Roy at the kitchen table
Why the first place to learn AI might be where nothing important is on the line.
At dinner, my son pointed at his broccoli and said, “Dad. The big broccoli is made of tiny broccolis, and those are made of even tinier ones.”
He had noticed something I had missed, which is common. We talked about the repeating pattern for a while, then asked Roy, the name my kids gave our AI, to help us see it. A minute later we were looking at images and talking about patterns in trees, coastlines, and the inside of a vegetable.
In my professional corner of the internet, the AI discussion can get deafening. As a CTO, I rarely feel a need to add another take. As a dad, I do feel a small disconnect worth naming.
There is a reasonable fear that bringing AI into family life is another way of leaving the room. We have already watched phones do that. Someone looks something up, then nobody quite comes back. The room goes quiet while each person follows their own feed.
That has not been my experience with Roy. The tool works best for us when it gives us one more thing to talk about.
It does not replace the interaction. It gives the interaction somewhere to go.
We use it to invent worlds, make up rules for games, and ask oddly specific questions that would otherwise evaporate before anyone reached a search engine. The children are still setting the agenda. I am still there. Sometimes Roy gets something wrong, which is useful too. It gives us a reason to disagree with a computer together.
Learn where the stakes are low
I think there is a practical lesson in this, especially for people who are going to reach for these tools at work anyway. Use them first for play. Find their limits when the cost of a bad answer is a confused story about dragons, not a customer decision or a production incident.
You build intuitions by seeing what the tool is good at, where it invents confidence, and when it turns a question into a better conversation. That is harder to learn from a benchmark chart. It is easier to learn with a child, a half-finished game, and a plate of broccoli.
Technology becomes alienating when it takes attention away from the people in front of us. Used with intent, generative AI can do the opposite. It can put a little more material on the table.
— typed on paper-white pixels, corrected twice
Robin Westerlundh