I want to tell you why I am writing this before I tell you what it is about.
Last month I sat in a room with some of the most thoughtful people I know. Educators. Founders. Researchers.
Someone asked a question that has not left me since.
If AI can now do in forty seconds what took a skilled professional two years to learn, what exactly are we training our children for?
Nobody had a clean answer.
I have been sitting with that question ever since.
Let me start with something that genuinely surprised me
In 1997 a computer beat the world chess champion for the first time.
The world assumed chess was finished as a human pursuit. Why play a game you can never win against a machine?
What actually happened was the opposite.
Human chess got better. Dramatically better.
Players used computers to study patterns, test strategies and understand the game at a depth that was previously impossible. The average rating of professional chess players has risen significantly since computers entered the game.
The tool did not replace the human. It raised the ceiling of what humans could achieve.
That is the story most people are not telling about AI.
What AI can now do
I want to be honest about this because I think parents deserve accuracy more than reassurance.
The pace of change is genuinely difficult to convey without sounding like you are exaggerating.
Two years ago AI could write a passable essay. Today it writes compelling ones.
Two years ago AI could generate basic code. Today it builds functional applications in minutes.
Two years ago AI could summarise a document. Today it analyses, critiques and improves it.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39 percent of workers' core skills will change or become outdated by 2030. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf
For a student starting university today, 2030 is the year they graduate.
The skills that took ten years to build can now be learned by a machine in months. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes hours.
That is not a reason to panic.
But it is a reason to think very carefully about what your child is building right now.
Here is what nobody is talking about
In 2023 researchers at MIT ran an experiment.
They gave one group of students access to ChatGPT to write essays. Another group wrote without it. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
The ChatGPT group produced better essays in less time.
But when researchers followed up weeks later, the students who used AI remembered significantly less of what they had written. They felt less ownership over their ideas. Their ability to construct original arguments independently had weakened.
The researchers called it cognitive debt.
The tool made the output better. And quietly made the thinker worse.
This is the paradox nobody is preparing Indian parents for.
AI is extraordinarily good at producing. It is not good at developing.
And development is what your child actually needs.
What AI genuinely cannot do
I have been thinking about this carefully because I think the answer matters enormously for how we raise the next generation.
It cannot exercise genuine human judgment.
Judgment is not the ability to process information and produce a likely answer. Judgment is the ability to act wisely in the presence of uncertainty, competing values and incomplete information.
I do this every day in my sessions. A student is telling me one thing. Their body language is saying another. The parent in the room is holding something back. The right question to ask is not in any dataset.
It cannot think originally.
AI is extraordinarily good at combining existing ideas in new ways. That is genuinely impressive.
But original thought, the kind that comes from a human being who has lived something, lost something, failed at something and found a completely new way through, that is different.
The most memorable college application essays I have ever read were not impressive. They were surprised. The student had clearly looked at their own life and found something nobody else would have found there.
AI cannot do that. Because AI has not lived a life.
It cannot communicate with conviction.
AI can write persuasively. It cannot speak with the authority that comes from genuinely believing what you are saying.
There is a quality in a human being who has thought deeply about something, who has changed their mind, who has defended their position and been wrong and rebuilt it again, that no generated text can replicate.
That quality is what makes people trust you. Follow you. Believe in what you are building.
It is one of the most valuable things a young person can develop.
And it takes years.
It cannot ask the right moral question.
Every consequential decision in the next decade will involve AI.
And every one of those decisions will need a human being who can ask the question the machine cannot ask.
We cannot do this. Should we.
That question requires moral imagination. The ability to hold competing values simultaneously. To consider who is harmed by a decision that benefits others. To sit with genuine discomfort rather than optimise it away.
This is almost entirely absent from the Indian education system. And it is becoming one of the most important skills a young person can build.
Why understanding AI is not optional
I am not saying your child should avoid AI. Quite the opposite.
The students who will thrive are not the ones who resist AI. They are the ones who understand it deeply enough to use it as a tool rather than be used by it.
There is a difference between a student who uses AI to write their essay and a student who uses AI to research faster, think deeper and produce work that is genuinely better than what they could have done alone.
The first student is outsourcing their thinking.
The second student is amplifying it.
Like the chess players who used computers not to replace their thinking but to deepen it.
Understanding what AI can and cannot do. Knowing when to use it and when not to. Being able to evaluate whether what it produces is accurate, ethical and truly theirs. These are the meta skills of the next decade.
What your child should actually be building
Not one skill. A combination.
A technical foundation that allows them to understand and use AI intelligently. Basic data literacy. The ability to evaluate AI outputs critically. An understanding of how these systems work at a conceptual level.
And a human foundation that no machine can replicate.
The ability to think originally. To communicate with conviction. To exercise genuine judgment. To ask the moral question. To build trust with other human beings in a room.
And most importantly. A genuine point of view.
Something they believe. Something they have arrived at through reading, thinking, arguing, failing and rebuilding.
Something that is unmistakably theirs.
Because in a world where AI can produce anything on demand, the rarest and most valuable thing a young person can offer is a perspective that could only have come from a human life fully lived.
So tell me. When your child uses AI, are they thinking more or thinking less?
Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Warmly,
Abhishek Gupta
A Father. A Founder. A Counsellor.