Some reflections on AI and early childhood

I was very honored to recently be invited by the Centre for Human Inspired AI at the University of Cambridge to join a panel discussion on AI and early childhood.

It was a great discussusion, where we covered a large variety of issues, asking more questions than answers.

I’ll post the YouTube link as soon as it’s up, but in the meantime, I wrote a few quick reflections here on LinkedIn:

AI and Early Childhood

Please do have a read, and feel free to share/comment/challenge!

Why Are We Building TANDEM?

We want to see all children, everywhere, have the best start in life.

It's a simple idea, but a big challenge. That's why we're creating TANDEM.

It all begins with this realisation: early moments matter. A lot. Change the start of the story, and you change the whole story.

Babies and toddlers need an awful lot in those first, precious years of life. Unlike baby wildebeast, who within minutes need to be able to run away from a hungry hyena, human babies and toddlers are utterly reliant on us, the adults in their lives, for many years.

But what kind of needs are we talking about? In a word it’s love... but let's unpack that a bit.

Firstly, little ones need enough food. First regular, small volumes of milk, before gradually weaning on to increasing amounts solid foods to feed fast growing bodies. So far, so simple.

Next, they need to be healthy; to not be sick. That means things like sanitation and vaccinations to prevent them getting unwell, and access to healthcare when they do get sick. The science of how and when illness undermines child growth and development is pretty clear. Again, it makes sense.

But there's a third ingredient, one that's also absolutely essential for children to thrive… …and that is interaction and stimulation.

Getting enough to eat and being healthy? That's a good start, (and sadly one that far too many children around the world don't get), but it's not a great start. For a truly great start – the kind that really builds brains and lets little ones thrive – you need regular, stimulating interaction to feed your developing mind.

For decades we have know that interaction (and of course the sleep to take it all in) are vital. Regular interaction is crucial to build foundational skills like communication, to lay the building blocks for early literacy and - most importantly - to help us to learn how to form strong relationships. And although many children do get the early, loving nurtuing care that they need, many millions do not.

When we (Rob and Al, with a much wider group of experts) started to look into the role that technology was playing in the early years, we had mixed feelings. Are increasinly present technologies, like video streaming services, or emerging ones like artificial intelligence going to help or hinder in the early years? And how well equipped are parents, regulators and academics to engage in this stuff? (We’ve written a bit more about these questions here and here.)

Early Childhoods are Changing

How are digital technologies changing early childhoods, and what do we all need to do about it?

But the more we got into this, the more we we realised that as well as the risks, there was an opportunity. We felt strongly that technology should help to enable human to (small) human interaction, rather getting in the way of it. But we found few serious examples of people thinking like this. In contrast, we found a small industry of people building ‘digital dummies’ which are mostly designed to pacify or sell to young children. In the end, we concluded that perhaps we should build some of these technologies ourselves, rather than just talking about the risks or waiting for ‘big tech’ to do it right.

The opportunity to combine the best of our academic expertise - top quality science on early childhood and passive sensing, an approach with ethics and transparency at it’s core, and rigorous measurement, learning and evaluation - with our collective experience advising some of the world’s biggest governments, philanthropic foundations, and technology companies made it feel a bit less daunting.

We fairly quicky landed on enabing shared reading as a great focus our efforts. We’re exploring how a combination of generative AI, passive sensing and data processing, and behavioural science might be able to encourage and enable more parents/carers to read with their young children more often.

In our next blogs, we'll delve a bit more into how early shared reading benefits children's futures and will tell you more about how we’re building TANDEM.

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