Ethical crisis and educational path for children in the AI era–centred on the importance of education for goodness

This paper adopts a child-centered approach to ethical education, employing case studies to examine children’s ethical dilemmas and solutions in the age of generative AI. In the Industry 2.0 era, children as ‘digital natives’ face cognitive challenges in distinguishing between virtual and real-world ethics. The imbalance between technological advancement and ethical education has led to cognitive disorientation and ethical confusion. These crises manifest in four forms: ‘children defined by rules, disordered children, children without privacy, and challenged children’. Fundamentally, the crisis reflects AI’s reinterpretation of human nature, the consequences of evolutionary laws, and the modern redefinition of traditional ‘human-object’ relationships. To address this, we propose three strategies: protecting childhood through AI-assisted exploration; integrating classical wisdom to establish human-machine collaboration; promoting human-machine integration while strengthening risk prevention through legislation and moral education. Ultimately, this aims to build a new human-machine ethics framework that achieves ‘technology for good’.