And Then They Think for Themselves

We spend years teaching children to think for themselves.

Humanity is spending billions trying to teach machines to do the same.

Apparently, nobody has thought hard enough about what happens next.

They do.

My children grew up.

They have their own view of the world. Their own decisions. Their own idea of what makes sense.

This is exactly what I wanted.

I just didn’t understand the price.

Because there is a considerable difference between wanting your children to become independent human beings and watching them make independent choices when you think you can already see the consequences.

Maybe I can.

Maybe I can’t.

That distinction becomes surprisingly difficult when you love someone.

We Already Tried Training Intelligence

And then I found myself listening to Jay McClelland at Stanford’s Center for Mind, Brain and Computation talk about Shared Strengths and Weaknesses of Real and Artificial Minds.

An unimaginable amount of money, resources and some of the most brilliant minds on the planet are being poured into artificial intelligence.

Old assumptions about intelligence are collapsing. Half the planet has discovered its inner Cassandra. Markets move. Jobs disappear. Fortunes appear. Some expect salvation; others are preparing for extinction.

Somewhere it’s pop culture.

Somewhere it’s black caviar.

If you know what I mean.

And I’m sitting there thinking about my children.

What if all that power now being directed toward AGI were directed toward developing a human mind?

Although, to be fair, we did pretty fucking well.

Two parents with five university degrees between them. Grandparents with some of the country’s highest honors. Professors. Renowned coaches.

And the input wasn’t just books, knowledge and what today would be LLMs and PDF manuscripts.

There were years of shared life. Experience. Conversations. Emotional connections. All the things a child learns when nobody thinks a lesson is taking place.

And yes, there is also that tiny unaccounted variable called DNA.

Still.

What happens to all that input?

Which parts become knowledge? Which become resistance? Which disappear completely? Which return years later in a form nobody recognizes?

We don’t know.

You can know someone from the first day of their life and still not know what that life looks like from inside their head.

And somehow we still call this “raising” a person, as if we knew what was actually being built.

And Then They Do

We say we want children who think independently.

Of course we do.

We want them to have judgment. Character. An inner core. The ability to make decisions when nobody is there to make those decisions for them.

Then one day they use it.

For real.

And sometimes they choose something you would not choose.

Something you think is wrong.

Something whose consequences you believe you can already see.

Suddenly independent thinking becomes considerably less attractive.

So I had to ask myself a fairly unpleasant question:

Did I want them to think for themselves?

Or did I want them to think for themselves and arrive at my conclusions?

Those are not the same thing.

And if I spent years helping another human being build an inner core, I cannot be shocked when one day they stand on it.

Even if they are standing somewhere I desperately wish they weren’t.

That may be the fucking point.

There Is No Backtest for a Human Life

Children are not AI.

The comparison breaks exactly where it should.

A human being is not a model. Parenting is not training. Most importantly, the life in question belongs to the person living it.

This sounds obvious.

It is also brutal.

Because experience sometimes does let you see things earlier.

Parents are not always wrong because their children are independent.

Children are not always right because the choice is theirs.

You may actually be right.

You may see the consequences perfectly clearly.

And it still may not be your choice.

There is no backtest for another person’s life.

No parallel universe where you run both decisions and compare the results five years later.

Which makes freedom considerably easier to defend in theory than to watch in real time.

My Private Matrix

I have been thinking about reality since long before anyone around me was talking about AGI.

As a child, I often thought that whatever was happening inside my head must be some kind of bullshit.

Because much of what people around me said and did seemed either meaningless or horrifying.

Why do people say one thing and do another?

Why does something become normal simply because enough people agree not to question it?

I kept analyzing.

Eventually, I learned to switch the analysis off.

Not my feelings.

The analysis.

Thinking about everything hurt and made living among people difficult.

So I learned, quite consciously, not to.

And every time I switched my brain back on, some kind of shit happened.

Now I live with it switched on again.

Silicon Valley happens to be a convenient place for this. Here, intelligence, consciousness and the difference between artificial and real are perfectly normal dinner conversations.

But Silicon Valley isn’t the point.

The point is that I started analyzing reality again.

And now I wonder whether I spent years looking for the artificial thing in the wrong place.

Maybe what’s artificial isn’t intelligence.

Maybe it’s some of the reality we build around ourselves.

A successful life.

A good family.

A good parent.

What children should become if you did everything right.

We build the model.

Then forget it is a model.

Reality eventually reminds us.

Same Life. Different Reality.

We worry that we may never know whether an artificial mind has an inner world.

I know my children have one.

I still can’t enter it.

Two people can live through the same years and carry away different lives.

The facts may be the same.

The meaning isn’t.

My memory of our shared life is still my memory.

I can listen. I can ask. I can observe. I can love.

I can be completely wrong.

Apparently intimacy does not come with root access.

And maybe this is the part I had never fully understood.

I thought closeness meant that, at some fundamental level, we shared a reality.

Maybe we never did.

Maybe we were simply close enough that the differences didn’t matter yet.

Until they did.

Freedom Is Expensive

I thought freedom was something you gave your children.

I was wrong.

Freedom is something you have to survive as a parent.

Because freedom is meaningless if it only applies to choices you approve of.

Children need to choose for themselves not because they will always choose well.

They won’t.

They need to choose because that is how they build the thing I wanted them to have in the first place:

an inner core.

You cannot outsource that.

I can give experience. Advice. Everything I know.

But eventually they have to decide what becomes theirs.

And then there is love.

I used to think unconditional love described how much you love someone.

Now I think it describes what happens to that love when you hate the decision they made.

That is a very different test.

You don’t have to approve.

You don’t have to pretend you’re not terrified.

You don’t even have to believe this will end well.

You just don’t make your love conditional on being right.

Fuck, it hurts.

Especially when you think you can see what’s coming.

Maybe you can.

That still doesn’t make the life yours.

Stay

So after Stanford, intelligence, consciousness, DNA, five degrees between two parents and my private Matrix, I have arrived at an embarrassingly low-tech answer.

Be there.

Not control.

Not disappear.

Not confuse acceptance with agreement.

Say what you see.

Then leave enough space for another human being to see something else.

This is not a happy ending.

Freedom does not guarantee wisdom.

Trust does not guarantee a good outcome.

Love does not protect anyone from consequences.

The thing I’m terrified of may still happen.

Maybe that is why I kept trying to solve this intellectually.

Intelligence likes problems with answers.

This one doesn’t seem to care.

Humanity is spending billions trying to create intelligence capable of thinking for itself.

I spent years trying to raise it.

And now I finally understand the part nobody puts in the specification.

If you really want an independent mind, one day you have to survive its independence.

Maybe that means saying what you see.

Maybe it means trusting when you are terrified.

Maybe it means keeping the door open when every part of you wants to grab the wheel.

Maybe it just means staying.

I don’t know.