Co-authored by Brett Smith.
You wake to a gentle voice suggesting it’s time to get up and, with bleary eyes, scroll through outfit suggestions on your phone. Downstairs, breakfast is waiting. The same voice runs through your schedule and compliments your appearance. You grab lunch—already packed—and get into a self-driving car. As the car pulls out, your phone screen locks. “Now might be a good time to practice your meditation routine,” the voice says.
At work, this AI companion proposes a plan, checks on your mood, and encourages you to hydrate. Every time you run into a problem, you ask it for help. After lunch, sensing you’re tired, the AI suggests a nap. At 5 p.m., it congratulates you on a productive day and drives you home.
Soon, AI may guide us through life with remarkable efficiency, armed with expert knowledge and tireless attention. It won’t just assist us; it will take care of us.
In this future, we will lean on AI the way a child leans on a parent—for help managing choices, challenges, and daily routines. Now is the time to ask not only what kind of caregiver we are creating, but importantly, how we can, like children, remain curious, capable, and independent, rather than stuck in a state of arrested development.
The Effort Paradox
At first glance, there seems little downside to AI assistants making life easier. Like all organisms, humans avoid effort when possible. We hunt for a spot near the entrance to the supermarket, just to spare ourselves a short walk across the parking lot.
But we also seek out effort when it is not necessary. We climb mountains, tackle crossword puzzles, and practice instruments, even with no intention of joining a band. This puzzle—why we both dislike and value effort—is called the effort paradox.
When miscalibrated, the effort paradox can lead to undesirable outcomes. Learning and mastery require hard work, yet we are often drawn to shortcuts in school. Harvard physics students prefer passive lectures to active problem-solving in class even though they learn less in those settings.
Ironically, the harder we work to get something, the more we value it. This phenomenon is called the IKEA effect because it explains why we love the bookshelf we assembled ourselves and not the same one listed on Facebook Marketplace. The IKEA effect extends far beyond Scandinavian modernist furniture; it has been observed in children as young as 5, across cultures, and even in animals like rodents and grasshoppers. Effort itself can imbue tasks with meaning, even ones as mundane as counting symbols or naming colors.
If AI systems can remove friction from daily life—anticipating needs, solving problems, and completing tasks before we even try—we may opt out of the very struggles that help us grow and find meaning. To understand how we might avoid this fate, we turn to the architects of human motivation: caregivers.
Caregivers as Guides
Humans are unique among animals for how long, and how intensely, they rely on caregivers. Although babies are useless at survival, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik points out they are “distinctively adapted to learn.” This evolutionary trade-off—extended dependence in exchange for rich cognitive growth—fuels our species’ success.
Caregivers keep children safe, guide their attention, and pass on cultural knowledge, helping kids focus their effort. They also model how and when to try hard. My research shows that 1-year-olds who watch adults persist on hard tasks are more likely to persist themselves on new tasks. But caregivers walk a delicate line: supporting growth without stifling it.
Increasingly, parents are stepping over that line. Researchers have documented a rise in “overparenting,” where adults routinely take over developmentally appropriate tasks, like tying a first grader’s shoe or writing a high school senior’s college essay.
Though well-intentioned, these interventions can undermine motivation. We found that when adults intervene too quickly, preschoolers persist less in future challenges. When we take away their sense of autonomy and competence, children begin to avoid effort altogether.
Caregiving AI
New technologies have already extended the developmental phase of human life. Farming, industrialization, and globalization enable more people to pursue education, test startups, and wait longer to find partners and start families. But AI brings the possibility of a deeper shift: not just extending childhood, but stretching caregiving across our entire lives.
On one hand, this could be disastrous. Like a helicopter parent, AI could erode our fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and connection. Already, dating apps deploy AI as a matchmaker—suggesting partners, initiating conversations, even drafting flirty messages. For many, this is a welcome escape from the awkwardness of courtship. But the friction of a first date gets us below the surface of a user profile and more in touch with ourselves. Avoiding effort in dating might not only make us less interesting partners, but could also steer society toward a high-tech version of arranged marriage.
On the other hand, prolonged caregiving is what made our species unique in the first place, and AI could become a new kind of guide. Imagine the math student who asks, “When will I need this in real life?” An AI tutor could respond instantly with important context and examples, drawing on that student’s interests, background, or career goals. And when the same student hits a wall in their calculus homework, the tutor could offer just enough scaffolding to help them move forward, without taking over.
You might wonder, “Will we even need to learn calculus in a world where AI can do everything for us?” My husband and co-author, who teaches math at Yale, would happily debate that point. But here, we won’t argue what we should be learning in the future. As any parent knows, children find their own paths anyway. This is about the quality of the journey, which depends on the support we receive along the way.
What happens next won’t be decided by the power of technology alone. Our future depends on the relationship we build with these systems, and whether we can let them care for us without taking over. In this moment of AI’s infancy, we have to keep struggling, experimenting, and taking the long route because it is our own growth that gives life meaning.
