Our daughter just turned one, she’s the “oldest” in the cohort of Gen Beta. She’s just learning to walk but here are some things we can learn from her.
She’s our second child, but it never ceases to amaze me. It’s this cycle of standing up, feeling confident for a split second, and then immediately falling on her bum. But slowly, that stability builds into a first step, then two, then a full-on waddle.
It’s been a different experience than with our son. When he was that age, he held onto his walkers and surrounding “crutches” for a lot longer before he felt ready to go solo.
Every child is different, but it’s a great reminder of the importance of failing and embracing the struggle.
I can’t help but connect this to how we use AI. Those tiny stabilizer muscles a baby needs to balance only grow because they’re being used and tested through struggle. In our current tech environment, those “muscles” are information gathering and synthesis, or in other words, critical thinking.
I worry that if we make everything completely frictionless—if the answer is always just one prompt away—those mental muscles are going to atrophy.
Don’t get me wrong, I am actively using an LLM to help write and rewrite this.
But if we offload all the “hard stuff” to a tool, are we losing sight of the long-term consequences?
In other words, is a tool with zero resistance actually helping us, or is the “struggle” where the real value lives?
My best advice for the younger generation growing up native with LLMs and other AI tools is this:
Don’t let these tools become your permanent crutches.
Use them, sure, but don’t let them do all your thinking for you. If you offload the “how” and “why” to a machine, you lose the ability to research, synthesize, and judge things for yourself.
In short: Stay curious and keep exercising your own brain. AI should help you move faster, but it shouldn’t be the thing doing the walking for you.
About Brian Leung: Brian Leung is a Toronto-based performance marketer, entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology and business growth. A career performance marketer and lifelong tech nerd, Brian is also a TEDx speaker and the founder and CEO of SwiftAds.io, a Toronto-based AdTech startup founded in 2020 that helps businesses manage and automate Google Ads campaigns.
Through SwiftAds, Brian has developed an ads intelligence model capable of handling a wide range of campaign management tasks, designed to save agency owners and freelancers hours of work each week. Follow him Linkedin and try SwiftAds for free here.
