👋 friends!

I’m thrilled and appreciative that you are giving this newsletter a try - it means you, too, care about how we can best be there for ourselves and our families as we race into an uncertain AI-centric future. I would love your feedback after you give this a read as I hope to make this weekly note something helpful, interesting, and motivating for you. ❤️ 💪 

In today’s glow note:

• Parenting in the AI era: AI companions should be on your radar and an optimistic future jobs report from the WEF.

• Mind-blowing: disease eradication in 10 years? robots pregnant with human babies?

• Connection spark: the powerful lasting benefits of one-on-one time

• Hands-on with AI: create instant, personalized, beautifully illustrated storybooks

With that, here we go…

Future Ready Formula

Curiosity + Connection

Why? It’s overwhelming to be a parent in today’s stressful and chaotic world. Tune out the noise and simply prioritize curiosity and connection. Doing so will empower your kids to be co-pilots, not passengers and to have a healthy, confident, joyful edge in the AI era.

Parenting in the AI Era

AI companions are coming in 🔥: parents may not realize this yet, but AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support are already extremely popular among teens, with yet unknown but highly risky consequences on children’s emotional development, relationships, and sense of self.

Unlike other AI tools, emotional AI companions target a fundamental human need during critical developmental years, making them potentially more harmful than previous technologies parents have had to navigate. I found this article well worth reading.

What to do:

• Have conversations with your kids about what these tools are, how they work, and that they are designed to keep your attention (and at least currently, reinforce what they think you want to hear, for better or worse)

• Consider expanding any social media restrictions you have in place to include AI companions, at least for now, based on their current design and lack of safeguards.

• Grow community awareness: ask teachers and other parents whether they've seen kids using AI companions, and how it's affecting relationships, attention, or behavior. Share what you learn widely. The more we talk about it, the harder it is to ignore. 💪 

  

  screenshot of Character.ai interface

Parenting in the AI Era

An optimistic report about the future of jobs: the WEF put out a report this year forecasting significant job transformation - but optimistically - significant job growth: about 170 million new jobs will be created and 92 million displaced, so a net growth of 78 million jobs by 2030.

Key desirable skills identified are: technological (specifically AI, big data, networking, cybersecurity, and technological literacy), creative thinking, resilience, flexibility/agility, curiosity and growth mindset.

Mind = Blown

Will AI cure all disease within 10 years?! Nobel Prize-winning researcher Demis Hassabis seems to think it’s possible. Incredible, and hard to grasp what that would even mean for our healthspans, if true.

Robots pregnant with human babies?! A Chinese tech firm is racing to deliver what could be the world’s first “gestation robot”. Slated for debut next year, it would carry a fetus through 10 months of gestation and deliver the baby. Um, whoa.

Connection Spark

The power of one-on-one time: We all know that spending quality time with family is precious when it comes to deepening connection. But did you know that prioritizing one-on-one time with each of your kiddos can go even further?

One-on-one time with your child boosts their self-esteem, trust, resilience, and sense of safety while building a lasting bond - and memories - that benefits both of you well into their adulthood.

It doesn’t need to be long or busy - quite the opposite. Even 15 minutes of unstructured time together - being fully present- can go a long way.

Hands on with AI

Instant personalized, illustrated storybooks: Speaking of one-on-one time, one of the best baked-in opportunities for this is when you’re tucking your kiddo in at night. Depending on their ages, a bedtime story that you create and read together can be a really special thing to try.

While we’ve been able to ask Chatgpt or other AIs to write us personalized bedtime stories for quite some time, Google has taken this to the next level with a new feature in Gemini.

Try this out: go to gemini.google.com and simply ask it to “create a storybook about x” (Pro tip: you can have it tackle a topic your kiddo has been worried about). It will instantly generate you a beautifully illustrated clickable storybook that you can read together or use the audio feature to have it read aloud to you.

That’s it for this week! Please drop me a note ([email protected]) - I would love your feedback, ideas, or requests for future glow notes. Also, if you enjoyed this and know of others who might too, I’d really appreciate a forward to help this grow! ❤️

TGIF, Michaela

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf

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