Wiley and I finished the Batsto River expedition guide this week. I sent it to Randy, who has kids the same age, and he sent back the question every parent will be asking for the next twenty years. Lightly trimmed, profanity intact.
Randy
Did Wiley generate that plan with AI? Where did that format come from? It’s pretty intense. How could that not be AI enhanced?
Me
I drafted it in pencil and colored pencils on my slant desk over the last six months. What do you mean?
OK, Mark Twain from corporate.
Was Wiley doing the prompting, or were you architecting it through a dialogue? My kids have never spoken to AI.
NotebookLM, Claude, GPT. Superwhisper recording us reading and arguing about each page. Transcript back in, visual references, rebuild, deck.
He’s not talking to AI directly. Maybe a little Gemini. Mostly it’s me taking our shared conversation through my platforms.
It had me contemplating my own relationship with technology and my kids. The Boy Scout manual is process management too, but you guys wrote this. Heavy contemplations over here.
Wait, I sent you the wrong file. That was substrate.
Well, isn’t that just perfect.
Here’s the shipped version.
Amazing.
What kind of heavy contemplations did it take you toward?
You’re getting this as a stream of consciousness because I was driving home from work thinking about wanting to pass on to my kids secrets that accelerate their life experience. Music specifically, cause we’ve been doing a lot of music. And then I remember you made this document and I hadn’t looked at it yet, so I open it up, driving, reading glasses on, and I realize I can’t read it in depth because I scan Reddit, but the top half is structured like a business document. And I think, how was this generated, is Wiley prompting AI? Is this the right thinking for a 12-year-old? And I think back to what I’d just been saying, what could I pass on to accelerate my child, and I go, oh, Will is accelerating his child with this organizational and effectiveness knowledge he has. Then I think, a childhood is a dream box, and they wait, from the unconsciousness to the evils of Babylon, and let that be slower rather than fast, don’t integrate them into the crushing work world, let them have their dream childhood. But then I think all education is just a matter of degrees, so what do you teach? So I hope my earlier comments didn’t come off any kind of way. It was an incredible piece of work, and it’s like a conversation the way you described it, a connection point, shared goals. I see it in every positive light. The thing that hangs me up is I’m not letting my kids talk to AI, that’s one thing, and I was like, where does Will come down on that. So I was actually curious.
Stream of consciousness. Hopefully your phone read that back to you in robot voice.
Yeah dude, I totally hear it. My sense is that coming down hard either way is futile in the face of the machines. What I can do is equip them: an awareness of AI, an awareness of how organizations work, a pocket knife, how to rescue a canoe when it flips with all your stuff in it, how to camp wet. How to work through big heavy emotions and write things down when more is coming at you than you can handle.
The one thing I actually want to hand them is a bias for action. I get freaked out when the lights dim. What gets me out: get out of my head, write it down, go outside, move my body, find the people who help me think. Give them as many reps at that as possible before the stakes are high. That’s the job.
And there’s no one right way. The experiment is long with variable hypotheses. We won’t know until later which strategy the kids needed, or what ways we’re fucking up our kids that we don’t even know about yet. Hopefully they’re resilient enough to get in a canoe, catch some fish, and enjoy what’s left of the world when the robots are running the show.
Aka critical thinking.
Right. I think about my kids in relation to all the kids who can’t read, can’t focus, and now have tools to remove cognitive friction. Do they know the source material, or are they more robot? I’m not talking about your doc now. Everything is always a live test.
Carve a spoon. If it scoops, it’s a spoon. Ask AI how and it’ll say a lot of words, but you probably don’t end up eating. Which is why AI access invalidates homework even further. Kids should be in the world, not cranking through cognitive friction because we had to. Seeking friction is human nature. I trust that about our species deeply. We’ll gravitate toward a stick to get the honey out of the hive in whatever new circumstance we find ourselves.
What I’m keeping from this one.