I grew up in Italy
I grew up in Italy. I live in the US now. Same human problem, two opposite answers, and I've watched both up close.
In Italy, wine isn't forbidden fruit. It's on the table at lunch, poured by your grandmother, part of how a meal works. Kids see it early. They learn what a glass is for, when to stop, what too much looks like on the face of an uncle who had too much. Nobody hides it, so nobody has to sneak it. The result is a culture that drinks without the frantic, binge-it-all-before-curfew energy you find elsewhere.
The US went the other way. Lock it up, fence it off, slap an age and a warning on it, treat the whole subject as dangerous. Fear became the teacher. And fear taught people to drink in basements, to rebel, to treat alcohol as a thing you conquer rather than a thing you handle.
I see the same fork in the road with AI right now.
One camp wants to protect everyone, especially young people, by bolting on every guardrail imaginable and assuming nobody can be trusted with the real thing. I understand the instinct. But you don't build judgment in someone by keeping the world away from them forever. You build a blind spot. You raise a generation fluent in nothing, dropped into a world where the technology is already everywhere.
I'd rather we did with AI what Italians did with wine. Show it. Explain it. Let people use it with their eyes open.
I use AI every day, for learning, for work, for thinking out loud when I'm stuck. I tell people to do the same, with one rule running underneath all of it: check what it gives you. Know where it breaks. Treat it as a tool that sharpens your thinking, never one that replaces it.
We don't have to treat adults like children indefinitely. We have to teach them to handle something powerful.
The people, the companies, and the countries that take that bet will pull ahead. The ones who wall everything off out of fear will spend the next decade catching up.