To the Silicon Valley Reddit mind, the whole of human existence is nothing more than a collection of inefficiencies waiting to be engineered away.
I saw a post this weekend that put this mentality on full display. A father built an app that monitors a camera feed while his six-year-old daughter watches television. If she starts sucking her thumb, the AI detects it and pauses the TV. Apparently this is what passes for an exciting use of artificial intelligence now.
I responded to it on X because it gets at something that has been bothering me for a long time. These people can build increasingly sophisticated technology, but they seem incapable of understanding why a father might need to sit down with his daughter and help her with something himself. They see a task that can be automated and assume that automating it is an improvement. The possibility that doing the task is part of becoming a good father never seems to occur to them.
Breaking a bad habit in a six-year-old child is meant to be relational. It requires patience, observation, gentle correction, and most importantly: presence. You have to pay attention to your child. You have to learn when she is doing it and why. You have to explain yourself, repeat yourself, and control your frustration when she does it again five minutes after you just told her to stop.
The weight of your presence as a father is something no AI can automate.
That is the part I find so disturbing about the arrangement being advertised. The girl watches a screen, a camera watches the girl, and software delivers the correction. Where is her father supposed to be in all of this? We are celebrating the fact that the system can operate without him. God forbid he has to look up from his own screen.
You may succeed in training a behavior this way. You have still missed an opportunity to be her father. She needed help with something small, and you decided the most interesting thing to do with that need was build a machine to handle it. I don’t need to know this family’s entire life to reject that as a vision of technological progress.
Anathema.
Fatherhood is supposed to cost you something
The people who think this way have no serious concept of duty, honor, or virtue. They may use the words, but the moment a duty becomes inconvenient they start looking for a way around it. Raising a child will expose that selfishness very quickly because children need you on their schedule, which rarely lines up with whatever you would rather be doing.
Of course it would be easier if your children always behaved, never interrupted you, and learned everything you wanted them to learn the first time you explained it. It would also be easier if you never had to get up in the middle of the night or answer the same question for the tenth time. None of us needed artificial intelligence to discover that raising children is difficult. What we apparently need is to recover an understanding of why a man should willingly do difficult things for his family.
Part of the difficulty is that your children force you to deal with yourself. You find out how impatient you are. You discover how much you resent being interrupted. You hear your own tone of voice coming back at you from a little person who learned it by listening to you, and suddenly the problem is a lot closer to home than you would like to admit.
A Christian father ought to recognize what is happening here. God is giving you responsibilities that require you to repent and grow up. You have to become more patient because your children need a patient father. You have to learn self-control because you cannot teach it convincingly while losing your temper over every little thing. There is no software update that will do this work for you.
In Ephesians 6:4, fathers are commanded to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We are also told not to provoke them to wrath. God holds the father accountable for how he exercises his authority. Getting the child to comply does not, by itself, mean you have done what He commanded.
Read Deuteronomy 6 and look at how fathers are told to teach their children. You talk to them in your house, when you walk with them, when you lie down, and when you rise. You are there, living with them and teaching them about God throughout the day. This assumes a father who actually knows his children and spends time with them.
Your son is watching how you treat his mother. He is watching what you do when you are angry, whether you keep your word, and whether the faith you talk about on Sunday has anything to do with how you behave on Tuesday. Your daughter is learning whether she can depend on you and whether you consider her worth your time. You are teaching them these things constantly, including when you would prefer to be left alone.
This is why the idea that we can simply outsource more and more of fatherhood is so foolish. You can pay someone to perform a task. You cannot pay someone to become the father your children were given. A schoolteacher can teach your son to read. She cannot show him what it means for his father to be a man. That responsibility belongs to you, and it will still belong to you after you find someone willing to take the job off your hands.
We were doing this long before AI. Modern men handed the formation of their children over to schools, entertainment companies, and strangers, then acted confused when their children grew up believing whatever those people taught them. Now we are going to add an AI system to the arrangement and call it innovation. We haven’t even begun to repair the damage from the first round of outsourcing.
People talk endlessly about women with “daddy issues” and young men who have no idea how to be men. At some point we should talk about the fathers who failed them. A little girl should not have to grow up wondering why her father couldn’t be bothered with her. A boy should not have to piece together an understanding of manhood from strangers on the internet because the man living in his house never took the time to teach him.
This failure is at the root of a tremendous amount of the misery we see around us. We keep trying to manage the consequences while treating the duty itself as optional. More technology will not rescue a society of men who refuse to be fathers.
What I actually want AI to do
I want AI to optimize every stupid, time-consuming work task I have so that I can spend more time with the people I love doing the things I love doing. I have been very clear about this. Help me get through the administrative nonsense. Help me solve a technical problem that would otherwise eat up my afternoon. Help me finish my work so I can go outside with my children.
That’s our vision for Gab AI. We are building useful tools that give ordinary people more time and more ability to do things they care about. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life staring at a computer, and I certainly don’t want my children raised by one.
It should be obvious why I can be enthusiastic about AI and disgusted by this particular use of it. The whole reason I want to save time at work is so I have more time for my family. If I then turn around and use the same technology to avoid spending that time with my children, what exactly have I accomplished?
These people make presenting an optimistic vision for AI an uphill battle. Every time you explain how the technology could help someone build a business or get home to his family earlier, somebody in Silicon Valley comes along with a demonstration of how to avoid another basic human obligation. Then normal people look at it and quite reasonably wonder what is wrong with the people building this stuff.
I wrote recently about Silicon Valley’s theological problem, and this is another expression of it. If you think human beings are biological machines, you will eventually start treating your children like machines to be programmed. The Christian knows that his child is a person made in the image of God, entrusted to him by God, and that he will answer to God for how he raised her. That ought to change how you think about a great many things, including which parts of your life you are eager to automate.
Fathers need help. We have work to do, bills to pay, and responsibilities outside the home. I am building tools precisely because I understand that. But helping a father fulfill his duty requires some understanding of what the duty is. If your idea of helping him is to make it easier for him to be absent, you are helping him fail.
This applies to the father sitting in the same room scrolling his phone too. You can be physically home and still be unavailable to your children for most of the evening. I spend enough time working on the internet to know how easy it is to tell yourself you just need to finish one more thing. There will always be one more thing. Your children will not always be children.
Someday your daughter will be too old to ask you to read that book again. Your son will stop asking you to come outside and watch what he can do. You don’t get to buy those afternoons back once you have spent them looking at something else.
I want better technology. I want to build it and I want people to use it. I also want men to remember why they are working in the first place. Your family is not an obstacle standing between you and the life you were meant to have. Being a husband and a father is the life God has given you, and you ought to treat it like it matters.
Let the machine do the paperwork. Go raise your children.
