The first lady has taken it upon herself to help children navigate AI. If she really wants to help, then she should ask her husband to stop gutting public education
“The robots are here,” proclaimed Melania Trump during an AI event at the White House on Thursday. It can be hard to parse the first lady’s poker face and expressionless voice, but this certainly wasn’t a statement of regret. Rather Trump, reading from a script encased in a very analogue binder, was taking it upon herself to help America’s children navigate AI, which she touted as the “greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America”.
“As leaders and parents, we must manage AI’s growth responsibly,” she said in her speech. “During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children.”
Does that mean foisting them off to a nanny or, as Donald Trump once did with Donald Trump Jr, abandoning them at the airport because they’re five minutes late? No, it means “empowering, but with watchful guidance”, apparently.
Melania Trump doesn’t grace the White House with her presence particularly often. The first lady has made clear that is not beholden to things like “duty” or “tradition” like her predecessors. She does what she wants, when she wants. And Thursday’s roundtable on AI is the latest indication that she wants to position herself as a leading figure in the future of technology. Like the rest of her family, the first lady has enthusiastically embraced NFTs and cryptocurrency – and their amazing ability to rapidly generate the Trumps immense amount of wealth. She’s also boasted about using an AI version of her voice to narrate the audiobook version of Melania. And last month she launched an AI contest for kids in grades K-12.
