To My Children: What the Machine Will Never Teach You

To my children,

The other night, I saw one of you ask a question to the glowing screen on the table. The answer came almost immediately: clear, confident, immediate. Then you moved on, as if turning off a faucet.

And I stayed there with a worry I want to share with you today.

This machine can answer almost anything. But it does not live any of what it tells you. It can know millions of answers; it has never had to live with the consequences of a single one.

It will often give you an answer — sometimes even when it does not know. It can save you time, explain an idea, translate a text, help you search. But it must never spare you from understanding.

Knowledge is not an answer

First remember this, in an era when machines give the impression that all the world’s knowledge fits on a screen:

A little. Even when a person stacks up books, data, and machines, what one knows remains little compared to what one does not know.

Then beware of anything that claims to know everything. And beware especially of yourself the day you believe there is nothing left to learn. Ignorance can drive you to seek. Pride, by contrast, closes the door.

There is a distinction I want to engrave in you: having information is not knowing.

The machine can give you information. Studying can turn it into knowledge. Experience will teach you to judge. And perhaps, with years, mistakes, and humility, you will draw some wisdom from it.

Never confuse these four things. They may look alike from afar, but they do not cost the same.

Verify before Believing

Since answers are now everywhere, free and instantaneous, the rarest quality of your generation may not be to find information. It will be to judge whether it deserves to be believed.

You will be surrounded by convincing sentences, perfect images, precise numbers and sometimes entirely false statements. A response may seem intelligent without being true.

The Qur’an gives us a rule that becomes more relevant as information accelerates:

I am not saying that the machine is that person mentioned in the verse. That would be an unfair and simplistic comparison. I ask you to keep the principle: information that reaches you is not yet truth.

No matter whether it comes from a friend, from a social network, from a video, or from an artificial intelligence: before repeating it, verify.

What the machine cannot shoulder for you

For there is one thing you will never be able to delegate: the responsibility for what you believe, what you say, and what you transmit.

Remember this idea: you will be responsible for your choices. The machine can produce a sentence. It bears neither your name nor your conscience, nor the consequences of what you decide to do with it.

If it errs and you spread the error without checking, the error becomes yours too.

That is why I do not ask you to flee the artificial intelligence. Use it. Ask it to explain, to translate, to contradict you, to show you what you did not see. But never give it the last word.

Patience in the Face of the Instant

There remains one thing hard to learn in the age of immediacy: patience.

The machine is fast. Understanding is not always. The speed with which a response arrives is not the measure of how deeply you have understood it.

So keep learning some things by heart. Read slowly. Return to a difficult page. Try before asking for the solution. Accept to stay a few minutes — sometimes a few days — in front of a question that resists you.

The time spent seeking is not always time wasted. Often, it is precisely there that something is built that the ready-made answer cannot give you: the capacity to think for yourself.

Keep the Taste for Questions

So here is what I would leave you, my children: not my answers — they will age with me — but the taste for questions.

Keep this hunger intact.

Use every machine your era will invent. They will likely be even more powerful than those we know today. But keep within you something no machine can do for you: the responsibility to search, to verify, to choose, and, at times, the courage to say: “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” is not a shame. It is often the first sentence of one who truly wants to learn.

And if there should be only one prayer to carry with you into this world saturated with answers, it would be this:

Your father.