India, Oct. 19 -- When calculators arrived, some parents worried that children would stop learning arithmetic. Then, when the internet arrived, the worry became that no one would remember anything. Now it is AI: will my child still learn to think?

The world is turning AI-first, and it is reasonable to ask whether our children are ready. But, parents have been here before.

The calculator did not end arithmetic. The approach was to teach the maths first and the tool second. A child who understood numbers could use a calculator and tell when an answer looked wrong.

The internet taught a similar lesson. A result at the top of a search page was not necessarily correct, so children had to ask who had written the answers they got and whether ...