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Forbes
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
A Case For Competitive Kids
Lindsey Witmer Collins is the Founder and CEO of WLCM App Studio, an award-winning software design and development agency. As my children grow older, I'm seeing how innocuous play turns into innocent competition. A race to the car, or to see who can get their shoes on fastest. On the playground, kids make up games in which the rules are unclear, unestablished and spawned mid-play. 'She broke the rules!' 'He cheated!' 'That's not fair!' Fairness. Rules. What a concept. For a child, what's unfair is that he or she has to lose. Many adults hold this view, too, and are prone to the same habits when they do—they change the rules in their favor, throw tantrums when they don't get their way. Our economy and many aspects of our lives depend on healthy, fair competition. We compete fueled by a desire to win, with the understanding that in the pursuit, win or lose, we become better. Competition provides traction for improvement, but it doesn't work to our benefit without fairness. Competition: A Sounding Board For The Self David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest takes place at an elite tennis academy for children. The author, a former standout junior tennis player, writes sublimely about the sport and the nature of competition: 'Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.' The game, the opponent, exist to provide an occasion by which to test, judge and improve yourself. That's why a close game is always more fun to watch than a blowout, because it occasions a true test. Without fairness, the test (and winning) becomes meaningless—and for the rest of us, a huge bummer. Cheating, thwarting that delicious competition, ruins the whole point for athletes and spectators alike. This holds true outside of sports. Building a company or a product, honing your expertise and skills, we train and compete, if only with ourselves. It takes work but also a degree of good faith and vulnerability. No one will be good at everything. But we all strive to be excellent at something. We put ourselves on the altar of the work and let the chips fall where they may. This is what it is to become excellent. This is what playing fair requires. This is what we are trying to incentivize in our children. Are We All Cheating Now? The type of good faith and vulnerability implicit in true, glorious competition can seem a snide punchline these days. A new AI startup, Cluely, promises to help users 'cheat on everything.' Maybe you saw Cluely's promotional video where its founder goes on a date and uses AI to analyze and respond to his date's conversation points in ways that she'll find most appealing. From his work history to knowledge of art, and even his age, he lies. In June, a livestream of UCLA's graduation paused on a graduate who gloated for the camera about ChatGPT ostensibly doing his final exams for him. How depressing. He and so many other college kids using AI as a crutch will never know what they're capable of. Our society glorifies those who game the system over those who master their craft. Look no further than our 'art of the deal' president, who, according to a 2018 USA Today article, stiffs his contracted workers. Where does that lead us? We've already seen the collateral damage. Perhaps the 2008 financial crisis is the most obvious example, in which junk loans were packaged with prime loans, creating risk (and later disaster) throughout the global financial ecosystem. Even lesser-scale incidents like the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and the Volkswagen emissions scandal erode trust in the institutions that help make our society possible and push it forward. Raising Competitive Children As a kid, the label of 'competitive' was lobbed at me as a criticism. It didn't matter if it was sports or board games, I was competitive. I tried to deny it, I even tried to not be it, but I earned the label and couldn't escape it. As an adult and parent, I no longer deny being competitive, and I encourage it in my kids. Because what 'competitive' really means is this: being intense, determined and dialed in. Giving it your all and becoming better in the process. We practice and achieve excellence through competition but only the fair kind. We hope that children who cheat do not become adults who cheat. We hope that in childhood, they practice, over and over, having the temptation to lie, shortcut, diminish others and change the rules—and not do it. We hope that in life, their belief in the critical value of fairness supersedes their desire to win. We hope they celebrate the excellence of others. In the process, they'll become excellent themselves. Gen Alpha needs and deserves adults who model these values, not to mention lots of races to the car. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Forbes
20-06-2025
- Forbes
Looking Under The Hood At The AI Education Task Force
Lindsey Witmer Collins is the Founder and CEO of WLCM App Studio, an award-winning software design and development agency. In April, a presidential directive ordered the creation of an Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force for the purposes of promoting AI literacy and proficiency in grades K-12. The policy includes 'comprehensive AI training for educators and fostering early exposure to AI concepts to develop an AI-ready workforce and the next generation of American AI innovators.' I'm an AI believer working in the development space. I constantly think, talk and write about how AI can improve products, streamline work and generally make life better. Yet I fear the tail is wagging the dog here, and I'm skeptical of this administration's attitude and intentions when it comes to education. Breaking Down The Initiative I find myself asking, 'For what?' Recall Steve Jobs's caution against prioritizing process over content: What you are doing is far more important than how you're doing it. AI is a how tool. The outcomes mentioned in this initiative are a bit slippery. It says nothing about improving literacy rates or fostering interest in STEM or whatever. What I get out of it is 'using AI to use AI better.' The imaginations of children do not need a technological intermediary to fulfill their potential. If you've ever seen children play or draw or build, the last thing you've thought is, 'AI could make this better.' I would argue that concepts of 'optimization' and 'efficiency' have no place in the realm of imagination. As far as critical thinking goes, writing is thinking. On this point, I suspect we've gone too far in analogizing AI's functions to human functions. LLMs don't 'think.' They tokenize language. They break down a phrase, feed it into a statistical model and regurgitate a series of words most likely to correlate with an appropriate response. These outputs aren't 'thoughts.' In humans, language is an extension of feelings, instincts, associations, ideas, knowledge, history. It is the vehicle that allows us to express what's inside us. The highest aim of education is to cultivate this interior soil. To inspire thinking and curiosity by exposing kids to new ideas, allowing them to grow toward their interests, like the stem of a vine follows the sun across a room. Writing is the mechanism that allows this pursuit. The best way to build critical thinkers is to engage in unassisted writing. The exercise of writing is to think about your own thinking, to put ideas into form and interrogate them. To follow the path of thought all the way to its essence, its truth. Your truth. Writing is necessary work, necessary friction. By doing it for them, AI robs children of the joy and the work of their imagination. This undermines the AI project, too. You can't have AI literacy without having regular literacy first. The president himself calls the Department of Education 'a big con job.' I'm skeptical of this task force being a good-faith move. For an education initiative, shouldn't someone specializing in education be leading it? Ironically, Education Secretary Linda McMahon does not have a background in education. She is the ex-wife and business partner of former WWE CEO Vince McMahon (Hulk Hogan voice: 'That's right brother!'). Again, tail wagging dog, I fear: The education system assisting the AI cause rather than AI assisting the educational cause. The directive makes space for 'public-private partnerships' to develop educational resources. Is it cynical to interpret this whole initiative as a way to funnel public money into AI companies? That's quite fast. When we talk about 'moving fast and breaking things' in the context of education, what or whom is being broken? There's no good answer. While AI has hugely reduced hallucinations, it's still not perfect. To deploy AI in our nation's classrooms, I'd expect the error rate to be the same as that of airplanes, or my car cranking when I turn the key. I'm down for this. Teachers are strapped for time, spending hours after the final bell grading the day's work, preparing the next day's lesson, attending staff meetings, communicating with parents, etc. Note that teachers already know how to do their jobs, and they learned without AI. This makes them well-equipped to use and apply AI to the areas where it can help them most. This truth applies to all jobs. I worry that AI will come with enterprise metrics of speed, efficiency and ROI. Obviously, we must have goals and outcomes, but we can't lose sight of what we're doing: empowering teachers to do more of what matters most. I hope AI isn't used on the grounds of culling teaching staff, increasing class sizes and generally exacerbating the problems teachers already struggle with. First Things First AI holds so much promise, but as miraculous as it is, it can't match the miracle of our inborn human machinery. Our imagination, our determination, our experiences and perspectives. Sure, AI can make things run smoother, faster and propel us to new destinations. But AI can't take the wheel. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
