Generation AI: Fear of a “social divide” if not all children learn computer skills

In a classroom in Cambridge, 10-year-old Joseph trained his AI model to distinguish between drawings of apples and drawings of smiles.

“AI does a lot of things wrong,” he said, as it misidentified a fruit as a face. He set about retraining it, and in a flash he was back on track – instinctively understanding the inner nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning in a way that few adults do.

His friends from the coding club at C of E Elementary School in St. Paul set out to build their own AIs with similar skill. Just as people born in the early 19th century never knew a world without manned flight, and Generation Z has always lived with social media, Joseph and his friends are AI natives.

Here, on a December morning, some of them were being taught the principles and practical aspects of the potentially world-changing technology that experts fear will pass large numbers of people by and disempower them.