A CTO has written a book about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nothing too remarkable there. However, this CTO has penned a title about AI and family life. Using his experience of developing customer-focused services in the travel sector and marketing personas, Francesco De Marchis' book is a compelling and helpful guide to navigating AI and family life.
Joining diginomica for that all-important family activity, a meal, De Marchis discussed the writing process, the families, including his own that shaped the book Raising Children in the Age of AI, and his vision for AI and its impact on organizations and homes.
First, let's meet the protagonist of this story, Francesco De Marchis. For the last six years, De Marchis has been CTO and Chief Commercial Officer of travel services firm Ten Lifestyle Group, his third travel role in a row, having previously led technology at Jac Travel and Low Cost Travel. Before travel, De Marchis was a CTO and CIO in retail and oversaw the growth of Play.com and its move into becoming part of the Rakuten empire. De Marchis, originally from Italy, became a digital leader through a career in software engineering.
Raising Children in the Age of AI is not a polemic against AI, but sets out to be a guide that helps parents with nurturing the character and creativity of their children in a world being reshaped by AI. Character and creativity are the keywords in that previous sentence - all through the book, De Marchis is concerned and informs readers on how to ensure these essential elements of the human soul are preserved and given the room to grow, whilst accepting that AI will be used. As he writes:
How do we preserve and nurture the uniquely human abilities in our children, when the technology around them keeps getting better at doing the thinking for them?
Although an advocate for technology, De Marchis explains he wrote this book to ensure that children continue to learn:
Once you outsource the challenge that makes you learn then you are screwed. The struggle that you have to do will enable you to learn and remember.
If you are trying to do some coding and it doesn't work and you do it again and it still doesn't work, but you keep doing it and then finally you understand what you had done wrong, and why it wasn't working, then you have learned.
CTO De Marchis, therefore, set out to write a title about critical thinking and creativity, when, as the book describes, 'AI can spit out ideas in the blink of an eye' and in that process ensure our children develop emotional intelligence. As he writes:
Accessibility opens the door to amazing learning moments, it also short-circuits one of the most valuable parts of learning, wrestling with uncertainty. When children rely on AI to provide confident, clean answers, they might miss the skill of questioning and comparing ideas.
Generative AI has made writing appear easy. The technology is able to spew out reams of passable prose, but there is so much more to the writing process than pouring words onto a page. The reason I chose to not only read De Marchis' book, but to also interview him was that like the children he is concerned for, the CTO has struggled and enjoyed the process of writing. Generative AI can produce words, but only a writer can demonstrate joy and frustration in each and every word.
Writing involves bringing your entire person to the piece, whether it is a history of interviewing hundreds of business technology leaders or your experiences as a parent and CTO to the page. De Marchis describes the challenge:
The first version was horrible, the way I wrote it was as a CTO, it was so stilted and tech-heavy.
His fiercest and most loyal critic, his wife, herself a teacher, told the CTO there were some really good ideas present, but he needed to start again. A hard lesson for any writer, but if you believe in the idea, the human in writing will persist. Two more editions hit the pages before De Marchis felt he had the book he wanted.
A novel approach within Raising Children in the Age of AI is the use of a group of fictional families. Each is different, but they all share a common challenge: helping their children make the most of AI, but also of their own talents. Having spent the bulk of his career in business-to-consumer organizations, De Marchis borrowed the personas model used by marketers to understand customers and their behaviours. He explains this enabled him to create families that any reader could recognize, or blend responses from the different family types and scenarios to suit their position.
Personas is, arguably, a methodology borrowed from the world of writing to help marketers achieve their business outcomes. During the writing process, De Marchis realized that creating fictional families and telling their story would enable the reader to really understand how to tackle the complexity of AI and family life. Storytelling has a long and illustrious history of enabling humans to understand the world. Kenneth Grahame penned the wonderful The Wind in the Willows to help his son navigate human relations; Jane Austen's titles continue to empower women, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath details the desolation families suffer at the hands of extreme weather, and George Orwell's depiction of tyranny is highly relevant today.
Writing is one of the few exercises where the author goes from pupil to teacher. Research teaches the concepts or motivations of a subject or person, then the writing process catalyzes that into a lesson that is engaging, tuned to the human ear of the audience and passes that knowledge on. For De Marchis, this meant researching and understanding child development and psychology, a learning journey the CTO describes as fascinating and enjoyable. These lessons shaped and reinforced his own view on technology and children, one of which he stresses in the book. Physical age is often used for when access should be given to a technology, but De Marchis' research revealed that parents must consider the mental maturity of the child rather than the age - he calls this the Digital Development Model. There are five stages to the model: exploration, guided use, supervised independence, mentored navigation and guided autonomy.
As he writes:
Rather than introducing technology just because it's available, we ask whether it genuinely supports development at that stage of a child's growth.
As the use of AI by individuals and organizations challenges and possibly devalues the very human act of writing, has De Marchis become a sceptic of this technology, or was it another tool in the writing process?
De Marchis comments:
It is important not to think that technology solves everything. If you use AI for outcomes only, then you will lose out, as you will not learn anything.
In the book, I used AI as a planning tool and a sparring partner because you are alone, and it can be handy to throw ideas at and see what comes back. The AI improved as I was writing the book.
Throughout our conversation and my reading of the book, it is clear that this CTO and author treasures the abilities of humans and technology. Like many of his peers, he believes it is important that children, parents, employees and leaders develop AI skills, because the challenge to jobs is going to be from those who can use the new tool effectively.
The debate surrounding AI is a sign of education and health in our society. At present, the dystopian or pro-AI hype surrounds the subject, but in the middle, I know from my involvement in the CIO and CTO community, there is a debate about how to harness this tool to benefit organizations (that is the job) and society.
Throughout history similarly impactful technologies have changed the shape of society with almost no debate - take the car for example, a really useful tool, but cars are over used and therefore one of the most prevalent killers in society, a menace to school children and the elderly as they insist on using pavements for parking, and one of the largest causes of pollution. Had society debated the rise of the car with the vigor we see towards AI, perhaps our society would be safer and cleaner.
To have a good debate requires educating ourselves and the generations that will follow us on how to use these tools in a manner that respects human nature. De Marchis has used his human abilities as a writer to pen a useful title in this journey to using AI as a tool for good. Raising Children in the Age of AI is available now.
