Children and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The children and adolescents of today are born into a world increasingly powered by virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) such as from the Alexas they converse with, to their robot playmates, to the YouTube wormholes they disappear into.
Opportunities for Children in the AI Age
- Providing education at the time of global pandemic: In the field of education, AI can and is being used in fabulous ways to tailor learning materials and pedagogical approaches to the child’s needs such as intelligent tutoring systems, tailored curriculum plans, and imaginative virtual reality instruction.
- It is offering rich and engaging interactive learning experiences that can improve educational outcomes.
- Power of Adaptable AI: The better the AI, the better it is at adapting to a person’s needs, context, preferences, and priorities.
- The Adaptable AI has far reaching implications- unlocking opportunities ranging from:
- Personalized learning tools: It can expand access to and improve educational outcomes for children and adults alike.
- Facilitating more advanced and efficient supply demand matching: It aims to improve access to work opportunities, resource sharing, long term employment and other forms of networking that allow us to reduce waste and maximize opportunity.
- Big Data Insights: The massive amounts of data that are now available are only useful when we are able to distill them into useful insights.
- AI helps us to do this at an unprecedented efficiency and scale, and has unlocked new ways not only of gathering data but of processing it in order to better understand patterns, assess people’s needs, and deliver better tailored services in almost every sector.
- The application of big data can be applied to support children through:
- Health: The combined power of Big Data and AI may allow us to finally reach the capacity to process vast amounts of health data that may uncover the hidden insights we need to crack on various diseases.
- Urban Planning: The big data can help us better map and manage everything from waste management to traffic to ensure our cities can be safer, cleaner, and healthier homes to over half the world’s population.
- Agriculture: The big data can also help us to better understand risks and opportunities for agricultural production, allowing us to shift resources where they are most likely to be productive and maximize our yields.
- Cognitive Support: AI technologies can supplement our innate intelligence and abilities, allowing us to access information faster and become more effective in our various personal and professional roles.
- Enabling accessibility: It powers virtual assistants, robotic devices, smart applications, and other technologies that can enable accessibility for people who are differently abled.
Challenges for children in the age of Artificial Intelligence
- Everyone can tap into the opportunities offered by AI: According to UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as many as two-thirds of the world’s children do not have access to the Internet at home.
- In India, the divide between the digital haves and have-nots was tragically underscored last year by the suicide of a young Delhi University undergrad whose parents could not afford a laptop or smartphone at home.
- Children are becoming digitally addicted: It does not help that the AI systems driving many video games and social networks are designed to keep children hooked.
- The Business model of such media has led to a damage in which children from a tender age through adolescence are becoming digitally addicted.
- Privacy, Safety and Security: The implications AI has for children’s privacy, safety, and security fall across a wide spectrum, from benefits related to the ability to understand threats facing children to risks around unintended privacy infringements.
- Empowerment of machines to make critical decisions: There is substantial risk that unchecked use of AI/ Machine learning to determine who gets access to what services can reinforce historic bias and prevent children from having a fair shot at life.
- The AI technology to sort through student applications may inadvertently but systematically exclude certain types of candidates if left unchecked and unsupervised.
- Livelihood and Dignity/Automation: The Experts predict that robots will replace humans in one third of jobs of today’s economy by 2025.
- Nearly 65 percent of students starting elementary school today will eventually work in jobs that don’t exist.
- Cognitive/ Psychological Implications: The new ways that children and young people interact with technology has implications to our core physiology and psychology.
Why children need protection in the age of artificial intelligence?
- Lack of action towards coping digital divide: The AI could radically amplify societal inequalities among children of different races, socio-economic background, genders, and regions.
- The expansion and deployment of AI is far outpacing our ability to understand its implications, especially its impact on children.
- Virtual world is full of unsupervised “vacations” and “playgrounds”: In the old-fashioned physical world, parents are reluctant to let their children be photographed by the media, and in many countries, news outlets blur children’s faces to protect them but such protection is absent in the digital world.
- Lack of attention of children towards social skills: When children need to be learning concentration skills, emotional and social intelligence, their attention is being spliced into ever-thinner slices, and their social interactions increasingly virtualised.
- Children are stuck in black hole of virtual deep space: When children and youth are forming their initial views of the world, they are being sucked into virtual deep space, including the universe of fake news, conspiracy theories, hype, hubris, online bullying, hate speech and the likes.
- Absence of legal framework to ban AI toys: The experts have raised concerns that the AI toys could prove to be harmful for children because it could be hacked and used to spy on children.
Measures to be adopted to protect children’s rights in the age of artificial intelligence
- Closing down the digital divide: The next phase of the fourth Industrial Revolution must include an overwhelming push to extend Internet access to all children.
- The governments, private sector, civil society, parents and children must push hard for this now, before AI further deepens the pre-existing inequalities and creates its own disparities.
- Multi-pronged action plans for mitigating on-line harms: It is necessary to have legal and technological safeguards which will lead to greater awareness among parents, guardians and children on how AI works behind the scenes.
- It is required to have tools, like trustworthy certification and rating systems, to enable sound choices on safe AI apps.
- It is required to ban anonymous accounts and enforce ethical principles of non-discrimination and fairness embedded in the policy and design of AI systems.
- Embed child rights into principles and policies before implementation: The Principles on Artificial Intelligence are meant to be “human-centered” is a useful starting point towards a child lens for AI governance.
- The rights of children should be considered throughout the AI value chain since policies are implemented by many actors in an AI ecosystem.
- Capacity building in the AI ecosystem: Children, parents/caregivers and teachers should have a basic understanding of AI systems and how they affect people.
- The attention should be paid to developing training materials, ensuring effective delivery, offering continued support, and providing adequate funding for capacity building.
Way Forward
- It is so important to help children understand and appreciate different perspectives, preferences, beliefs and customs, to build bridges of understanding and empathy and goodwill in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
- It is necessary to have online tools (and an online culture) that helps prevent addiction, that promotes attention-building skills, that expands children’s horizons, understanding and appreciation for diverse perspectives, and that builds their social emotional learning capabilities.
- The Convention on the Rights of the Child urges all public and private actors to act in the best interests of the child, across all their developmental activities and provision of services.
- The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comment 25, on implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child and fulfilling all children’s rights in the digital environment which is an important first step on the long road ahead.
- The UNICEF’s Generation AI initiative is currently working with the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and other stakeholders to realise the potential of AI for children in a safe and transparent way.
- In this interconnected world, the more we can agree upon multilaterally and by multi-stakeholder groups, the easier it may be to implement nationally and locally.
- As India proactively helped shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and gave the world the principle of Ahimsa, it could also galvanise the international community around ensuring an ethical AI for Generation AI.
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