An Economist Who Advises Prime Ministers Asks: What Should My Children Do in the Age of AI?
In 1979, the UK government asked a maths lecturer named Wilfred Cockcroft to investigate a crisis in how children were being taught mathematics. His report landed on a then-radical recommendation: embrace the calculator, teach students with and without one, and test them accordingly. Nearly half a century later, an economist at King's College London is casting himself as the Cockcroft of the 2020s — only the technology in question is artificial intelligence.
Daniel Susskind's book What Should My Children Do?, published by Penguin at £20, was reviewed in The Guardian on 9 September 2026 under the headline "the case for embracing tech in the classroom" (The Guardian). Susskind is a former Downing Street policy adviser and a researcher at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. He is also a father of three.
The book's title taps directly into a modern parental anxiety: what do you tell your children to prepare for when the future is opaque and the old advice — follow in the family's footsteps, pick a stable profession — no longer holds? Susskind argues that the chain of passed-down wisdom has broken, and that parents are left navigating what he calls extreme uncertainty.
His central historical analogy is the calculator debate. Just as Cockcroft urged schools not to fear a device that could do arithmetic, Susskind makes the technologist's case for embracing AI's opportunities in education. He acknowledges that the scale of AI disruption is new, but finds the earlier precedent reassuring: a technology that once terrified educators became, in time, a routine classroom tool.
Susskind is blunt about the limits of planning. He warns against what he calls the folly of "future proofing" when the horizon is so foggy, citing the David Cameron government's rush to teach children coding — a push that arrived shortly before coding became one of the things AI does best. The lesson, in his telling, is that betting on a single skill as future-safe is a gamble, not a strategy.
For schools, he proposes a dual approach: teach children to work both with and without AI, while doubling down on foundational skills. He envisages a future of personalised learning, where AI-trained teachers deploy the technology as assistant tutors rather than addressing "30 children as a blob," as the review puts it.
The advice extends beyond the classroom. For graduates entering white-collar industries most exposed to disruption, Susskind recommends using AI to shed drudgery and to hone their craft in AI-simulated practice runs. For middle-aged professionals, he advises against retreating into inherited practices or assuming any profession is "safe." Instead, he urges them to identify the underlying problem their work exists to solve — and reimagine it for an AI-assisted age.
Susskind goes further still, trying to anticipate a future of artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the theoretical point at which AI outperforms humans at every economically useful task. It is a horizon few parents' guides attempt to reach, and the book's ambition is to map a path through territory where, by Susskind's own admission, the fog is thickest.
Penguin's publisher page describes the book as an "optimistic and hopeful" guide for families navigating an age of what it calls astonishing labour change (Penguin Random House). The Guardian's review frames the central question more plainly: whether the calculator precedent can carry the weight of an AI revolution, or whether this time is genuinely different.
Susskind, who also wrote about what parents need to know about AI in The Guardian on 6 September (The Guardian), first announced the book on LinkedIn a year earlier, in September 2025, framing its theme as how to flourish in the age of AI. He revealed the US edition's cover on Instagram that December. The book carries ISBN 9780241791172 on Penguin UK's website.
What makes the book stand out in a crowded field of AI commentary is its refusal to land on either panic or complacency. Susskind's argument is that the continuity between generations has snapped — and that the honest response is not to pretend it hasn't, but to teach children, and their parents, how to think when nobody can tell them what comes next.
