Your Kids Will Never Drive a Car | Matt Britton on FOX 4 Dallas

Welcome back. So there is a whole generation of kids right now who were born with AI already in place. Like, it kind of makes me think about, you know, there wasn't the internet when I was born, right? Right. And then as, you know, I got into college is when more— there was more internet. When we both got our first email, we were talking about that together.

And then when we got our first social media, the phones and social media and everything else.

Exactly. So chat rooms, it's all firsts for us. AI is new for us, but there is a whole generation growing up right now where AI is going to be what they know. It's definitely shaping, reshaping parenthood as we know it, whether you know it or not. Joining us on the post is an AI and consumer trend expert, Matt Britton, also the author of Generation AI. Hey there, Matt. Good to see you.

Good to see you. Okay.

So I had seen your pitch and we were hoping to get you on the show. And I'm sitting there with my daughter, my 12-year-old daughter, and I'm like, look how cute this video is that I just saw. And she goes, Mom, that's AI. And I went, no, it's not. And I'm looking at— I'm sure this is so many parents right now. And I'm looking, I'm like, no, it totally looks real. And then sure enough, for like one split second, like a little icon pops up that apparently is supposed to tell me that it's AI the whole way through. But— and so sure enough, it was. And it's— I'm learning from my my 12-year-old what the world of AI is like. And as a parent, that can be a little scary.

It's not only scary based upon where it is today, but when you think about the fact that the power and potency of AI is literally doubling every 7 months, you're never going to really be able to get used to it because the second you do, it's going to be completely changed. You know, you talked about AI-generated video and that is worlds better today than it was, say, 6 months ago where you were likely to see a person with 6 fingers on one hand, 7 on the other. Right. And today in 2024, it's really indistinguishable to what's AI-generated and what's real. And you were fortunate enough to see a disclaimer saying it's AI-generated, but a lot of people obviously are being spoofed by what they believe is real content. And obviously that's one of the downsides of AI. But in that note, there's also a lot of upsides as well with this revolution we're living through.

Yeah, let's talk about some of those upsides, 'cause I think too, like she was just mentioning, as parents it can be really scary and we're just trying to keep up with it all. And you can't really resist it when you know that your kids are gonna be embracing it and using it quite a bit. What are some of the upsides upsides for kids who are growing up with AI?

Yeah, I mean, I heard you guys talking right before I came on about how when you were growing up, there was really no internet, right? And I'm in that boat. For Gen Xers like myself, there was no internet. And the defining technology was the personal computer. And then for the millennials, the defining technology was the internet. And for Gen Z, which is the most recent generation, it was social media and the iPhone. Now kids 0 to 15 are Gen Alpha, and they are the AI generation. And they would never know a world without AI. And for those that are AI native, they're going to be able to command this powerful technology to really uplevel their capabilities and 10x the output both as a citizen and as a worker versus previous generations. It's going to be so intuitive to them to use these tools where for a lot of us, it's going to take a lot of time in adjusting to understand just what AI is capable of.

Okay. In your book, though, you talk about how our kids will, I don't know, share their fears, share their dreams, questions with AI chatbots. And you said that talking to AI to them is going to feel normal. And I think to me, well, this sounds like a crisis to me. Like, I mean, what about the human interaction? Are you worried about that at all? And then I also think like right now, I at least go into a restaurant and I know that there's like, you know, laws in place to make sure what I'm getting is okay for me. Whereas AI, there's really not any rules right now.

So there are many educators who would've said the same thing when Google was invented or Wikipedia, that kids aren't gonna have to no longer go to the library to do research. So I think with every new technology, there's fear and people usually fear what they don't understand. The reality is these consumers are gonna start to have deep relationships with AI chatbots because again, it's the only world they ever know. Know, and their brains are going to be hardwired to lean into AI for things that would seem strange or foreign to you or I. And that's just human evolution. And I don't think whether it's good or bad, we're not going backwards. It's part of our new society. The biggest changes that I think Gen Alpha is going to see is, first and foremost, if you have a kid right now that's aged, say, 5 or 6, they will likely never drive a car. Let's just think about that for a second. They're going to be getting into a car that's going to be driven by AI. Crazy to think about, right?

But that almost gives me some peace of mind, actually. I like that.

It makes me sad.

You know what?

Doesn't it make you sad? Are human drivers getting twice as good every 7 months of driving?

That's true.

So think about how much better AI is going to be than humans 5 to 10 years from now. The biggest change you're going to see is the elimination of what's called the knowledge economy. So for the last 25 years, if you learn the knowledge of writing a contract, you can be a lawyer or doing someone's taxes, you can be an accountant., right, or reading someone's X-rays, you can be a radiologist. But all of those jobs are not going to be the same anymore because AI can command all the knowledge in the world on a topic and deploy it in ways that can actually replace those skills. So the big question is, well, what is going to be left for this new generation? And it's going to be really much more focused around identifying the problems that need to be solved versus how to solve the problems, meaning how can you lean into humanity? How can you lean into using these tools to actually advance practices versus just becoming a current actor in them? And that's gonna allow us to open up new industries and new jobs that really we can't even think of right now. A recent study came out that by 2030, 80% of the jobs that are gonna be available then don't even exist today.

Wow.

Makes sense. So it's just hard to imagine. We ask our kids, what do you wanna be when they grow up?

I don't know. Who knows?

Who knows?

But I, you know, as a parent right now, okay, so I have a 12-year-old. So like, what should I be doing as a parent? Yeah. Um, because I, I did see one thing in the book where it says, um, that you should teach them how to question AI. Is that right? Like what, what, what as a parent should I be doing right now if I've got a—

Well, question AI is a great example of focusing on the problems that need to be solved. You know, I have a 5-year-old daughter, and what I try to do with her at night is have her talk to me about something that she imagined in her dream or like, you know, while she's daydreaming and actually show her how I can bring that imagination to life in either video or imagery. That is something that wasn't possible a couple of years ago, but it really is a great analogy to where things are headed. Where anything you can think of can be created, whether it's a video or an image or even a software product. So you really wanna lean into creativity, into critical thinking, into problem solving as skill sets. But the notion of memorization and regurgitation, which is how you and I were raised in school, you know, cram information and spit it out the next day on a test, that is what is not gonna be as valuable moving forward. It's much more the soft skills.

So stop working on spelling tests. That's what you're telling me.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, what's the point of spelling it or even arithmetic anymore? I mean, it might seem crazy or handwriting, but if we're talking to these machines and they're doing the calculations for us, there's probably much more important things that we wanna teach tomorrow's leaders.

Oh, makes sense. So true. My mind is blown and now I have to like rethink my whole parenting strategy.

Yes, I know. And, and I know obviously you have a book about this. Are there, there apps, YouTube channels? What should, what resources should we be using to really learn about AI ourselves?

So the best way to learn for yourself is actually build an AI. And that might seem so daunting, but it couldn't be as simple as something— let me give you an example. I made the mission to use AI to help me stay alive for as long as possible. And I built my own personal health bot where I took 25 years of X-rays, MRIs, blood test information, and kind of fed a model that was a custom version of ChatGPT with the sole purpose of keeping me alive. And it sounds complicated, but I just started by going to ChatGPT and asked, how do I build this? Give me step-by-step instructions. Do not give me step 2 until I tell you step 1 is done. And if you just follow the instructions and you persevere, you're going to find that by step 11 or 12, you are so much more adept at understanding what AI can do. So whether it's building a math tutor for your kid or whether it's building something that helps you organize your family's hectic schedule, there are so many incredible things you can do that can allow you to build an AI and give you the skill set you need, and more importantly, a full understanding of what this technology is capable of.

I've been using it to redecorate our house.

I go room by room. That might be more on my level.

I'm like, how do I style this shelf? Like something as simple as that.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And Gemini, Google's model, is best for that, where you can basically take a picture of a blank room, describe whatever style you want, and it'll bring it to life for you.

Yeah, it'll even send you links on where to buy things.

There you go. Right.

And I'm in trouble.

Yeah. Matt Britton, author of Generation AI. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, my mind is blown, huh? Yeah, I feel like I need to, I need to get up on AI. I don't use it at all.

But he's, he's so right though. It's like each of us kind of grew up with or without it a different way than our, than our parents did. And, you know, our parents feared, well, everything with the internet and then everything with social media. And I remember my mom setting a timer of like, Shannon, you only have an hour on the computer, and then, you know, your sister can use it. And we'd have to switch off. And it was like we had to set these rules in place because my parents weren't sure how else to monitor it.

This gives kids permission though to say to us, "Mom, it's just different now." Okay, we know, we know it's