Hello ,
In March, at a summit in Washington, the chief executive of OpenAI described the future to a room of investors.
Intelligence, he said, would become a utility – like electricity, like water – and people would buy it from his company on a meter.
Not a tool you own. A utility you rent. Metered. Billed. Subject to somebody else's price and somebody else's outage.
The man interviewing him on that stage was Adebayo Ogunlesi. A Nigerian. One of the most consequential infrastructure investors in the world.
So we cannot tell ourselves that this is happening far away, to other people, in rooms we are not in. We are in the room. The only question is whether we arrive as owners of our own minds or as customers of somebody else's.
Here is what we specifically stand to lose.
Our knowledge systems are oral. Proverbs are not decoration - a proverb is an argument that survived four hundred years of testing, compressed into twelve words. Riddle-tales are a training system for lateral thinking. Oríkì is a memory technology.
None of it lives in a database. It lives in the space between an elder speaking and a child working out what was meant.
Close that space and transmission stops in one generation. Not two. One.
And there is a sharper problem. Ask any AI system about a Yoruba naming ceremony or an Efik proverb and you will get something fluent, often wrong, and delivered with total confidence - because these systems learned about our world mostly from text written elsewhere, about us, without us.
A child who verifies their heritage against a machine will be taught a plausible counterfeit of their own culture and will have no way to know.
So one rule in my house, and I would give it to you free:
The elder is the primary source. Culture questions go to a human being who lives it. If the machine and your grandmother disagree about a custom, your grandmother wins. Not out of sentiment. Out of accuracy.
And one rule for schoolwork, from the neuroscience.
MIT researchers found that people who did their own thinking first and brought AI in afterwards kept their memory and their sense of ownership. Those who started with the machine did not - they could not even quote the essay they had written minutes earlier.
Own thinking first. Tool second. That order is the whole lesson.
Today's article gives you the full framework – what to build in a child before you hand over the tool, the three questions to teach them, and why a teenager migrating to a machine is really a connection problem wearing a technology costume.
👉 [Read: Raise a Thinker, Not a Prompter]
One favour. If this series has been useful, forward this email to one parent who needs it. That is how it travels.
Warmly, Latifah
Latifah Ajetunmobi | Parent & Teen Coach | Author, The Phone-Free Teenager and Beyond the Goat Pen
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