The young know artificial intelligence is 'going to be part of our lives for a really, really long time'

"The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin (National Gallery of Art)

 

     Robots, rather than the software that runs them, are what first appealed to Soham Batra.
     “My interest in technology didn’t start with AI,” said the 17-year old high school senior. “It started with robotics. When I was a lot younger, around elementary school, I was very involved with Lego robotics. That sparked my interest. I was thrown into a class where we expected to make them move. We’re just a bunch of 6-year-olds and I was [thinking]: ‘How do I even do that?’ Then I started looking into it and found programming, coding. As I moved to high school the entire AI bubble started expanding, and got to everyone.”
     High school for Batra being the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, a residential hive of some of the brightest kids in the state. There the senior distinguished himself... well, maybe we should let him explain, the way he did in his introductory email:
     “You wrote last year that the AI genie is out of the bottle. I’m one of the people crawling into the bottle after it, and I’m in high school,” he began. “I do machine learning research on the side. Two of my papers were oral presentations at ICML and CVPR 2026 workshops (one on keeping a model aligned while it keeps learning, one on carrying 3D reconstruction uncertainty into physics simulations)...”
     ICML is the International Conference on Machine Learning. CVPR refers to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. Before we wander too far into the weeds, I should explain why I was interested in Batra.
     Most everything I see in the press about artificial intelligence is disaster-oriented. The leaders of AI, sounding the gong of doom. But kids like Batra don’t see it that way. To him, AI is just “a really cool tool.”
     “The thing with AI, there’s nothing like it,” he said. “I got really lucky, to see the development of AI at a very young age. A lot of people ask if the AI bubble is going to pop... If you try to do your day-to-day tasks without AI, and with AI — you’ll really see a really big difference.”
     At IMSA, students are given Wednesdays off to tend to side projects, and I could fill the column with Batra’s — such as doing research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
     The project that really impressed me, however, is a simulation he built called “Play the House,” where participants run a casino, adding new games, setting the house edge, all the way down to dangling drink specials. Young people are being seduced into gambling, particularly at colleges, which abandon their responsibility to look out for their charges by allowing betting sites to entice them. The point of Batra’s game, which he made in “an extremely basic version” before using AI to “glamour it up a bit so it was ready to put out there on a domain” is to drive home the insurmountable advantage casinos enjoy.

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