A year or two ago, AI wasn’t something I really thought about. It was just something in movies. Now, it’s everywhere. I see it on my phone, I hear my teachers talking about it, and it’s always in the news. Being a junior in high school right now feels a bit strange because the world I’m preparing for seems to be changing every single week.
The biggest change is how we handle school. For a lot of us, AI has become a tutor. If I’m stuck on a problem at 10:00 PM and I don’t understand a youtube video, I can ask an AI to explain it in a simpler way. It’s helpful, but it also feels a little risky. If a computer can do the work for me, I have to be careful not to stop thinking for myself. The goal of school is to learn how to solve problems, not just how to get the answer.
Then there’s the big question: What am I going to do after I graduate? Usually, by 11th grade, people tell you to pick a path. But it’s hard to pick a career when you don’t know what jobs will look like in five years. Will people still need entry-level coders? Will writers still have jobs? It’s a little scary to think that a computer might be able to do a job better than a person who spent four years in college learning how to do it.
However, I don’t think humans are going away. I think AI is just going to be another tool, like the calculator or the internet. My parents tell me that when the internet first came out, people thought it would ruin everything. Instead, people just learned how to use it to work faster. I think my generation will have to do the same thing. We will be using the tools at our disposal.
One thing that worries me is how hard it is to tell what’s real anymore. With AI-made photos and videos, it’s easy to get tricked. As I get older and start voting or making big life decisions, I’m going to have to be much more careful about what I believe online. We’re going to need to fact check everything.
In the end, I think AI will take over the boring parts of life like organizing data or doing tedious tasks. That should leave more room for the things computers can’t do, like being creative, showing empathy, and talking to people face-to-face.
The future isn’t a robot world but it’s a world where we have to be smarter about how we use our technology. I’m nervous, but I’m also curious to see where it goes. We’re the first group of kids growing up with this, and it’s up to us to make sure it helps people instead of hurting them.
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