How will childhood change?
Dr. Joseph Wilson has been working in AI since before most people knew the term. He ran computer vision studies as a high school teacher in Central Florida and now serves as Managing Director at the American Institutes for Research, an 80-year-old nonprofit research institute. The team is launching the AI Century Study, a 100-year longitudinal project following the first generation of AI-native children, born between 2023 and 2025, alongside a comparison cohort born a decade earlier. AIR has done this before, and in the 1960s they launched Project Talent, which captured 5% of all U.S. high school students and is still producing research today.
Living less than a mile from OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, Wilson has a front row seat to the the AI hype cycle up close. He notes federal funding for rigorous longitudinal research is shrinking even as the need for it has never been greater. With these rapidly evolving technologies, he says policy must be guided by evidence. We need to question what comes out of these tools, and AI is not human (and never will be.) In the day-to-day, he encourages listeners to take the small act of taking out your earbuds and talking to the person in front of you, and to lead with empathy.
Tune in for this thoughtful interview, listen or watch! We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
“We have to study it. And it’s an unsexy thing to study because it takes time, if you want to study it in a really rigorous and long-term way. But we won’t have an answer if we don’t.” — Dr. Joseph Wilson
Guest
Dr. Joseph Wilson, Managing Director, American Institutes for Research (AIR). Principal Investigator of the AI Century Study, AI by 8, and the Wind River Computer Science Collaborative. Engineer, former high school teacher, and PhD in bioengineering. Based in San Francisco.
Carve-outs
Joey: Project Talent. Launched by AIR in the 1960s, it captured roughly 5% of all U.S. high school students at the time, the largest study of its kind. Originally designed to measure education and aptitudes, it has since evolved into a study of life course outcomes, including Alzheimer’s-related findings.
Joey: Wind River Computer Science Collaborative. Now in its seventh year. Brought computer science and AI into elementary schools on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. When teachers were asked what mattered most, the answer was language revitalization, preserving Shoshone and Arapaho. The team connected computational thinking and storytelling to those languages, and teacher engagement jumped.
Joey: Cycle to Zero and AIDS/LifeCycle. Cycle to Zero is a charity ride from San Francisco to Guerneville and back. Its predecessor, AIDS/LifeCycle, was a six-to-seven-day ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles raising funds for the SF AIDS Foundation and the LA LGBT Center.
Joey: The Luddite Club of New York City. A student group, reportedly one of the fastest growing in the city. They meet in Central Park for entirely analog activities like crochet, chess, conversation. A counter-movement emerging from the generation that grew up most saturated by screens.
Chelsea: Basshunter and EDM. Chelsea and Joey both enjoy EDM. A small reminder that the people shaping how we think about AI are also the people who grew up on dial-up internet and early Eurotrash anthems.
Chelsea: Cozy escapism. The rise of cozy digital games and literature, be a little villager, make tea in a pixel cottage. The impulse to escape technology and the impulse to escape into it, running in parallel.
Joey: Mount Olympus, San Francisco. A pocket park above the Castro district, right beside Sutro Tower, the large radio antenna that dominates the city’s skyline. Offers 360-degree views from the Bay to the Pacific. Quiet, contemplative, and close enough to the city to feel connected while still being able to hear your own thoughts. Joey’s recommendation for anyone visiting SF who wants to see the entire city from one vantage point.
Key points
The AI Century Study: A 100-year longitudinal study tracking AI’s impact on the human condition, with two cohorts and a nationally representative sample drawn from U.S. Census data. The first cohort follows children born between 2023 and 2025, the first generation to grow up entirely alongside generative AI
Evidence before policy: The gap between the speed of AI deployment and the evidence needed to govern it responsibly, and why the federal funding landscape for rigorous research is narrowing
Unplugged AI literacy: Teaching K–2 students to think critically about AI through literacy lessons co-designed with teachers with no computers required
Cultural sovereignty in research: Some stories and lessons created by Indigenous teachers are not meant for outsiders
Third spaces and manufactured community: Where do people actually connect, and what happens when those spaces get commodified?
Empathy as infrastructure: The case for small, deliberate human connections, taking out your earbuds, learning your barista’s name, as the counterweight to a digitally mediated world
AI and sentience: It can approximate how people feel but that doesn’t make it a person
Links
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