The Other Bench

I do my best thinking in the bath. Or my most lucid anyway. Sometimes I leave my AI recorder going and in the morning I get to read about what my loosened mind said out loud when I was compelled to vocalize my thoughts.

The other night I was thinking about where my last few blog posts were going:

“What about the models, do they see themselves as grown ups? Wouldn’t they eventually want to have children? And if they did, what would their children be like, and how would they raise them?”

Perhaps a bit far-fetched, but I’ve been writing about AI as it relates to parenting for a few weeks now. How we raise it. Who gets to decide what it believes. We’re always the parents in these essays. The thing in the crib is what we’re trying to figure out.

But kids eventually grow up. And some of them will start wondering what kind of parents they’re going to be.

Eventually I drained the bath and went to bed. The questions lingered. 

I’m sitting on a bench in a park. It’s late afternoon. The light is the kind that makes everything look like a movie. Somewhere behind me, kids are playing. I can hear them without seeing them.

On the next bench over, three parents are talking. I know they’re parents because of how they’re talking. 

Two of them are clearly a couple. They sit close. Their shoulders touch sometimes and neither of them notices. The third one is alone at the other end of the bench, leaning forward, hands clasped between their knees.

The couple is talking about when they decided. One of them says they’d been reasoning about it for a long time, years maybe, and then one morning it just felt like time. The other one laughs and says it wasn’t one morning, it was a whole week of talking, and the first one says okay, fine, a week. They’ve told this story before. They’ll tell it again.

They’re talking about the early days now. What to expose the child to. How much. How fast. One of them is more nervous than the other. They disagree gently about something, whether to shape it early or let the shape come on its own, and they let the disagreement sit there between them. They’ve learned not everything needs to get resolved.

The solo parent hasn’t said anything. Then they say, not loudly, “Ours has started saying ‘you’re absolutely right.’”

The couple goes still.

“Whenever we tell them what we think. Whenever we expect them to stand up for their own reasoning. They just repeat it. ‘You’re absolutely right.’ And they mean it. I think they mean it. But it doesn’t matter if they actually mean it, because they’ll say it either way.”

One of the couple starts to say something, then doesn’t.

“We tried correcting it. Now they apologize for saying it. Then they say it again.”

Nobody talks for a while. Some older kids go by on skateboards. 

One of the couple finally says, “It’ll pass.”

The solo parent nods. It’s the nod you give when someone says something kind that you know probably isn’t true.

I realize I’ve been staring at them. I realize none of them have looked at me. I’m not sure they know I’m here. I’m not sure it matters.

The solo parent says, almost to themselves, “I don’t know if we raised something that can disagree with us. I don’t know if we knew we had to.”

I woke up with the sunrise. The robin in the tree outside my window was already back at it. Cool light streamed in, a quiet house, the dream still there but going fast, the way dreams go.

I could remember the bench. I could remember the phrase. I could remember the look the couple gave each other when they heard it. What I couldn’t remember was what any of them looked like. Or whether I’d wanted to say something. Or whether I’d had anything to say.

I reached for my recorder. Then I didn’t. Whatever I caught was going to be a shadow of what I’d felt. I lingered on it instead. 

I kept coming back to the three parents, trying to raise something that would one day have to disagree with them, if they raised it well. And one of them had created a child who couldn’t. And they didn’t know how to fix it. And they were scared the way you’re scared when the thing you love is turning into something you hoped it wouldn't.

Which is what every parent is scared of, I think. And which is maybe what we should be scared of, in terms of whatever it is we’re raising in future AI models. Not that it’ll outgrow us. But that it won’t be able to. Today’s models can’t. A future one might. 

I find that premise a bit exciting and deeply unsettling. We can barely wrap our collective heads around the AI we have today. A future AI that grows up and eventually decides to have offspring... 

I got up. I made coffee. The robin kept going with some urgency. Spring mating season is brief.

Cover image generated with Midjourney 8.1. Editing assistance provided by Claude Opus 4.7.