Valentina is a 14-year-old girl in ninth grade, living with her family in an urban area of Chile. Her main touchpoint with AI is Siri — she uses voice assistants for basic requests like checking the weather, and beyond that, she says she is not really aware of other intelligent robots existing in her daily world. What she lacks in exposure, she compensates for in pragmatism: her thinking about AI is grounded, specific, and notably free of either enthusiasm or alarm.
Everyday Life with a Voice in Her Pocket
For Valentina, AI is mostly a voice. Siri answers the small questions — weather, timers, reminders — and that is about as far as her regular contact with intelligent technology goes. She is not dismissive of what exists beyond that; she simply has not encountered it directly. Her framing of AI is practical from the start: these technologies are “made to make life easier… for everyone.” She cites prosthetic robotic hands as a clear example of AI doing real good — helping people who have lost limbs — alongside voice assistants as everyday aids. The logic is simple and consistent: if it helps, it has value.
A More Respectful Society by 2050
When Valentina imagines 2050, technology is not the first thing she reaches for. She pictures a society “with more values, and all that” — a place that is more respectful, more humane. The technological backdrop to that future is implied rather than described: she expects the world to have changed, but what she actually cares about is the quality of the people living in it. This is a pattern that runs through her whole interview — she evaluates AI not as a spectacle but as a means to a social end.
Where Robots Help — and Where They Can’t
Valentina is in favour of robots assisting with domestic tasks — cooking, cleaning, the routine work of running a home. She also supports AI in education: she points to the fact that standardised tests are already machine-graded and sees no reason that should change. For retail, she accepts robot store clerks, reasoning that the tasks are simple and the economics make sense for companies. In nursing homes, she sees particular promise — a robot that talks to elderly residents and keeps them company strikes her as genuinely useful.
Where she draws the line is childcare. Robots can prepare food and handle the basics, but she is clear that they “can’t detect things that humans can” and that strength calibration is a real risk — a machine that cannot measure its own force around a small child is a machine that does not belong in charge of one. In healthcare, she thinks robots are well-suited to diagnosis — processing large amounts of information quickly — but insists that human contact is essential for building the trust that medical care requires.
Learning to Live with Technology
Valentina believes schools should be teaching students how AI works, and she frames this not as an optional extra but as a necessity: “practically everything is electronic, so we need to know how they work.” She expects school itself to change as technology becomes more present, and she thinks that change will be positive — partly because she appreciates the objectivity robots could bring to education, reducing the kind of teacher bias that she sees as a real problem in classrooms today.
A Cautious Welcome
On the future of work, Valentina is realistic rather than optimistic. She expects intelligent technologies to displace workers and reduce the number of available jobs. Her preference is that robots take on the dangerous tasks — the ones where human error can be fatal — rather than the simple ones where people could easily continue. She does not express strong enthusiasm for more advanced AI development, nor particular concern about it. Her position is essentially neutral: she is neither eager to accelerate the future nor anxious about what it brings. For Valentina, the question is always the same — does it actually help?
