He's 2 1/2.
I don't mind being behind the curve on a lot of those things. We live in the country on 2 1/2 acres, and he loves playing outside with lizards and plant and hoses and toy trucks...we want him to continue his engagement with the natural world, and the social world, as much as possible.
I don't know when he'll start interacting with technology. But when he gets old enough to read and type - or input voice commands - I'll definitely show him some AI apps and encourage him to use them. I figure that's probably at least a few years off.
My view is that childhoods of that sort are luxuries that we might no longer be able to afford -- by "we" I mean people who don't want their kids to be wage slaves.
The basis of my view is a general perception based on a lot of reading, listening and thinking. So it's pretty fucking far short of expertise of knowledge. It's not quite pure speculation, but anyway that's my sense of things. And in particular, I focus on the early childhood years because that's where neural pathways are formed. A kid who learns at age 4 that the universe is probabilistic is a kid who will coast through a lot of lessons that others find quite difficult.
Case in point: my son took Intro to Electricity and Magnetism this past semester (second semester of intro physics). He thought it was super easy, especially Maxwell's laws. I responded, "said nobody ever, including Maxwell." But he pointed out that he had the benefit of an early education geared to this task. He's said so many times that he feels as though he's had a leg up because I would play Crazy Machines and Civiballs with him at age 3, and taught him about electric oscillators and digital logic when he was 5.
Neither he nor I know whether that's actually true, but that's what I report. Without question he's an exceptional student: not only did he coast through his freshman year with a 4.0, but the aerospace club gave him a leadership position as a freshman (which is very rare). In part that's just his conscientiousness about details and rule-following (which he definitely didn't get from me!), but anyway.
I also would show him, before age 6 (don't remember exactly when), the scene from Trainspotting where Ewan McGregor ODs and gets dragged to the curb and then unceremoniously left at the ER. I said, "this is what heroin is about. Sometimes people think it could be fun at first, but this is the reality. Heroin users get money stuffed in their shirt pocket to pay a taxicab to dump them on the ground near a hospital" I was hoping for an aversion to develop, not unlike that in Clockwork Orange (minus the inhumanity), and so far it seems to have worked. I mean, I don't know if it really did: probably he wouldn't be thinking about opiates regardless. But I think it was the right thing to do and it hasn't not worked.
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