An eleven-year-old speaks about Artificial Intelligence
By Sophia Zhou
Recently, I contributed to a series of children’s books about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and the series is called Artificial Intelligence and Me. The books talk about the five big main ideas of A.I. and the books introduce you to A.I. through an A.I. robot, Robby, and his friends. The publisher of this series, Ready A.I. is a company that provides a variety of children’s courses for Artificial Intelligence, and they also provide what is called “A.I. in a box” that includes a Cozmo robot, the Calypso software, an kindle fire, a controller, and in the plus version, it also includes a laptop. I learned a lot about Artificial Intelligence through the A.I. in a box, and I think that it is perfect for any kid who is interested in exploring Robots because using Cozmo is not only educational but very fun as well. I think that the series of books is a must-read for any kids ages 5 or above, and is my number 1 recommended book for kids from Kindergarten to 6th grade, for many reasons.
First of all, I think that kids right now should understand at least the concept and fundamentals of A.I. because it has been all around us despite whether they realize it or not. When COVID-19 hit the USA as well as the globe last year, millions of people had to quarantine at home. Adults work from home and kids learn from home. It is a tragedy for human beings however it accelerates a massive scale adoption and upgrade of Artificial Intelligence. Think about during our remote learning, when we communicate with our teachers through Emails, those automatic spelling or grammar checks are an example of A.I. And A.I. is also used to sort your incoming Emails into designated inbox folders and automatically send those strange or unrecognizable emails into the spam. Let me give you another example of A.I. in our everyday lives. Big technology companies like Google, Facebook, or Apple. They can accurately send individualized advertisements to you based on your browning, searching data, and Artificial Intelligence studies your data and identifies the ones that it thinks you will most likely be interested in based on its calculation. Digital voice assistants are also a part of many people’s lives, tools like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant are becoming parts of people’s lives since they could tell you from today’s weather to directions to your favorite restaurant. Undoubtedly, they become smarter and smarter each day. Aside from assistants on your electronics, there are also smart home assistants like a smart refrigerator that creates grocery lists for you. I can list such examples on and on. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence has penetrated into our lives and becomes an inevitable part. Future jobs will be how to get them smarter but never eliminate them from our life.
My second reason is that, as I said, A.I. is becoming a part of everyone’s lives, and also an essential part of jobs as well. In the future every industry will be affiliated with A.I. technology, for example, some industries currently heavily affiliated with Artificial Intelligence are Transportation, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Entertainment, and Sports. A.I. technology is going to be adopted eventually in more and more industries, jobs, as more use cases are found, and A.I. will learn to be self-sufficient. A.I. trend is inevitable simply because it represents higher productivity than manpower and will be in favor of all businesses. If we already know it is going to be the future, kids today will be better prepared if they have the concept in mind from a young age. I think the A.I.and me series is a perfect entry book to introduce big ideas of AI. This series is educational and easy to understand for even kids very young since it contains a lot of pictures, and some fun activities at the end of the books as well. It will definitely make them more interested in A.I. and are prepared to go deeper into the A.I. world.
I feel very proud of participating in such a meaningful project. I have no doubt many children will benefit from this book as much as I do. I think more good children’s books around this topic will continuously be published. Enjoy reading!
About Sophia: My name is Sophia, I am eleven years old and I am in 6th grade. Some of my hobbies are reading, writing, ballet, golf and I also play piano. I established a blog a year back, for several reasons, first, I like to write and share my thoughts, and I want to understand more about what is happening around the world, this is a link to my blog, https://www.sophiasviews.com. A year ago, I also got an “A.I. in a box” which gave me the chance to learn how to code Cozmo using Calypso, and because of that, I became interested in A.I. as well. So, I was very excited when I got the chance to contribute to this series of books because I think that this series is a must-read for any child for reasons that I explained in my blog. Enjoy reading!
Learn more about ReadyAI: www.readyai.org
