Parenting & Family Quote by Kevin Kelly

Kelly’s parenting metaphor is a neat piece of rhetorical judo: it makes the most unnerving part of AI sound like the most familiar. “Raising a child” smuggles in patience, trial-and-error, and the expectation that unpredictability is not a bug but a developmental phase. That framing does real work. It nudges the reader away from the fantasy of perfectly specified, fully controllable machines and toward a world where we cultivate systems the way we cultivate people: by shaping tendencies rather than dictating every move.

The subtext is a quiet admission about limits. “We train the system to a certain range of behaviors” concedes that the range is bounded, probabilistic, and value-laden: “useful” to whom, and for what ends? The language of usefulness sounds pragmatic, even neutral, but it masks the politics of optimization. Training is governance by example, by reward, by constraint; it is also outsourcing, because once the system is “useful,” it can be deployed at scale with fewer humans in the loop.

Then comes the most loaded line: “we let it go.” That’s independence, but also abdication. The phrase “babysitting” casts oversight as petty drudgery, a cost center, a vibe-killer. It implies the real goal isn’t simply smarter tools, but tools that demand less responsibility. In the context of a tech culture that prizes autonomy and speed, Kelly is articulating a seductive bargain: accept some opacity and risk in exchange for systems that run without constant supervision. The metaphor is comforting. The reality it points to is consequential.