But Susskind worries about what will happen if AI begins to replace the kinds of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.
In fact, Suskind says, her original, working title for the book was “Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may look cute and cuddly but carry hidden risks to a child’s development. She ended up going with Raised by humans because she wanted to emphasize the positive—and indispensable—role that parents, teachers, and caregivers play in shaping young people.
“If we want children to be able to continue to connect with each other and with other human beings, to be able to think critically, to be able to navigate the human world, we’re going to have to make sure that children have a distinctly human-educated early childhood,” says Suskind.
Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he directs a program aimed at giving children hearing with cochlear implants. After she began doing this amazing work—literally helping children hear—she noticed that some children who had the procedure understood spoken language and spoke with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Just hearing wasn’t enough. And that led her to delve into neuroscience and social science to find out why.
Young children’s brain development, Susskind has learned, is greatly influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with parents and caregivers in their first few years of life. And she became concerned that there was a large population of children who weren’t getting the enriching communication their brains needed. And so she founded the TMW initiative, research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work at a Money planet 2022 newsletter).
Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm
With the explosion of AI, Suskind is alarmed by the rush to introduce unprecedented technology into children’s lives without careful consideration and rigorous scientific study of its effects on young minds. She is particularly 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. c Raised by humansSuskind traces this story back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry babies while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies – such as television and tablets – have eased the burden of caregiving or helped keep children occupied. Many of these technologies have also been met with fears that they will spoil children’s brains.
But Suskind argues that AI could mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or a smart teddy bear is more than a child glued to a TV or iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems have conversations that can feel amazingly human. They answer children’s questions, emotions and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social bond—one that Suskind argues can shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.
Suskind cites research by noted 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 wired to learn through social interaction. Studies show, 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 ways that passive media do not. The sing-song way adults naturally speak to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touch, eye contact, and word exchanges all seem to help open this social door and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.
While artificial intelligence can’t compare to educators and caregivers, Susskind argues, it is able to open the social door for young children in ways that previous technologies could not. This makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool, but also a potentially dangerous one.
Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which may include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They don’t have the same priorities as parents. And while these systems can mimic human interaction, Susskind argues, they cannot recreate everything that makes human relationships developmentally valuable.
“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient answers to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nurturing that no algorithm, however complex, can match.”
Human relationships are also messy and full of emotions. Parents do not understand their children. Children get frustrated. Families fight, reconnect, and then patch things up. Susskind argues that these imperfect interactions—and the “productive struggle” they create—are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real-world relationships.
Unlike most humans, AI systems can be endlessly engaging, endlessly patient, and relentlessly affirming. Interactions with them often feel seamless. 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
Susskind compares AI’s connections to ultra-processed food. “If all you’re eating are fruit snacks that are a synthetic version of fruit, when you’re actually eating the real fruit, you’re going to be like, ‘Hmm, it’s not that sweet,'” she says.
AI could eventually be programmed to try to mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem is not simply that today’s AI fails to achieve human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new kind 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 used 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 daysand the episode sparked fierce controversy.
The lesson, Susskind suggests, is that we should be cautious about engineering substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human care before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.
Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly developing technology and its potential effects on children, Susskind devotes a large portion of the book to offering parents a practical guide to safely navigating parenting in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it is especially important to protect children from AI in the first years of their lives.
“Older children and adults encounter AI with a neural scaffolding already in place, but young children are still connecting the very circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” she 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 education for some children — but only as a tool that enhances, not replaces, humans. She argues that 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-pressed parents who rely on screens to buy some me-time today, there may be growing temptations to outsource some of the child-rearing to AI, especially given the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that over time, a childhood raised entirely by humans could become something of a luxury commodity—just as fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with time and resources would provide their children with rich human interaction. Everyone else may increasingly rely on cheaper, more convenient AI substitutes.
And children raised primarily by AI may not only fall behind socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, may be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.
Suskind points out recent essay by University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas argues that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may become increasingly concentrated in what he calls the “relationship sector”—occupations where people are valued for the qualities that make them distinctly human, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts and therapy.
