On Friday 10 May 2024, Reuben College launched its Global Challenges Programme with a workshop that brought together a multi-disciplinary group of academics, post-docs, graduate students, and technologists to explore the impact of advanced AI upon childhood and adolescent development.
The gathering was an important moment of pause and reflection to consider more deeply the challenges in harnessing advances in AI systems for child and adolescent flourishing. Discussions and presentations from guests including Baroness Kidron, Professor Melinda Mills, and Bishop Steven (Former Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on AI) surfaced a number of challenges and opportunities: from concerns about child online safety, agency, and mental health; opportunities to learn from new research, past ‘mistakes’, and other disciplines; and examples of innovative AI applications supporting language acquisition and creativity.
Key points raised included:
- In this moment, creating a space of pause is fundamental. We can and should invest time to learn from other moments of crisis, such as moral panic or pandemics that are very recently in our past.
- We can learn from ways to manage complexity and harmonise approaches within rapidly emergent realities by drawing in perspectives from fields including philosophy and ethics.
- We can reimagine the role of academia, industry and policymaking and think beyond a broken flywheel where pacing and transparency issues slow progress to consider an ecosystem in which actors’ collective efforts support children and young people’s flourishing.
- The unprecedented momentum of technological advancement is driving the fast pace of policymaking, guideline-setting, and industry commitments. The sense-and-respond context in which actors are attempting to protect children from potential harms while ensuring they can benefit from Advanced AI is a valid response, but it leaves open complex questions such as:
- How best to deliver a robust evidence base to support policy makers and designers;
- How to deal with underlying systemic challenges of access to training data, model development;
- How to ensure that ethical frameworks that have served us in the past are coherent and applicable in the context of emerging technology;
- How do we focus on strengthening digital citizenship at population level, in the knowledge that the pace of innovation is likely to have far-reaching impacts for generations currently in school;
- How to ensure children and young people have a voice in shaping the products and services that will impact them, including the reframing of education and digital literacies.
- We can learn from the resourcing landscape and incentive structures that shaped poor examples from the early Ed-Tech boom where numbers of users, profit, or user preference were weighted in favour of developmental science in design choices.
- Advances in understanding the phases of children’s development and adolescence and the factors that help them reach their full potential could inform a unified vision of what good design can and should enable, as well as a pluralistic understanding of how that is realised across cultures and different individual and collective needs.
- Conversation between tech companies, governments, and citizens could help to address broader questions about how AI can be best aligned to support human development and values. What implication, for instance, does the application of AI have for our understanding of what it means to be human? And, how can human and societal flourishing be ensured against the risk that individuals become reduced to consumers, data points, and products?
The Global Challenges Programme is a Reuben College initiative, led by Dr Andrew Serazin. Find out more about the programme here, or email global.challenges@reuben.ox.ac.uk.
