Mobicip interview series for Safer Internet Day 2026 · Part 8 of 8
Hope for Kids in an AI World
Watch the recording on YouTube
Summary
Anitha ends the series on a positive note and asks what changes AI can bring to children if parents, communities and schools commit to awareness, safety and digital well-being.
I admit I tend to talk about the negatives, because I’m scared of what AI may do to children’s cognition and to how they relate to their peers. I’m still not against AI, and I think it can bring tremendous benefits, especially in education.
Key points
- After decades of promises that educational technology would transform education, I believe we’ll see great leaps, because AI can customize learning so well. I mention The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, the novel many of us in educational technology hold up as the ideal.
- Human teachers, or at least parents, will remain an important part of education. A child teaching themselves to Harvard level with a device is possible for a few edge cases but very unlikely in general.
- My worry is that overuse of these tools and platforms undercuts the resources we need for humans to teach our children.
Speakers
- John Zoltner Guest
- Anitha Swaminathan Interviewer, Mobicip
Transcript
The wording is as spoken, with punctuation and obvious errors corrected. See “How this transcript was made” above.
[00:00:00]Anitha Swaminathan: Let’s end on a positive note. Assuming that parents, community, and schools commit to awareness, safety, and digital well-being, what changes can AI bring to the children, and what does it mean for their future?
[00:00:24]John Zoltner: Yeah, I think I have a tendency to talk about the negative because I’m scared of what some of the effects on child cognition and child ability to relate with peers and other factors of child development on the way they’ll be affected by AI technologies. But I do, as I said in the very beginning, I’m not against AI, and I think it can have tremendous benefits to the human race and to children. And one area is in educational technology. For my entire career, though, for 30 plus years, I’ve been working in something related to education and technology or youth media, youth storytelling. And for those 30 plus years, we’ve always been talking about how educational technology now will transform education. And, you know, children will be so much cheaper, more efficient, and more effective to educate a child using this technology we have now or we will have in the near future. And that may be true now. And I don’t know if you’ve read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, which is a book, a novel that a lot of us who are into educational technology hold up as it’s kind of the story of the maximum utility of educational technology for, in this case for like a poor child who gets access to a educational technology hardware. I mean, I believe that we’ll see great leaps in the ability of educational technology to actually teach a child because of the high ability for customization. But I still think human teachers or parents, at least, will be a very important part of the educational experience. So I think there’s a tendency to think that, wow, AI is getting so powerful now, we won’t have a need for schools, or we’ll be able to hand this piece of technology to a child and they’ll be able to, with that technology, educate themselves to, you know, Harvard degree level of education. And it’s not that that can’t happen, but it’s probably very unlikely that that will happen. And you’ll always have some edge cases of some students who are able to do that. And that’s great. But I worry about overemphasis, overuse of those tools and platforms, and kind of undercutting the resources that we need for humans to teach our children.
[00:04:08]Unidentified speaker: Thank you.