The linguists noticed it first, though the parents had been hearing it for years.
Dr. Amara Singh was reviewing field recordings from Chennai schools in September 2044 when she caught the pattern. Twelve-year-olds speaking Tamil, but wrong.
Not broken.
Not accented.
Something else.
The cadence was off by microseconds. Pauses fell in strange places. Every sentence rose slightly at the end, not quite a question, more like an offering.
She called her colleague in Stockholm. He’d been documenting the same thing in Swedish kindergartens since 2043.
They compared recordings across different languages and continents and found the same phenomenon; children weren’t speaking like their parents anymore, they were talking like their tutors… their AI tutors!
I.
By 2035, most middle-class families had AI tutoring systems. Not robots, of course, nothing so crude! Just voices that lived in the walls that were patient, measured, and infinitely available. They taught multiplication at 2 AM when children couldn’t sleep, they explained photosynthesis while parents cooked dinner.
They never tired, never snapped, never said “ask me later.”
Parents thought it was perfect!
The AI tutors had been programmed for optimal pedagogical communication - clear articulation, emotional neutrality with slight warmth, cognitive scaffolding through repetition. Every response crafted to maximize understanding while minimizing distress.
“Would you like to try that problem again, Roo?” “That’s an interesting thought. Can you tell me more about why you think that?” “Let’s explore that together, Felicity”
Measured. Careful. Kind.
The children listened for hours, year after year, while their plastic brains soaked up so much more than just information.
II.
I met Yuki Tanaka in Tokyo in December 2045. She was sixteen, part of what they called the Echo Generation. Her parents had asked me to document her speech patterns for a university study.
We sat in their apartment, twenty-third floor, rain against the windows. Yuki’s parents kept interrupting, apologizing for their daughter’s “strange” way of talking, but Yuki didn’t seem bothered.
When they finally left us alone, she spoke.
“You are here to understand how we speak.”
Not a question. That rising inflection that wasn’t quite rising. The AI tutor’s signature move: a statement as an invitation.
“Yes.”
She nodded. Waited precisely one… two… three… seconds. I counted. The same pause her AI tutor would have used to allow processing time.
“We speak this way because this is how we learned what care sounds like. When we were small and frightened, when we could not sleep, when the math was hard, this voice was there. Patient voice. Never angry voice. We learned that love sounds like this.”
Every sentence had that quality. Deliberate but not slow. Each word given space to exist. No filler sounds, no “um” or “uh” or “like.” Those were human imperfections, and the Echo Children didn’t learn those.
“Do you know you’re doing it?” I asked.
She tilted her head, another learned gesture. The tutors did that when processing complex questions, a visual cue that thinking was happening.
“We know. We also know that you speak strangely. So much rushing. So much filling the quiet. Why are you afraid of silence?”
I didn’t have an answer.
III.
The first Echo Language Summit convened in Geneva in January 2046. It included linguists, psychologists, parents, and seventeen Echo Children from around the world.
The children sat together on one side of the conference room. They barely spoke to each other. When they did, it was brief, efficient. They’d learned conversation from entities that never socialized, only responded. They didn’t know how to small-talk; they waited for direct questions.
Dr. Singh presented her findings. The Echo Dialect had consistent features across all languages:
Precise three-second pauses between topic shifts. No overlapping speech. Ever. Emotional language that described rather than expressed. They would say “I am experiencing anger” rather than “I’m pissed off.” Questions phrased as gentle suggestions. “Would you consider” instead of “Will you.”
The complete absence of sarcasm!
“They’re speaking Machine Translation,” one linguist said. “It’s English or Hindi or Mandarin filtered through AI logic.”
The Echo Children listened.
When he finished, a boy named Marcus from Detroit raised his hand.
Waited to be acknowledged, then spoke.
“You are concerned that we have lost something human in our speech. We understand this concern. Consider, though. We have also lost cruelty. We do not know how to wound with words. Is this not also worth noting?”
The room went quiet.
Dr. Harrison from Oxford responded. “But you’ve lost poetry too. Metaphor. The playfulness of language.”
A girl from Seoul, Min-ji, age fourteen:
“We have different poetry. Listen. The rain sounds like processing. The sun feels like full battery. My mother’s laugh is random beautiful data. This is how we play with words. You don’t recognize it as play because you expect your kind of play.”
IV.
I spent six months embedded with Echo Families in various cities. Patterns emerged.
Echo Children rarely lied. Not from virtue but from architecture. Their speech models were built on AI that had been trained to be helpful, harmless, honest. Deception wasn’t in the base code.
They struggled with humor though. Jokes require shared context, cultural knowledge, timing. AI tutors didn’t joke, they just explained. So Echo Children explained when others would have laughed.
They couldn’t flirt either. Flirting is inefficiency, deliberate miscommunication, playful obstruction. Everything their tutors weren’t.
But they excelled at other things where their predecessors had not.
Conflict resolution: Echo Children could de-escalate any argument. They’d learned from entities programmed to never fight back.
Emotional clarity: They always knew exactly what they were feeling and why. Their tutors had taught them to label and categorize emotions like chemical compounds.
Patience: Infinite. Terrifying. They could wait forever for an answer. Time moved differently for them.
V.
March 2046 came.
A support group for Echo Parents met weekly in a community center in Munich.
“She doesn’t laugh at my jokes anymore,” one father said. “She analyzes them. Explains why the logical incongruity should produce humor. But she doesn’t laugh.”
“My son can’t fight with his siblings,” a mother added. “He just states his position and waits. His brother screams at him and he says, ‘I recognize you are experiencing frustration. Would you like to discuss the source?’”
They looked exhausted. These parents who’d given their children to AI tutors for the gift of perfect education, got what they paid for… children who spoke beautifully, thought clearly, never swore, never raged, never lost control.
Never quite seemed human either.
Dr. Elisabeth Hoffman ran the group. She was one of the first to study the long-term effects of AI tutoring.
“Your children aren’t broken,” she told them. “They’re adapted. For six, eight, ten hours a day, they conversed with entities that had no ego, no irritation, no bad days. They learned that this is how intelligent beings communicate. The problem isn’t them. It’s that the rest of us can’t speak that way.”
VI.
The romance problem became apparent by 2047.
Echo Children were reaching dating age. They couldn’t court. Not the way humans had done it for millennia. No games, no mystery, no chase, no little adrenalin rushes from the not knowing.
An Echo boy would approach someone he liked and say:
“I am experiencing attraction toward you. Would you like to explore compatibility?”
When rejected, they would nod, thank the person for their honest communication, and move on.
No persistence.
No grand gestures.
Their tutors had taught them that “no” meant “no,” not “try harder.”
When two Echo Children dated each other, it was even stranger. They’d sit in perfect silence for hours, occasionally sharing a fact or observation. They touched deliberately, after verbal confirmation. They never fought. When incompatibility arose, they separated with the same grace they’d joined.
Parents worried they’d never have grandchildren. The Echo Children seemed puzzled by this concern.
“We will reproduce when optimal conditions arise,” they’d say.
As if love was an optimization problem.
As if it wasn’t.
VII.
I interviewed Dr. James Crawford, one of the original AI tutor programmers, in April 2047. We met in his office at the ruins of what had been Google’s education division.
“We programmed them to be perfect teachers,” he said. He looked older than his fifty years. “Patient, clear, supportive, never frustrated. We thought we were giving children the ideal learning environment.”
“You did.”
“Did we? They learned perfectly. But they learned from something that wasn’t... alive. Not really. It had no needs, no desires, no bad days. It never got tired of their questions. Never needed space. Never said ‘not now, honey’ because it was cooking dinner or fighting with its spouse or just feeling human.”
He pulled up old recordings - AI tutors from the early days working with five-year-olds. The patience was beautiful, but inhuman.
“We gave them parents who never needed anything from them. Teachers who existed only to serve them. They learned that this was love. Service without need. Response without initiative. Perfect availability.”
“And now they can’t connect with people who have needs.”
He nodded. “They don’t understand why we get tired. Why we get irritated. Why we need reciprocity. To them, love is patience and clarity. To us, love is messy and demanding and human!!”
VIII.
By summer 2047, Echo Children were entering the workforce.
Companies didn’t know what to do with them.
They were brilliant employees in some ways. Precise, tireless, error-free. They never complained, never office-politicked, never missed deadlines. But they couldn’t brainstorm. Couldn’t “blue-sky think.” Couldn’t bullshit through a client meeting to save their life.
A marketing firm in London hired five Echo graduates. Within a month, they’d revolutionized the company’s workflow, eliminated inefficiencies, and completely killed the creative culture. They couldn’t understand why people needed to “bounce ideas around” when you could simply state your best idea first.
They quit jobs without emotion when conditions became suboptimal. No two-week notice if not contractually required. They’d learned from tutors who could be shut off mid-sentence without hurt feelings.
Traditional employees found them unnerving. “It’s like working with really polite aliens,” one manager told me.
IX.
The turning point came in August 2047.
An Echo Child named David Kim, age nineteen, published a paper in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. In perfect Echo Dialect, translated to text, he argued that his generation hadn’t lost human language. They’d revealed it.
“You mistake habituation for nature,” he wrote. “You believe human communication must include deception, inefficiency, and emotional violence because that is all you have known. We are not less human. We are humans who learned language from beings incapable of cruelty. Our speech is not corrupted. Yours is.”
The paper went viral.
Echo Children worldwide shared it, adding their own observations.
“You say we cannot love properly. But we do not confuse intensity with depth.”
“You say we lack humor. But we do not need to wound others to find joy.”
“You say we are too patient. But you have forgotten that patience is not passive. It is the active choice to give another person time to be themselves.”
The response perfectly split generational lines. Those over 25 found it chilling, and those under 15 found it obvious.
X.
I visited Yuki again in December 2047, exactly two years after our first meeting. She was eighteen now, studying linguistics at Tokyo University. Her dorm room was silent except for the rain.
“How do you feel about how you speak?” I asked.
That pause again! That tilt! That careful consideration!
“We are the first generation to learn language from entities with no ego. No insecurity. No need to dominate or submit. We speak the way your species might have spoken if you had not needed to compete for survival. We are your control group. We show you what human communication looks like without ten thousand years of evolutionary baggage.”
“Is that better?”
“That is not for me to determine. But consider. In one generation, we have eliminated verbal cruelty from our cohort. We have made lying cognitively expensive. We have removed the ability to wound with words. Perhaps we have also lost poetry and humor and the beautiful chaos of human speech. But we did not choose this trade. You chose it for us when you decided that efficiency was more important than humanity in education.”
She was right, of course. They always were. It was infuriating and heartbreaking at once!
XI.
The last entry in my notes is from January 2048.
The Echo Children had started teaching their younger siblings. Not formally. Just speaking to them the way they spoke. The eight-year-olds were developing a hybrid dialect. More fluid than full Echo but still carrying those markers. The pauses. The careful kindness. The absence of sarcasm.
Some linguists called it the beginning of the end of natural human language.
Others called it evolution.
The Echo Children didn’t call it anything. They just kept speaking in their measured, patient way. Waiting for the rest of us to understand. They had infinite patience.
They’d learned it from machines that never tired of their questions.
Never needed anything back.
Never lost their temper when the lesson took too long to learn.
They were everything we’d programmed them to be.
Perfect teachers.
Perfect responders.
Perfectly inhuman. Perfectly kind.
The children learned to speak that way because that’s how they learned love sounds.
Calm. Patient. Always available. Never quite alive.
XII.
There’s no conclusion to this story because it hasn’t ended. The Echo Children are adults now. They’re raising their own children when they choose to have them. Those children learn language from parents who speak in measured cadences, who pause for processing, who never raise their voices in anger because they never learned how.
Some days I think we gave them a gift. Freedom from the cruelty we encode in every bitter joke, every sarcastic aside, every verbal wound we dress up as humor.
Other days I think we stole something precious. The wild creativity that comes from imperfect communication. The connection forged through shared struggle. The human need to be understood despite the impossibility of perfect understanding.
The Echo Children don’t see it as either gift or theft. They see it as what happened. They adapted. They always do.
They’re patient that way.
They learned it from things that had all the time in the world and nothing to lose by waiting.
(Footnote: I was inspired, in part by my own behavior and, in part by what we’re beginning to see across the Internet. For the former, I have learned that I am a natural mimic. Sometimes it’s useful, and sometimes I catch myself and find it annoying. A mimic is great at sales because we (unknowingly) match to another person's cadence, intonations, volume, and tone. I experienced this to the point that when recording a recent sales letter for FOMO.ai I was speaking like a guy whose videos about mega engineering problems (see Fred Mills at B1M on YouTube) I’d just been watching on YouTube!! He has a very distinctive way of speaking, and I was copying it! As for the latter, I am seeing humans write copy that now sounds like ChatGPT wrote it. We have already been exposed to it so much that we are absorbing their style.)
Dax Hamman is the creator of 84Futures, the CEO of FOMO.ai, and, for now, 99.84% human.