Originally published here.
As a mother of two young children, I keep getting asked how I plan to raise them in the age of AI.
This is my attempt at an answer.
I was on a ski trip with a range of world-leading entrepreneurs recently. One of them has a son nearing school age. He described how, after initial hesitation, he and his wife had decided to send him to an elite private school. “I see how my colleagues in Silicon Valley educate their children. Competition will get incredibly fierce and I want our son to have the best chances”, the founder said.
During a longer trip to the Bay Area a few months ago, my husband and I had similar experiences. When visiting incredibly successful friends of ours, we brought a dinosaur book as a gift for their 5-year old son. They smirked at us, explaining that their son wasn’t really into dinosaurs, he only cared for fractions. I almost choked on my drink. Mind you, my two year old daughter was sitting on the floor eating sand at that very moment. That night, my husband and I looked at each other and asked if we were raising children that would be totally out of step with the modern elite of tomorrow.
In many elite circles around the world, it has become the norm for highly ambitious parents to hire a host of private tutors in order to maximise the educational future of their offspring. Much of this resonates. These parents are not deluded or pure snobs. They are often genuinely hard-working and very smart people. As the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant father with a very strict and ambitious attitude towards education, this is exactly the mindset I grew up with, albeit with significantly less financial means.
But the more I wondered how I want to raise my own children in this new world, the less this educational path made sense to me.
Instead, it is my strong belief that in a world of constant change and nearing AGI, rather than obsessing over teaching my children specific skills to compete among global elites, the most important skill I can teach them is to become unfuckwithable.
unfuckwithable (adj.): When you are truly at peace with yourself. Nothing anyone says or does bothers you and no negativity can affect you.
unfuckwithable in the age of AI (mindset): When you have the steadfast human grounding to harness the upside of AI while shielding against its downsides.
Raising unfuckwithable children in the age of AI is first and foremost an exercise in raising grounded, whole humans - and only then an exercise in using AI well.
I On being human
What exactly is it that we want to teach our children? Historically, the answer was mostly something along the lines of "how to live a happy life." Increasingly, the answer also seems to revolve around “being competitive among a fierce global elite.”
The fallacy of material wealth, narrow skills and young excellence
Does generational wealth make us unfuckwithable? After all, there must be a reason we call it Fuck You Money. The ability to become so wealthy that not a single hour of work need ever be done again and not a single boss deferred to, is extremely compelling to most of us.
Yet, as philosopher Sam Harris remarked about the silence of billionaires in the face of geopolitical madness: “What’s the point of having fuck you money if you never say ‘fuck you’?”1 In the end, material success does not shield us from mental captivity, anxiety, and quite plainly, human egregiousness.
Research consistently shows that happiness is most influenced by our relationships, our mental health, as well as our sense of autonomy and meaning. Financial security plays into it as well, but evidence on how much remains inconclusive, and it is far from the biggest factor2.
At the same time, teenage suicide rates in Palo Alto are more than four times the national average3. Students describe feeling they have to be perfect for their overachieving parents and struggling with the intensity of the workload4. While competitive environments aren’t for everyone, severe rates of depression and anxiety among Silicon Valley high schools show us that something clearly isn’t working.
Research into the highest levels of human performance further shows that global outlier talents often weren’t necessarily the best as kids. Instead, they engaged in various activities and developed their excellence over time.5Gaining wide attention, this research seems to shatter the desire of helicopter parents to somehow bake perfect outliers into existence through rigid schedules and maximum focus.
What is more, the world of careers and skills is changing fast. Research now measures workers’ adaptive capacity, their ability to overcome job displacement and find new work.6 Students also regularly describe a sense of hopelessness and disorientation, worried they will not find employment after finishing their studies7. A narrow window of time to “escape the permanent underclass” before Artificial General Intelligence takes over has become half-meme, half depressing reality that many young people find themselves in.
There is much debate about whether material wealth would still matter in the face of truly powerful AGI, with some experts discussing if property rights would still exist or how wealth would be measured in galaxies rather than billions (e.g. Trammell & Patel).
I find this debate fascinating. But I have decided I do not want to raise my children for some potential shot at post AGI material wealth. First, because at the current rate of progress, by the time they are old enough to work themselves out of any permanent underclass, the window may already be closed. Why risk their mental health for this? Second, because I feel a deep moral disturbance about my family being a part of either a permanent upper- or underclass. And third, because my intuition about what true post-AGI wealth would mean has little to do with material accumulation - galaxies or otherwise.
How to be human
Instead of chasing material wealth, narrow skills, and young excellence, I believe that in a world of looming AGI, we should focus on what actually makes children unfuckwithable: their sense of self, their relationships, their ability to think and use tools, their agency, and their resilience. The shocker? This just means teaching them how to be human.
Together, these attributes define our humanity and enable us to progress. Annoyingly, we cannot teach most of these things directly. Rather, they’re outcomes of the environment we expose our children to. So the question becomes: what learning environment should we cultivate, especially as AI becomes central to their lives?
II On learning with AI
AI is already transforming how humans learn. As a powerful tool, it can expand cognitive skills, vastly increase agency, and help us navigate difficult situations. Used well, it becomes a highly effective tutor, coach, and creative partner adapting to our pace, offering patience, and multiplying what we’re capable of.
But research shows that timing matters.
In early childhood, the role of AI should be minimal to nonexistent. Screen time before age two is linked to altered brain development, attention difficulties, and increased anxiety in adolescence. Young brains need face-to-face interaction, physical play, and sensory exploration rather than screens. The weaker the medium, the stronger the imagination it demands.8
As children grow, AI can become a powerful tutor. One of the most influential findings in educational research, known as Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem (1984), showed that students receiving one-to-one tutoring combined with mastery learning outperformed classroom learners by two standard deviations. In the past, the challenge has always been that individual tutoring doesn’t scale and is prohibitively expensive for many parents. AI offers a powerful solution: personalised instruction available to any learner, anywhere.
Innovative educational approaches are already emerging. Take Alpha School in Texas for example. Its students spend only two hours each morning on core academics (maths, reading, science) using personalised AI-driven apps. In the afternoon, they focus on projects and life skills like public speaking and financial literacy.9 AI tutors can condense traditional instruction, freeing time for the collaborative, creative, and practical learning. I am my father’s daughter after all, and as such I am incredibly excited about what AI tutoring can unlock for my daughters.
But AI fluency also requires a critical understanding of the technology's limits. Beyond hallucinations, the deeper risk is that AI can shortcut genuine learning, providing answers without teaching us how to ask better questions. We risk becoming answer-rich but question-poor. The goal of AI in education should be human expansion, not human atrophy.
III On becoming unfuckwithable
While AI can help us develop across all dimensions of our humanity, it can just as easily hollow them out. The difference between augmentation and replacement comes down to four capacities that must be in place, not just for children, but for anyone. These are what make a person unfuckwithable in the age of AI.
Boredom tolerance as the essence of creativity
There is a reason Waldorf kindergartens make children play with rocks and sticks. These simple objects force human imagination to fill the gap between what is and what could be.
“This? Not a rock, that’s Superstar Galactica’s rocket.”
“That? Not a stick, it’s the mythical sword of Ganymed.”
When children encounter emptiness, their minds rush to fill it. In this process, creativity is born. Research broadly supports this: boredom activates the brain’s Default Mode Network, the system responsible for daydreaming and creative insight. Studies show that people who experience boredom before creative tasks actually perform better.10 The discomfort of having nothing to do or little means becomes the foundation from which imagination can grow.
AI is extraordinarily good at filling every gap. It answers every question and completes every thought. For a mind already rich with creative capacity, this can unleash incredible things. But for a mind that is still forming, it can atrophy the imaginative muscle we wish to strengthen. Creativity thrives on both scarcity and abundance. But to harness AI's abundance well, a child needs their own creative foundation first.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” - John Milton, Paradise Lost
At a dinner, my friends and I recently discussed what we would do if we were locked in an underground bunker for six months without access to the internet. I pictured the scene before me and in that moment realised how important it is to develop the ability to fantasise. I want to raise my children so that their fantasy - their own mind, in and of itself - enables them to dream up faraway places and play theatre with a bunch of rags, even in the roughest of places.
So in the midst of all the powerful advancements of AI, I immerse my children in books, sticks and stones.
Avoiding the trap of the hollow shell
Consider two people who have had AI whispering in their ear for years. Then the AI is removed.
One person cannot function without it. They suddenly do not know what to say anymore. Their conversations turn into stammers and their ideas thin. You screw open their head and discover a vast emptiness. They have become hollow shells: dependent on AI and utterly bland in the process. Humans who are the hollow shell have not been augmented by AI, they have replaced themselves with it.
The other person has had that same AI whispering in their ear constantly, but somehow it rubbed off on them. The smart machine voice enriched their own voice. Remove the AI and they remain sharp, often sharper than before. They used AI as a sparring partner and a tutor. They sharpened their mind against it and it augmented who they already were. We all know people like this - they get tutored until they eventually become better than their tutor.
What is the difference between both people? I believe it is their pre-existing creativity (see previous paragraph), as well as a clear sense of self, a somewhat solidly tethered point of view and therefore, an angle toward the world.
If AI, like overprotective parents, removes all friction, children never develop the strength to handle the world. The sycophancy that might merely irritate adults can fundamentally hinder children from forming their sense of self and avoid the kind of friction required to produce anything worthwhile.
It is shocking how many adults have already given up on themselves in this regard. Empty shells are strewn all over the Internet. AI slop has taken over much of social media, and magazine editors are publicly begging for people to stop sending them AI articles. As someone recently put it: “what’s the point of writing if you’re just trying to make a chatbot sound more like a human being?”11
Do not be the next token. Do not give up on yourself this easily. If adults are vulnerable to this behaviour, children are at significantly higher risk. As a parent, my job is to help my kids become themselves first, and stay themselves as AI enters their lives.
Mastering intrinsic motivation
The difficult thing is that identity formation takes much longer than I can reasonably keep my kids away from AI, especially given the technology's incredible benefits. It is thus critical that I help them become maximally intrinsically motivated.
AI will eventually outperform us at most tasks. When that happens, what remains? Likely the things we do because we want to. We may not be the best at them and nobody rewards us for them, but doing them is a reward in and of itself.
I don’t mean consumption, like watching movies or scrolling. I mean creation. Writing something no one may read. Tending to a garden of ugly cucumbers. If there is creation that we revel in without an audience, I believe we have found the solid ground of unfuckwithableness.
Research shows that external rewards can undermine this drive. Children who received rewards for drawing lost interest when the rewards stopped. Validation creates dependency. On the contrary, intrinsically motivated people do not derive meaning from job titles or follower counts. Life becomes a landscape for exploration because curiosity is its own reward.
For these people, AI becomes a treasure trove with which they can explore every question and pursue every curiosity. The technology serves the drive instead of replacing it.
The world I grew up in ran largely on extrinsic motivation: good grades, spots at top universities, climbing the career ladder. With the automation of human intelligence, all of this is being called into question. I believe intrinsic motivation will become far more important, and I hope to nurture my children's innate drive before AI floods them with easy answers built for old reward systems.
Building anchors and resilience
To sustain periods of increasing uncertainty, some kind of grounding is as important as ever. In the face of rapid technological change, the old certainties of our world are dissolving. Knowledge that seemed permanent becomes outdated and skills that were valuable become automated. In this environment, tying yourself too closely to what you do - your job or your output - is a recipe for being perpetually destabilised.
Who you are is more than your job: it’s how you are with yourself, how you are with others, your capacity to act with agency and to recover from setbacks. These don’t become obsolete. They are stable not because they never change, but because they define your humanity (being and meaning) rather than your output (labour).
There is a reason people believe in god(s). It allows them to make sense of the challenges and threats they face, granting them the hope of eventual salvation and a sense of meaning when everything seems meaningless. The function of gods is not so much whether they exist, but whether humans believe they exist.
We must each find our own answer to what grounds our being and meaning. For some, it may be rediscovering the meaning of religion. For others, the power of nature. For yet others, the significance of family or community. Whatever it is, these things will likely be as simple as they are powerful. And any upbringing of our children should offer a firm understanding and ritualistic reinforcement of these core human anchors.
My husband and I decided that nature and family are of outsized importance to us. So we raise our daughters far from city centres, surrounded by extended family.
Humans first, always
I don’t raise my children to escape the permanent underclass, not because I cannot imagine a dark future in which a permanent underclass becomes reality, but because I am hopeful for a bright future in which being a whole human matters more.
Rather than risk becoming hollow shells - outwardly engaging but inwardly empty - I want my children to engage the world with curiosity. I want the reward for their curiosity to be more curiosity. AI will be part of that world. It will sharpen them, multiply their capabilities, and coach them. But I hope that their humanity will always come first, so that no matter how much life bounces them around, they can always find their way back to themselves.
When I look at my children, I can imagine a day when AI is gone, a day when there will be nothing there…but their whole humanity.
That is how we all become unfuckwithable.
Kahneman and Deaton's famous 2010 study found that day-to-day happiness rose with income but plateaued around $75,000 (source)
Killingsworth's 2021 work found happiness rose steadily with income well beyond $75,000, without evidence of a plateau (source)
Killingsworth noted that "Money is just one of the many determinants of happiness. Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit." (source)
