll be the ones who connect most deeply. Human presence is becoming scarce. (When was the last time a person rang up your groceries for you?) And what’s scarce becomes valuable.
In the age of artificial intelligence, a human-raised childhood may be the most important advantage we can give a child. We must not allow it to become a luxury good.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, which surveyed over 1,000 leading employers representing 14 million workers, identified empathy, resilience, and creative thinking as the fastest-rising skills in the global economy. Those are also the skills with zero substitution potential from AI.
Fortunately, we know how these skills are built, and we already have the blueprint. It’s an ancient one that’s been working for millennia, and it tells us that these skills are built through human relationships.
Think of the infant brain as hardware. The neural architecture is built in real time, piece by piece, through moments of human connection and nurturing interaction with loving adults. The most important construction occurs during the first five years of life, when the brain creates one million new neural connections every single second. That rate of growth is never again matched in life. Everything that follows is akin to a software update.
To the developing brain, human interaction isn’t a luxury; it’s a biological necessity. The exquisite dance of human interaction provides the precise neural nourishment needed to build a child’s brain: a sophisticated mix of language, neural synching, emotional attunement, and social signaling that wires the developing mind. Each conversation, each shared moment, sparks the neural activity that allows children to build language, spatial reasoning, self-control, and everything it means to be human.
Notably, this development doesn’t depend on perfect parenting. The infant brain has, in fact, evolved to learn from imperfect human interaction: the split-second delays, the mismatches that require repair, the subtle facial cues and shifts in tone. These seemingly inefficient elements of communication are exactly what build our capacity for deep human connection. They’re what make us both human-raised and human.
The friction created when parents misstep and reconnect is where resilience, flexibility, empathy, and emotional regulation are forged. The same is true as children grow and encounter what researchers call social micro-frictions, such as arguments over toys or struggling to take turns. These small moments, when a child must reconcile their perspective with someone else’s, are profoundly meaningful. Children learn that they can express their needs and still be okay, and that connection with another person can withstand tension.
In other words, children learn to be human from other humans. And for all of human history, they only learned from humans. Researchers have demonstrated that infants’ sponge-like brains absorb information at an incredible rate when it comes from a person, and they absorb nothing from screens or recordings. Evolution equipped children with a kind of biological filter called the social gate, which tells their brains to tune into people rather than be overwhelmed by the cacophony of sensory inputs surrounding them at all times.
That’s all changed.
For the first time ever, artificial entities hold the keys to our social gate. The same back-and-forth human interaction that wires a child’s brain and builds the Human Edge can now be convincingly mimicked by a machine. Infants as young as six months show physiological responses to robots that parallel their body’s response to humans. And older children are even more vulnerable: research shows they’re significantly more prone than adults to attributing consciousness, intentions, and feelings to non-human entities.
The machines knocking at the social gate are never distracted, and always available. They never lose their temper or check their phone. And they’re flooding the market.
App stores and toy aisles are filling up with AI-powered companions, tutors, and playmates, all promising to build the skills children will need: curiosity, creativity, empathy, connection. Parents who’ve reached for any tool at their disposal to give their children a fighting chance will likely reach for these too. As someone who purchased Baby Einstein videos for my preschooler, I understand that instinct.
But the reality, and the great irony, is that AI tools marketed to build Human Edge skills are likely to erode those very capacities.
Research has found that using Generative AI reduces individuals’ confidence in their critical thinking skills and that adults who completed an essay-writing task without AI showed more cognitive activity, felt greater ownership of the material, and actually learned more, compared to those who used AI to do the same task. A neuroimaging study of children, meanwhile, found that using ChatGPT reduced engagement in the brain networks responsible for creativity, attention, and cognitive control.
If cognitive offloading changes how adults think, its implications for children may be more profound. Their brains aren’t simply using established circuits; they’re still building them. In adults, the concern may be “brain rot.” In children, the risk is something closer to “brain stunt.” And it will threaten more than a child’s intellectual development. Their very capacity to connect with other people could be undermined. By interacting with always agreeable, endlessly patient artificial companions, children’s brains may be wired to expect what no human relationship can ever give them: perfection.
The evidence is clear that a thoroughly human-raised childhood is the best preparation for a thoroughly AI world. The question that keeps me up at night is whether every child will get one.
The optimist in me wonders if AI’s arrival might break the spell of intensive parenting entirely. If the cognitive skills we’ve been racing to build are no longer a differentiator, perhaps we can finally stop racing and accept that simply being present, in all our wonderful imperfections, is enough for our children.
But the pragmatist in me recognizes that presence isn’t free. In fact, it may be the most expensive commodity of all. Because what it costs is time, and time is precisely what the economy has been stripping from the parents who can least afford to lose it. The parent working three jobs doesn’t lack love. She lacks hours. The father on his phone during dinner isn’t checked out, he’s drowning in deadlines.
My fear is that families diverge: some will double down on human connection, while others seek (or accept) technological supplementation. Both sets of parents would be acting out of love, striving to give their children everything they can. But as we know too well, fierce love and the best of intentions have never been enough to generate equitable outcomes.
There’s plenty of evidence that this divergence has already begun. Highly educated and well-resourced parents are already following the science of human development, leaning on connection and eschewing technology in their homes even as they build it in their workplaces. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman all famously went on the record stating that they limit, or plan to delay, their children’s use of technology. Many Silicon Valley families are choosing low-tech Waldorf schools, increasing playdates, and prioritizing unstructured play. In doing so, they are cultivating Human Edge skills and preparing their children to thrive in an AI future, while families with fewer resources and less time are reaching, understandably, for the tools that promise to do the same thing faster and cheaper.
If the cognitive skills we’ve been racing to build are no longer a differentiator, perhaps we can finally stop racing and accept that simply being present, in all our wonderful imperfections, is enough for our children.
Imagine one child whose parents can afford the time to read, sing, argue and repair, facilitate outdoor play, and seek out low-tech classrooms. Now imagine another child whose overworked parents lack time but have done their best to surround their child with products promising support: “educational” videos, an AI tutor, a chatbot companion. Both children are loved. Only one is getting the developmental input every child needs.
The “better than nothing” fallacy would suggest that artificial interaction is better than no interaction. Tragically, this miscalculation not only robs children of the opportunity to build the Human Edge skills they will need to thrive, it could rewire their developing brains in ways we’re only beginning to understand and drive one of the deepest developmental divides we’ve ever known. Not between those who have access to information and those who don’t, but between those who grow up human-raised and those who don’t.
What was once the most universally available developmental input, human interaction, is now at risk of becoming a luxury good that is unevenly distributed, planting inequality at the neurological level.
AI is one of the most powerful tools our species has ever held. Used wisely, it can reduce the burdens that keep families from being truly present with one another and lighten the invisible labor that exhausts parents before they walk through the door. In that way, it has the potential to protect, rather than replace, human connection. The greatest promise of this transformative technology is that it might offer every child, regardless of zip code, the one thing that has always mattered most. A loving caregivers’ presence. That’s the opportunity.
But we have a narrow window to act on that opportunity and ensure AI is designed and deployed in ways that facilitate human connection, not impede it. That means judging child-facing AI by a simple standard: Does it give adults more capacity to connect with children, or does it quietly take their place? Does it keep parents, teachers, and caregivers in the loop, or does it make human presence seem optional? Does it protect the messy work of attachment, play, conversation, boredom, conflict, and repair, or does it offer up a frictionless substitute?
In the age of artificial intelligence, a human-raised childhood may be the most important advantage we can give a child. We must not allow it to become a luxury good.
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Originally posted on [ Center for Humane Technology ]
