Susskind to parents: teach kids AI, and how to work without it

On a car trip to Suffolk, Daniel Susskind's family put on a children's history podcast called History's Not Boring, narrated by two young hosts. His wife, a podcast and documentary maker, later worked out that the children did not exist. The show was AI-generated end to end.

"It was a strange moment, learning that people we had grown fond of were not actually people at all," Susskind writes in the Guardian, in an extract from his new book *What Should My Children Do?: A Human's Guide to the Age of AI* (Penguin, £20). Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the piece.

Susskind, a father of three aged 8, 5 and 2, has spent 15 years studying AI's impact on work. His argument to parents is that the last round of "future-proofing" has already been overtaken. He points at 2013, when David Cameron pushed coding into UK primary and secondary schools; in January 2026, Anthropic reported that "90% of the code for Claude Code was itself written by AI." The skill picked to protect that cohort was, on his reading, "largely redundant before they had even left school."

He wants a return to basics. Since 2009, OECD PISA assessments show literacy and numeracy falling among young people, and Susskind argues these matter more, not less, in a world of models that hallucinate. His model for schools borrows from Wilfred Halliday Cockcroft's 1982 mathematics report on calculators: teach both, test both. As he puts it: "A teacher cannot monitor whether or not a student uses AI in the quiet solitude of their bedroom."

On careers, his line to parents is to "choose a profession because the problem interests you, not the job." Roles change, he argues, but the underlying problems (improving health outcomes, providing legal counsel) persist. He points to a Stanford system in 2017 that diagnosed skin cancer as accurately as dermatologists, and to DeepMind's AlphaFold2 creators winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in late 2024.

His closing frame: "We are letting children down if we prepare them for the world that we grew up in, not the one they will actually inhabit."