AI Made Answers Cheap. Here's Why Daydreaming Just Got More Valuable

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, recently said something counterintuitive to a room full of parents: don't be so quick to decide what counts as your kid wasting time. He bothered to say it because every adult knows that itch. You watch a child stare into space, fold a piece of paper, tell themselves a story out loud, and a voice in your head says, shouldn't they be doing something "meaningful"? The man is qualified to say it. In his younger years he spent ages on things that looked pointless: playing chess, writing games, reading neuroscience. Later all of it tangled together and became AlphaGo, became AlphaFold, became the path that led, years on, to a Nobel Prize. If someone had talked him at twenty into doing "something more useful," the world might not have any of those things today. Drop that line into the world we live in now, where AI is everywhere, and it suddenly carries more weight. The logic isn't hard. AI means the next generation no longer has to wear themselves out thinking: hand the question to AI, get the answer from AI, even a short reflection AI can squeeze out for you. On the surface, more efficient, more output. What gets lost is that thing where you puzzle over something for ages, get nowhere, and then a week later it suddenly clicks. That kind of thing looks like the biggest waste of all: you chew on it for three days only to arrive at a conclusion someone else could have told you in five minutes. But the reason you're willing to go think through a fourth problem, a fifth, a sixth, is precisely that those first three days built the muscle. Put another way: AI made the "answer" cheap. But growing a person who can ask good questions, that process didn't get cheaper. It got more expensive. The people most likely to trip over this are the ones raising kids. You see a child spacing out, you reflexively open up an AI to have it teach them some English, lay out a study plan, solve a math problem, and your mind settles. Hassabis is pointing at exactly this spot: how do you know this isn't the moment they're building the muscle? Next time you catch your child (or yourself) in that state with nothing to show for it, looking like idle drifting, don't rush to fill it with a task. Give that blank stretch a little time and see what grows out of it. Don't be quick to decide for them, and don't be quick to decide for yourself. Sometimes wasting time is the real work.