Since the start of the year, I’ve run several AI workshops for Year 6 pupils, including one five-week progression.

At the start of the workshops - before we built anything, before we trained models or tested tools - I asked one simple question:

“When you think about AI, do you feel more excited or more worried?”

Almost 70% said they felt more worried.

When I delve into this further, it’s not that they are uncertain. Not cautiously curious.

They are scared.

• “There won’t be any jobs.”

• “AI will take over.”

• “Humans won’t be needed.”

• “It could end the world.”

These are 10 and 11-year-olds.

That should give us a pause for thought.

Where Is this fear coming from?

Children are not analysing labour market forecasts. They are not reading policy papers on automation and robotics. They are not listening to endless AI podcasts (like the author of this blog!).

They are absorbing tone.

They hear snippets of adult conversations. They see headlines about job losses. They hear phrases like “AI takeover.”

They get told in class that they can’t use AI as they are too young and it’s dangerous.

Even children’s news platforms, such as Newsround - which tend to present AI in a measured and balanced way - still reflect the wider uncertainty in society.

And uncertainty is contagious.

Psychologists describe something called negativity bias - our tendency to focus more strongly on potential threats than potential opportunities. It’s evolutionary. It helped our ancestors survive.

But when the “threat” is abstract - algorithms, automation, artificial intelligence - it becomes harder to understand, especially for a child, and harder to challenge.

So it becomes something to fear.

And fear spreads faster than understanding. [Just look at current politics around the world!]

It felt uncomfortably familiar

Their concerns reminded me of being in primary school during the latter part of the Cold War.

I remember chatting with friends what we would do if a nuclear bomb fell on London. The fear felt distant but real; shaped less by facts and more by atmosphere.

Children are incredibly perceptive. They absorb the emotional climate around them long before they fully understand it.

The difference now is the pace of change and, importantly, the inevitably.

AI isn’t a slow, theoretical shift. It’s visible. It’s accessible. It’s in homes and their classrooms already.

It is no longer a debate about whether it will shape the world.

It already is and, most certainly, will continue to do so.

A moment that made me reflect

During one session where, as a class, we had created a new Harry Potter-style book, a teaching assistant - understandably voicing their own genuine concern - commented firmly about AI replacing jobs and entire careers disappearing. “AI shouldn’t be allowed to create book covers. What happens to all the illustrators?”

Those concerns are not irrational. But in that moment, I realised something important:

Adult anxieties can quickly become children’s certainties.

So, I felt compelled to provide a contra viewpoint.

We discussed the Industrial Revolution (generally not taught until KS3). In the early 1800s, groups of textile workers destroyed machinery in protest at how industrialisation threatened their livelihoods.

They were not foolish. They were responding to real disruption and, certainly, some roles did disappear.

But new industries emerged and new professions were created.  Entire sectors developed that had previously been unimaginable.

Technological transformation has always been disruptive.

But history rarely ends where fear predicts it will.

The real risk isn’t AI - It’s powerlessness

I am broadly positive about AI. Excited, even.

But I am also realistic and can have days when I feel impending doom and worry about my daughter’s future.

The next five to ten years are likely to be uncomfortable. AI advances are now moving exponentially faster than Government policy and large institutions generally react slowly and in a considered fashion.

With the current, incredible technological breakthroughs, happening so quickly, being reactive may well not be sufficient.

But if children already believe their future is already bleak before they have even chosen their GCSE options, before they even have left Primary School, we have to ask:

Are we helping them feel capable - or helpless?

There is a significant difference between explaining risk and amplifying inevitability.

This isn’t about blind optimism and pretending AI carries no risk. It does. But nor is it about retreat and burying our heads in the sand.

When children begin to understand how AI systems actually work - when they build simple models, test their limits, and see their flaws - something shifts.

The unknown becomes knowable. And knowable things are far less frightening.

If the dominant message children absorb is that technology will make them obsolete, it is hardly surprising that the excitement most of us would like primary children to have about their futures, gives way to anxiety.

Anxiety added to an already quite anxious generation.

The real danger may not be artificial intelligence itself.

It may be a generation growing up believing they have no control or agency within it.

In Part 3 of this series, I want to explore a natural next question:

Are we truly preparing children for the age of AI — or are we instinctively trying to protect them from it?

And could those two approaches lead to very different futures?