The kids are alright: Hong Kong AI scientist offers a vision for ‘parenting’ AI

“I would prefer to think about it as the AI climate change challenge,” De Kai said in an interview with the Post at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is a professor of computer science and engineering. “Literally, AI is a change to the [social] climate that humanity is competing in.”

De Kai, whose surname is Wu but who professionally goes by only his given name, has spent four decades at the forefront of AI research, going back to his work in natural language processing during his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s. His new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future, released on June 3, argues that living with AI requires a paradigm shift – one in which people “parent” these systems as if they were their children.

“What’s the single thing in folks’ lives that makes them most want to become better versions of themselves?” De Kai writes. “Having kids, most grown folks say.”

Since AI is learning by absorbing everything we do and say online, we need to be conscientious about who we are around our AI “children”, the argument goes.

This is not a new concern for De Kai, who has served on the board of The Future Society and was an inaugural member of Google’s short-lived AI ethics council.