Children and Young Adults Futures Thinking and AI

On behalf of Dr Jaimee Stuart, Dr Min Yang presented an intervention during the symposium on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Children’s Rights on 22nd of November 2024 in Beijing, China. Co-organized by the Communication University of China and the UNICEF China Office, the symposium aimed to analyse the benefits, potential risks and harms of AI for children, as well as identify solutions and opportunities to promote children’s well-being in an era characterised by AI.

The audience, comprising representatives from academia, civil society and the private sector showed strong interest in the research, particularly in the findings concerning young people’s understandings of AI and their motivations for using AI. Furthermore, given that the majority of discussions in the symposium centred around external measures by multi-stakeholders to protect children in the era of AI, the intervention presented (which delved into children’s perceptions and feelings), provided a distinct and critical viewpoint. It underscored that children’s voices should not be overlooked when identifying solutions to enhance well-being in the AI era. Resonating with the presentation, participants emphasized the significance of incorporating children’s perceptions of AI into policymaking and AI governance. The full text of the intervention is presented below:

Children and Young Adults Futures Thinking and AI

It is very important to consider the risks and opportunities of AI for children and young people, and this is where much of the discussion is currently situated. But it is also crucial that the ways young people can meaningfully contribute to an AI driven future are discussed and prioritized. This is not only because the children of today will be living in very different future from the one that world we currently live in and they have a right to participate in and have a say in what their future will look like, but also because their input can shape the future (and the present) for the better.

Notably research highlights that young peoples’ imagined futures can help us to meet complex sustainability challenges because they have different ways of looking at the world, distinct ideas of what is important, and novel perspectives on possibilities. By nurturing and surfacing pluralistic alternative futures through young peoples’ storytelling about how they imagine the future and their role in it we can be more inclusive of children’s own fears, hopes and understandings as well as extend our own thinking. Effectively, children’s voices can support us to bridge an imagination gap that we are currently facing in addressing complex, contemporary issues of sustainability and technology.

Children’s voices can support us to bridge an imagination gap that we are currently facing in addressing complex, contemporary issues of sustainability and technology.

Research also finds that when children think about the future and feel a sense of hope, agency and self-determination that they are more likely to want to contribute to that positive vision of the future, to be more civically engaged, and to have a stronger desire to engage with science and technology. In fact, futures thinking has been found to play a key role in educations settings supporting technology literacy.

Work so far on children and young peoples’ future imaginaries indicates that they centralize technology in their foresight and tend to be relatively positive optimistic about it. However, they are worried about the world that is being left to them and may feel ‘a loss of faith in the notion that humanity is progressing towards a positive future’— and believe that technology is needed to address growing social problems. Notably, the small amount of evidence that has been gathered concerning children and young peoples’ beliefs about how AI will change the future highlights that they show strong desires to learn about and uptake emerging tech (especially Generative AI), but are worried about how this might affect their future jobs through automation and also show some anxieties around humanoid robots.

In order to unlock the potential of young peoples’ futures thinking about AI, I (Dr Jaimee Stuart) developed and led a research project examining the motivations and uses of Generative AI among a large group of young adults aged 18-25 years old from all around the world. In this work (which was supported by UNU Macau), I was particularly interested in how young people expressed the risks and opportunities of Generative AI for themselves and others as well as what they thought should be done about this. While the research was based on theories of anticipatory anxieties, it also considered topics such as digital competencies and mental health.

The research findings highlighted rich and nuanced understandings of AI among young people that were characterized by a high degree of tension. In fact, while young people rated their overall thoughts about AI as being positive (around 7 out of 10 on a 10 point scale), they also illustrated the many paradoxes.

On the positive side they believed Generative AI would

• Increase access to and democratize information and content creation capabilities,
• Free time by undertaking mundane tasks as well as support in their education, skill building, and technology literacies,
• Create new forms of work and education and help to solve complex global problems such as the SDGs.

On the negative side they believed Generative AI may

• Create more false, biased, and misleading information, vectors for violence, reduction of privacy,
• Enable dependency through overuse, reduce individuals’ critical thinking ability, as well as and increase laziness,
• Decrease involvement in creative arts (and increase IP issues), create uncertainties, and promote social isolation.

These results point to the “cautious optimism” of young peoples’ thoughts on AI in the future and can provide guidance for policy makers and AI governance efforts. However, this needs to be extended urgently to include the experiences, thoughts and inputs of even younger children.

Focusing on the risks and opportunities of AI without children and young peoples’ own thoughts and feelings included may mean that we miss the complexity and depth of their future imaginaries.

Focusing on the risks and opportunities of AI without children and young peoples’ own thoughts and feelings included may mean that we miss the complexity and depth of their future imaginaries. Furthermore, we do not always effectively include young people in the conversation, even if we are now working towards including the rights, issues and needs of young people into our programs and policies. This research shows that young people themselves are aware of what AI means for them, their peers, and their societies now and into the future. They clearly understand that there are potential positive and negative impacts and can articulate where these risks and benefits are situated – within the context of human needs and thriving. In many ways this is incredibly insightful and rich discourse to help us create more human-centric AI design, development, and deployment.

However, including children and young people in AI governance needs to be meaningful. I strongly suggest that this needs to be (1) inclusive and not tokenistic, (2) impactful on decision making, (3) safe and ethical and (4) representative of children and young people from diverse backgrounds.

Dr Stuart is in the process of drafting recommendations for the meaningful participation and inclusion of children’s voice in AI design, development, and deployment. As there is a pressing need for insights and evidence on AI and children’s experiences, she is currently seeking collaborations and opportunities to scale her research and action efforts. Email Dr Jaimee Stuart on stuart@unu.edu to connect.