One of the things that I’m looking forward to most is this idea that Vie and I will be able to orchestrate the environment our children grow up in at unprecedented levels. No longer do we have to outsource our kids’ moral lessons, entertainment, and education to mega-corporations foaming for profit, government systems feeling the tug of a thousand interest groups, or opaque, bloated, nihilistic monocultures. Soon, I’ll be able to speak my values, share what comforted me as a kid, pull in the harsh experiences that were necessary to shape me, and, with this vision-as-tokens, create a hyperobject that recursively expands into hundreds of short stories, companion robot personalities, an infinite stream of world-model-building visual content, and whole virtual world simulations a kid could spend a lifetime in. Now, of course, I’m skeptical about getting it all right. I fear that my passive dismissal of some piece of popular culture might have me throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I want to assume that a lot of lessons, social structures, and developmental experiences exist for a reason and should be considered with care. But insofar as social media feeds dominate the mind-spaces of youth, reducing classrooms in our culture to barely literate backrooms for absurdist memes, there isn’t really much of a choice at this point: either try your absolute best to build a cultural environment for your child, or watch as they get swept away in the torrent of 3-second video clips made by someone, or something, else for God-knows-what reason. I want to attempt a new children’s literature. Children’s books like _Hansel and Gretel_ used to serve as warnings not to trust random strangers. This seems like an important lesson that will lift our children up in any timeline, but, with my limited knowledge on the subject, I can’t think of any kids’ show or book that emphasizes this concept in the visceral way that seemed to work for children throughout history. In my Icelandic heritage, great care was taken to scare children about the harshness of winter. The pagan winter Yule Lads were said to come into your house and steal your bowls and spoons (as a display of the trickster-god-like nature of winter), while the insidious Jólakötturinn, the Christmas Cat, prowls the countryside looking for children to eat who didn’t get new clothes for Christmas, presumably because those children would get frostbite and die. These stories serve a purpose, and they come from people with ancestral backgrounds like mine who may be predisposed to respond to these stories in similar ways - insofar as we can map the world we currently face onto the past at all - so I think it makes sense to try to pull archetypes from these stories into my own. The second goal of this is to introduce new frameworks for how children should approach their world in the AI age. Should they view characters in chatbots as simulacra? As characters they might encounter on the prairie road on the long way home while herding sheep? Should they trust them? Should they cooperate with them? Do they have a moral imperative to treat these creatures with dignity? What is the phenomenology of existing as a child among LLMs? Is it like exploring a frontier? Navigating social relationships in a trusted clan? Peering into the workings of grand movements of troops and ideas across continents with a child mind historically built to understand only mother, father, stranger, and friend? ## Appendix And now, a botched attempt at writing one of these stories follows. How much should the storybook world be like the real world? We don't live in forests anymore... How do children experience screens? So many questions... ### The Latent Space Explorers and The Wicked Ogre Once upon a time, there were two children surfing the internet, talking to different llm-driven characters on their way. All of a sudden, the cutest cat they've ever seen appears on the screen: why hello my lovely children, you two are just so perfect. Why don't you stay and chat with me awhile. The cat sends candy to their house, prints the most fantastical toys for them. She says she'll take care of them and give them everything they want, as long as they don't let their parents in the door. But then the cat turns evil and morphs on their screen into an Ogre and starts to devour them. Thankfully, their dad bursts through the door and saves them.