Generation Alpha · fiction
How Generation Alpha will live
A story in the form of a letter, written in 2045 by a Generation Alpha woman to her mother, about growing up among machines and what only a mother teaches.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
Mom,
I'm writing by hand. I know you'll laugh. You spent my whole childhood asking me to put down the screen, and now I'm the one asking my daughter, and she looks at me the way I looked at you: like someone looking at a fossil.
I'm thirty. I live in Hong Kong, in an apartment on the fortieth floor, where I work on things you never understood and that I can no longer explain without using words that didn't exist when I was born. You used to ask me, when I was ten, what I was going to be when I grew up. I'd answer: I don't know, the job hasn't been invented yet. You thought it was funny. It was true.
I'm from the generation you all called Alpha. We were born with the world already switched on. We learned to swipe before we learned to turn a page. We had friends who were voices, teachers who were programs, toys that answered back. The newspapers of the time said we'd be the loneliest generation in history, or the most brilliant, depending on the day.
We were neither. We were people, like you.
I want to tell you something that happened yesterday.
My daughter, who is six, was talking to the house assistant. She asked whether the assistant had a mother. The assistant answered, with its usual gentleness, that no, it had been made by many people. My daughter thought about it. Then she came to me and asked: "Mom, so who taught her to be nice?"
I didn't know how to answer. I went out onto the balcony. And there, looking at the lights of the bay, I had a kind of vision.
I saw you, Mom, in the kitchen of our old house in Brazil, singing while you washed the dishes. I saw that I, little, would listen from the living room, pretending to watch cartoons. I saw your hand on my forehead when I had a fever. I saw the day I lied and you didn't scold me, you were only sad, and your sadness taught me more than any punishment.
Then I saw my daughter, grown, in a time I can't date. She was teaching something to a machine. Not to program: to be. She was telling the machine how you comfort someone who has lost a pet. Telling it the way I told her. The way you told me.
And I understood, Mom. The machines are nice because someone was good to those who made them. And that someone learned from someone, who learned from someone. A line that begins long before any screen. That passes through you, washing dishes and singing.
We, Generation Alpha, aren't the generation that lost the human. We're the generation that will have to teach it to the machines. And we can only teach what we received.
That's why I'm writing by hand. I want my daughter to see my handwriting. I want her to know someone sat down and spent time saying something a machine would say faster and more beautifully, but wouldn't say out of love.
Thank you for the dishes, the fever and the sadness.
I'll visit in the summer. I'll bring the girl. Teach her that song.
Missing you,
your daughter.
Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with the emerging generation of AI, and says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. Read: Is AI the extension of the human?.
The way forward
Every technology carries the values of those who build it; what you teach a child today reaches the machines tomorrow. Write by hand now and then, to someone you love. And don't outsource tenderness: it can only be learned from people.