Thank you The Workspace for Children, Orel, Anastasia | ModernMomPlaybook, Dr. Leigh Peek, Sheenu | TinyExplorersPlanet, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dr Sam Illingworth.
There is a moment, as a parent, when you realize the world has shifted underneath you and the rules you thought you understood no longer apply. AI did that to me. Quietly, quickly, and all at once.
Dr. Sam Ellingworth has been thinking about this longer than most of us. He a father and university professor in Scotland as well as the writer behind Slow AI , a Substack dedicated to helping people think more intentionally about artificial intelligence — not just how to use it, but when to leave it alone. That instinct is exactly what drew me into this conversation.
Sam and I sat down for a Substack Live to talk about the AI questions nobody has figured out yet — not the big policy ones, but the smaller, harder ones that show up in your living room whether you're ready or not.
We talked about my teenager, who uses ChatGPT to troubleshoot cookie recipes when we’re out of eggs. And my twins, who are using Gemini at school because their teachers are telling them to. And me, over here calling all of it “the robots,” trying to figure out which ones are helpful and which ones I should be worried about.
The question I keep coming back to — and the one Sam has spent real time thinking about — is what happens when your child goes to a chatbot instead of you. Not for homework help. For the hard stuff. The questions they’d never walk down the hall to ask. That frictionlessness is the thing that worries me most. A chatbot will never make eye contact with you across the dinner table.
We also talked about what it means to know when not to use AI. There is research showing that kids with zero access to social media and kids with completely unrestricted access both struggle. The ones who do best are in the middle, with healthy boundaries and parents who stay in the conversation. I think AI will follow the same curve.
Sam closed with an idea from James Clear that I have not been able to shake: sometimes the long way around is the meaningful way. Taking my kids to the market after school instead of ordering delivery — that is not inefficiency. That is life. I think about AI the same way now.
Join me in subscribing to Slow AI . Sam writes with clarity and without alarm about one of the most important things happening in our lifetime, and he is exactly the kind of voice we need right now.
xo,
Emily
