The future
Generation Alpha and Generation Beta: growing up with AI
Alpha (2010–2024) and Beta (2025–2039): Bairo Gonzalez imagines how children grow up who never knew a world without artificial intelligence.
Bairo was born in 1982, in a world without internet at home and without a phone in your pocket. The children born today won't remember a world without them.
The names of the generations
The Australian social researcher Mark McCrindle named the youngest generations. Generation Alpha covers those born from 2010 to 2024: almost two billion people by the time the last of them is born, the largest generation in history. Generation Beta began in 2025 and runs to 2039. According to McCrindle, Beta will be the first generation never to know a world without artificial intelligence.
The names have their charm. Alpha and beta are the first letters of the Greek alphabet, chosen, McCrindle says, because these generations aren't a return to the old: they're the beginning of something else.
Bairo's vision
For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, these children are the 1.0 of the code he describes: the generation that will grow up with artificial intelligence the way one grows up with electric light. For them, talking to a machine won't be news. It will be as ordinary as opening a window.
He imagines generations Alpha, Beta and those that follow ever more integrated with technology. Integrated in the sense of coexistence: learning with AI tutors, talking in any language, having at hand the knowledge that, for their grandparents, was locked away in distant libraries.
And he also imagines that this ease brings an enormous responsibility for those who raise them.
What children will need
There's a question running through Bairo's vision: if the machine can answer almost everything, what does a child need to learn?
His answer isn't technical. It's human. They'll need to learn to ask good questions. To tell the true from the made-up. To wait. To get through frustration without a shortcut. To look someone in the eye and understand what wasn't said. All the things no algorithm teaches by shortcut.
In 2021, UNICEF published guidance on artificial intelligence for children, with nine requirements: support children's development and well-being, ensure inclusion, protect children's data and privacy, ensure safety, prepare children for present and future developments in AI, among others. Bairo reads these principles as a map. In the ecosystem he imagines, any tool a child touches must pass through them.
In the future he describes
In 2030, he imagines a twelve-year-old Alpha child learning math with an AI tutor that notices when she's tired and suggests a break, not another exercise.
In 2040, he imagines Beta teenagers who have never been afraid of not understanding a foreign language, and who therefore make friends on the other side of the planet the way one makes friends on the street.
In 2050, he imagines Alpha adults leading companies, hospitals and governments, deciding how artificial intelligence should be used. The question he asks himself is: what will these people have learned from us?
None of this is a prediction. These are scenarios from someone who asks himself, every day, what world he is leaving behind.
The part that doesn't change
Amid so much transformation, Bairo bets on one thing that remains. An Alpha or Beta child will still need a lap to sit on. Someone to listen to them tell last night's dream. An adult who says "I've made mistakes too" and tells how they got back up.
That's why he speaks of waking humans up and of a life to teach. Machines will teach facts. People will go on teaching what to do with them.
A scene
An eight-year-old girl, born in 2026, asks the school assistant why the sky is blue. The assistant explains light, molecules, colors. She says thank you. Then she runs to her father and asks something else: whether he was ever afraid of the dark. The father sits on the floor beside her and tells her.
Some questions are for machines. Others, only a person can answer.