Artificial Everything: When Childhood Gets A Software Update

Vivek, whose name translates to wisdom, though society seems to have misplaced the meaning entirely, told me something last week. His son, freshly three, not even all of three feet tall and mostly knees, was due to begin school. You know, school, that mythical space where children once went to eat glue, hide erasers in their socks, and learn the alphabet via singalongs about anthropomorphic animals. That age of wonder, when toy trucks talk, ants are fascinating, and the world is still a grand mystery with no user manual. And like what happened to my daughter when she was a toddler, the wasp in the corner stung her, setting off a loud, unstoppable cry, when she tried to pick that beautiful thing (?!) up!

Naturally, like so many earnest young parents, Vivek and his wife went looking for a play school. Not a factory, not a coding boot camp, just a place where their child could play, touch sand, meet other mini-humans, learn to share a crayon without legal arbitration. Ideal, really.

But the school they visited had other ideas. It was one of those “new age” institutions, where children, barely out of diapers, are prepped not for the playground but for the platform. They proudly informed the parents that their curriculum included coding. Yes, at three. Because what use is a nap mat if you can’t write a “Hello World” script on it?

They also offered “AI grooming”, a phrase that, I suspect, sounds more like dog-training in the year 2025 than education. Their brochure practically glowed with jargon: cognitive acceleration, neural optimisation, emotional recalibration; and not a single mention of finger painting.

The school, naturally, had a “vision.” Every modern institution now has a vision statement, preferably in Helvetica, etched on frosted glass, to make up for the lack of an actual soul. Vivek’s chosen temple of toddler tech proudly declared that it would “groom the child for the AI economy.” Which is just a poetic way of saying: we will deprogram your offspring into a sentient résumé by age five.

Their classrooms had no toys, only tablets. No jungle gym, just JavaScript. One of the teachers, oh sorry, Neuro-Cognitive Interface Specialists, told the parents with a straight face:

“By age four, we want them to understand conditional logic.”

“But, madam, most four-year-olds still think socks are edible.”

But here we are, living in a society that mistakes early exposure for early maturity. The baby barely speaks in full sentences, but we want him fluent in Python. He hasn’t yet mastered the potty, but we’re potty-training him for predictive analytics.

And the most tragic part? Vivek and his wife objected. They said they wanted a play school, not a pre-startup incubator. But they were told, with pained condescension, that “play is part of the old paradigm.” Apparently, monkey bars are now regressive.

One can only assume that swings are subversive.

Coding Toddlers
Coding has become the holy grail of 21st-century parenting. If your child cannot debug a function before he can spell his own name, you have failed him, nay, you have failed the species. Coding is now seen not as a skill, but as a moral obligation, the digital equivalent of Sanskrit chanting in a gurukul. Next only to public speaking!

Once, the bragging point was, “My daughter can recite all the state capitals.” Now it’s: “My son built an app to rate his own mood using facial recognition.”

What mood? The poor thing just wants a biscuit and a nap.

In this brave new world, the child is no longer a child; he is a data point in a spreadsheet of parental ambition amidst social peer pressure. And every new trend is a virus that spreads faster than common sense.

First it was Baby Einstein DVDs.

Then it was Mandarin immersion pre-schools.

Then it was baby yoga (I still don’t know which chakra handles diaper rash).

Now it’s AI prep school for toddlers.

Next up: blockchain potty training.

The modern parent wants to raise not a child, but a high-performance machine that can one day outpace the apocalypse. Maybe not all… Our own naïve Vivek is an example. Childhood is seen as wasted potential. Playtime is a sunk cost. Every minute spent digging in the sandpit is a minute not spent optimising for a future that may not even arrive.

We are preparing our children for an AI-augmented, metaverse-driven, quantum-encrypted, post-carbon world where their soft skills and sleep cycles will be monetised by the time they hit puberty.

Ironically, the more we try to build them for the future, the more we rob them of the present.

These are children, not chipsets. Certainly not the NVIDIA types. They don’t need to be upgraded. They need to be hugged. They don’t need Python. They need play-doh. They don’t need “grooming for the AI economy”, they need to fall in love with the messiness of being human.

But that’s too analog, I suppose.

Will-o’-the-Wisp
This obsession with future-proofing childhood is our generation’s own will-o’-the-wisp, that ghostly glimmer of technological salvation, always receding into the fog. We pursue it blindly, convinced that if we just optimise enough, enroll in the right programme, buy the right app, our child will be spared obsolescence.

But the truth is, we’re grooming them for a world we don’t even understand—let alone the kids.

We don’t know what the economy will look like 10 years from now. We don't know if GPT-12 will have automated creativity itself. We don’t even know if there’ll be enough water to brush our teeth. By the way, with ChatGPT and its sisters around, do we still need coders?

Yet here we are, shovelling coding camps down their throats before they’ve even figured out which way is up.

A few years ago, everyone wanted their kids to become data scientists. Then it was fintech analysts. Then blockchain engineers. Now it’s prompt engineers. Five years from now, who knows, maybe “Chief Empathy Officer” will be the job du jour because we finally realised AI can't handle feelings.

But by then, the children raised on screen-time schedules and no mud puddles might be emotionally tone-deaf.

Playground, Not Platform
But as I said, Vivek wanted something simple: a place where his son could learn to take turns, pet a caterpillar, discover gravity the fun way (by falling off low benches), and maybe understand that sharing isn’t just a button on an app.

But such schools are now harder to find than signal in a rural Jio tower.

Education today is not a river that flows; it is a funnel. One end wide with colourful promises such as “holistic,” “future-ready,” “21st-century skills” and the other, narrow and claustrophobic, pushing the child toward a career that hasn’t been invented yet by people who probably didn’t enjoy their own childhood either.

Let the child play. Let him be gloriously inefficient. Let him draw monsters with six eyes and believe in magic. Let him learn coding later, like we all did in panic, in college, five hours before the deadline.

The final, cruel irony? The very technologies we worship today were mostly invented by college dropouts and bored kids who had the space and time to be weird, to be wrong, to doodle, to dream.

Steve Jobs learned calligraphy. Not machine learning.

Zuckerberg built Facebook while procrastinating. Not attending Baby AI boot camp.

Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge.

But we’ve taken the opposite approach: we’re trying to inject knowledge into children before they’ve even developed imagination.

And in doing so, we’re breeding the most tragic thing of all: kids who are technically fluent but emotionally bankrupt. Highly employable. Thoroughly exhausted.

Modest Proposal 
Maybe we need to start a new kind of school. Let’s call it the Institute of Joyful Uselessness.

No coding, no flashcards, no career mapping. Just stories, clay, rain, cardboard castles, and that most undervalued learning resource of all: boredom.

Let the children stare at clouds. Let them build a time machine out of a shoebox. Let them believe in unicorns. Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll build something far better than AI.

Maybe they’ll build wisdom.

Like Vivek.

Not before I end up looking naive! Zeitgeist!!!