But Suskind worries about what will happen if AI begins to replace the types of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.
In fact, Suskind says, the book’s original working title was “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may seem cute and cuddly, but they carry hidden risks to child development. She finally accepted it. Raised by humans because I wanted to emphasize the positive (and irreplaceable) role that parents, teachers and caregivers play in the formation of young people.
“If we want children to continue to be able to connect with each other and other human beings, to be able to think critically and navigate the human world, we will have to ensure that children have a clearly human-raised early childhood,” Suskind says.
Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she directs a program aimed at providing hearing to children with cochlear implants. After he began doing this incredible work (literally helping children hear), he noticed that some children who underwent the procedure understood spoken language and spoke with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Listening alone was not enough. And that led her to delve into neuroscience and social science to understand why.
Suskind learned that young children’s brain development is strongly influenced by the mutual interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first years of their lives. And she worried that there is a large population of children who don’t receive the rich communication their brains need. And so he founded the TMW initiative, a research center that helps parents create the types of brain-enriching environments children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work at to Planet Money 2022 newsletter).
Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm
With the explosion of AI, Suskind has become alarmed by the rush to introduce unprecedented technology into children’s lives without careful thought and rigorous scientific study of its effects on young minds. She is especially concerned about AI companions and other systems that interact socially with children, which she fears many people will use to replace the human interactions that children need most.
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used technology to make raising children a little easier. In Raised by humansSuskind traces that story back to prehistoric times, when mothers used knitted slings to carry babies while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies (such as television and tablets) have eased the burden of childcare or helped keep children busy. Many of these technologies have also been met with fears that they would rot children’s brains.
But Suskind, again, AI can mark a fundamental change. Interacting with a chatbot or a smart teddy bear is more than just a child glued to a TV or iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems hold conversations that can seem surprisingly human. They respond to children’s questions, emotions and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social relationship that Suskind says can shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.
Suskind cites the research of renowned developmental psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl of the University of Washington. Kuhl proposed what is known as the “social gate” hypothesis: the idea that children’s brains are biologically primed to learn through social interaction. Studies have shown, for example, that babies learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that this is because social interactions engage the brain in a way that passive media does not. The way adults naturally talk to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touching, eye contact, and back-and-forth exchanges seem to help open that social door and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.
While artificial intelligence is no match for human educators and caregivers, Suskind responded, it is capable of opening the social door for young children in ways that previous technologies could not. That makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool, but also a potentially dangerous one.
Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which could include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They do not have the same priorities as parents. And while those systems can mimic human interaction, Suskind means they can’t recreate everything that makes human relationships valuable for development.
“Eye contact, shared laughter, patients’ responses to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nourishment that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”
Human relationships are also confusing and full of emotions. Parents misunderstand their children. The children get frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then smooth things over. Suskind noted that those imperfect interactions (and “the productive struggle” they create) are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.
Unlike most humans, AI systems can be infinitely engaging, infinitely patient, and relentlessly assertive. Interactions with them often feel frictionless. Suskind worries that exposing young children to them may make them less prepared for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.
AI as junk food for the young mind
Suskind compares the relationships of AI with ultra-processed foods. “If all you eat is fruit snacks, which are a synthetic version of fruit, when you actually eat the real fruit, you’ll say, ‘Hmm, it’s not that sweet,'” he says.
Over time, AI could be programmed to try to mimic real parents and caregivers even more. But Suskind said the problem isn’t simply that today’s AI doesn’t reach human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new type of social experience for children, one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and whose long-term effects remain deeply uncertain.
Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nutrition of human milk. But when a French doctor tested the formula on four newborns, They all died within a few days.and the episode sparked fierce controversy.
The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we must be cautious about designing substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human care before understanding how those substitutes shape children’s development.
Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly evolving technology and its potential effects on children, Suskind devotes much of the book to offering parents practical guidance for safely navigating parenting in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it is especially important to protect children from AI during their first years of life.
“Older children and adults encounter AI with neural scaffolding already built, but young children are still wiring the circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” he writes. “The introduction of AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different challenge with greater potential for harm.”
Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to improve some children’s education, but only as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She claims that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls “the human edge,” a set of social, emotional and cognitive skills such as “critical thinking, interpersonal connection, genuine creativity, empathy and resilience.”
But, like time-strapped parents who rely on screens to buy some time these days, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of child-rearing to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, over time, a completely human-raised childhood could become a kind of luxury good, much like fresh, healthy food tends to be today. Families with the time and resources would provide rich human interaction for their children. Everyone else could increasingly rely on cheaper and more convenient AI substitutes.
And children raised largely with AI could not only be left behind socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, they could also be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.
Suskind points out a recent essay by economist Alex Imas of the University of Chicago. Furthermore, as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may increasingly concentrate in what he calls “the relational sector”: occupations in which humans are valued for qualities that make them distinctively human, from education to healthcare, hospitality, the arts and therapy.
