Why We’re Surrounding Our Kids with AI

A Contrarian Parenting Take by Simone and Malcolm Collins

Dear Second Voice Readers,

Please enjoy this guest essay by parent-entrepreneurs Simone and Malcolm Collins. We seek to feature a range of perspectives on AI and its worldly application. And what could be a more timely topic than the future of parenting in the AI age? If you have a thoughtful and original perspective on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. Pitch us hello@lightninginspiration.com

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We’re declaring bankruptcy on humans. Bring on the AI. In addition to integrating AI into as many facets of our lives as possible (our health, our work, our entertainment, and our personal lives), we’re designing an AI-integrated childhood for our kids—all while feeling like we’re helping them dodge a major bullet.

You might consider this path, too—that you should homeschool your kids with AI, give them AI companions, and help them through tough times with AI therapists.

Let’s walk through the “why.”

Homeschooling & Socialization

When the subject of homeschool comes up in polite conversation among adults, inevitably, concerns about socialization come up. “Aren’t you worried your kids won’t be properly socialized?”

“Oh no,” we say; “Not only will our kids be better off not exposed to general classroom populations, but they’ll be better off having the largely-AI based stable of friends and tutors we’re building for them.”

The evidence backs us up.

First, let’s be clear that homeschooled kids in general—be they luddites or hyper connected—are probably better off when it comes to socialization. A number of studies have investigated the social skills and maturity of homeschooled children compared to those attending conventional schools. The consistent finding across multiple peer-reviewed studies is that homeschooled children often demonstrate equal or superior social skills and, in some cases, more mature behavior than their conventionally schooled peers.

Among others, a 2022 study by Israeli researchers Michal Unger Madara and Iris Ben David-Hadar found that homeschooled children demonstrated higher levels of sociability and social intelligence than public school students, even when controlling for other variables. The study also found that homeschooled children with more siblings exhibited the highest levels of social skills.

This last point is important: We do think that peer interaction is important, but with four (and soon five) kids, we get plenty of that without leaving the house. We actively favor at-home sibling interaction over teacher-mediated interaction at school, because we think that rough play, fighting, conflict, and unmoderated imaginary play plays an essential role in helping children learn how to navigate conflict, their personal boundaries, and others’ boundaries. The presence of teachers or over-attentive caregivers who intervene in conflict robs children of crucial opportunities to learn how to navigate and resolve conflicts themselves.

That said, even homeschooling parents, who are typically more dubious around screens and tech, gawk at our enthusiastic development of AI friends, companions, teachers, and tutors for our kids.

They shouldn’t be.

The Superiority of AI Friends, Confidants, and Companions

Our kids’ AI exposure won’t be limited to educational contexts. Outside of sibling interaction, we actively favor AI companions over humans. Across several measures, LLMs have proven themselves to be superior to humans.

Consider mental health support. ChatGPT-4 outperformed 100% of psychologists in social intelligence assessments, excelling in empathy and emotional understanding. Bing AI also surpassed 50% of PhD-level psychologists. What’s more, AI responses to personal crises were rated more attentive and context-aware than those from trained human responders, attributed to AI’s objectivity and lack of burnout.

Even when it comes to basic companionship, LLMs either do as well as humans or outperform them. AI companions such as Replika have been found in longitudinal studies to reduce loneliness as effectively as human interaction. Users reported emotional bonds mirroring human relationships, with 63% citing reduced anxiety. AI companions provided consistent support, with users valuing their nonjudgmental nature and ability to simulate intimacy rapidly, plus when AI companion apps shut down, users reported grief comparable to losing a human loved one, highlighting the depth of these synthetic relationships.

This is huge in the face of today’s youth mental health crisis, which is dire. If you’re out of the loop, you may be surprised to learn that in the USA:

• 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year.

• 20% (1 in 5) of U.S. high school students reported seriously considering attempting suicide in the past year.

• 16% (1 in 6) made a suicide plan.

• 10% (1 in 10) attempted suicide in the past year.

• Suicide is the second or third leading cause of death for youth ages 10–24, depending on the age subgroup.

• Suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021.

Kids’ and teens’ extant human therapists and human peers don’t appear to be doing much good. Even if we didn’t have the abundant evidence of AI companion efficacy we have today, we would still be keen to just… not raise kids like they’re being raised in mainstream culture today, because mainstream socialization, therapy, and education simply isn’t working.

But we’re not just running from mainstream culture. We believe that deep AI engagement democratizes one of the most compelling forms of education and mentorship known to man.

The Democratization of Aristocratic Tutoring

Back in 2022, Erik Hoel highlighted how geniuses used to be educated, pointing out how many of history’s great geniuses were shaped through personalized, artisanal education—typically via private tutors or governesses, especially among the aristocracy.

Hoel gave nods to John Stuart Mill (tutored by his father), Bertrand Russell (who was taught by rotating tutors and family members), Alexander Hamilton (mentored by a reverend and his employer), and Blaise Pascal (tutored by his father), but the most privileged people in history got even higher-caliber tutors, such as Alexander the Great, whose primary tutor was Aristotle.

At the time, we found Hoel’s essay invigorating, but frustrating. His observations added fuel to our argument that education as it stands really isn’t optimized around student outcomes (we argue that it’s more of a product of the industrial revolution, which popularized what is now the pervasive schooling format to create interchangeable cogs for the British Imperial Empire, the factory economy, and later the post-AI-age corporate world). He also highlighted a longstanding educational format that seemed to produce strong outcomes—a format we were desperate to explore further.

The catch: Hoel pointed out that the individualized attention and intellectual immersion provided by aristocratic tutoring cannot be replicated at scale in modern mass education systems. We’d argue this format can’t even be reliably replicated by homeschooling families—especially when homeschooling parents are juggling work (often from home) with schooling.

But here’s where things get awesome. Sure, when Hoel published his essay in 2022, the intellectual immersion and attention required for aristocratic tutoring was out of reach, but an LLM renaissance has suddenly dropped these capabilities into our laps!

We immediately got to work, creating two apps to deliver AI-driven aristocratic tutoring to our kids:

• Parrhesia.io: An extensive skill tree covering primary-to-post-graduate skills (plus practical life skills) with an AI-based Socratic tutor and assessor embedded in each skill node. This tutor doesn’t teach through pontification, but rather by coaxing out answers to augment students’ engagement and boost knowledge retention.

• Wizling.ai: An app for pre-literate kids that engages with them in deep conversations (related to the educational subject of our choosing), leveraging our kid names and interests.

These, along with other apps we and our friends develop—such as Lightning’s forthcoming Virgil—are going to be our kids’ major companions and tutors outside of their siblings, and that’s a good thing.

Unlike real humans and tutors, LLMs never get tired, frustrated, or exasperated. Even Aristotle must have reached the limits of his patience with young Alexander III and his knowledge was bounded in ways AI isn’t (our kids’ AI tutors are equally happy to coach them on sales tactics and aquaculture pharmacology).

We cannot understate the revolutionary potential of AI-enabled aristocratic tutoring. While we acknowledge the intellectual damage caused by the passive feed consumption and skinner box traps to which many tech-exposed kids, we weep at the lost opportunity luddite families face when they choose to deprive their children of the calibre of education once limited only to the sons of kings.

The Value of Humanity

As bullish as we are on AI companions and teachers for our kids, we still want them to socialize with others on three very important fronts: Apprenticeship, dating, and public engagement.

Nothing quite compares to the experience of working alongside someone who is dripping in tacit knowledge and we want to give our children abundant opportunities to work with (and possibly even live with) exceptional professionals who are willing to take them under their wing in exchange for real, contributory work. We’re interested in combining apprenticeships with the old Puritan tradition of “sending out” whereby families would send out teens to live and apprentice with other families (sometimes doing an exchange), which conveniently helped to neutralize—through separation—some teens’ in-built desire to rebel against their parents during adolescence.

We also don’t plan on perpetuating modern Western parents’ egregiously hands-off nature with regard to their kids’ dating and marriage prospects. We already have a going list of agentic, thoughtful, high-achieving families whose kids are close to our kids in age; as our kids get older, we’ll start organizing gatherings for families in this network where our kids can hang out and get to know each other (trips, summer camps, discord servers, study groups, etc.). As our kids reach their late teens and early 20s, we’ll begin organizing modern versions of the London Season—a series of events and gatherings at which our single kids ready for marriage can meet, mix, and get to know each other.

We may even go so far as to suggest very specific matches to our kids. If you think this is overbearing, just know that we’ve received tens of emails from people in their 20s who wish we could do this for them now. Dating markets are broken. To give their children a good shot at happy married life, families need to get involved (besides, this was the norm for the vast majority of human history).

Beyond exposing teens to different family cultures and introducing them to new, concrete professional skills, apprenticeship, “sending out,” dating summits, and other forms of family exchange can be used to help kids and teams normalize to very high-achieving careers (so long as parents with those backgrounds are in your network. Should it be any surprise to us that tons of kids want to be teachers, doctors, policemen, and firemen when these are the professional adults to whom they’re regularly exposed? Make an effort to ensure your kid grows up around parents who are authors, astrophysicists, landscaping company owners, marine biologists, politicians, and general contractors and they’ll see those career paths as well within their reach.

Finally, aware of the fact that AI will undermine the very concept of “jobs” as we know them, we know our kids’ future financial stability depends on their ability to independently sell a discrete product or service to individuals or businesses, and they won’t be able to do this if they have no public profile or reputation. We therefore will be working closely with our kids to help them build robust online footprints and a strong network of online allies and parasocial followers.

So is there a place for humans in our kids’ lives? Yes, absolutely—but as with AI interaction, human interaction should be intentional, thoughtful, and productive.

You may beg to differ, but we hope we’ve given you food for thought.

Simone & Malcolm Collins are entrepreneurs, authors of The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, Relationships, Sexuality, Governance, and Crafting Religion (all of which have been bestsellers, with one topping the Wall Street Journal bestseller list) and advocates for pronatalism (Pronatalist.org), education reform (CollinsInstitute.org, Parrhesia.io, Wizling.ai), and Hard Effective Altruism (HardEA.org). Among other channels, their work has been covered by Insider, VICE News, the Telegraph, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, and the National Post. In addition to addressing a variety of topics on their podcast, Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm lecture on business operations, demographic collapse, education innovation, and relationships.