Happy Father’s Day (real father in an AI world)
I have spent quite a bit of my professional life thinking about human capital. What does it actually take to develop people, build capability, and create the conditions in which talent can grow into something meaningful and lasting? When I organized free IT career seminars, mentored young professionals, advocated for women in technology, I have consistently argued that the human dimension of development is the one that matters most. Technology alone does not create progress. People do.
It took me longer than it should have to connect that conviction to fatherhood. Not because the connection is subtle. It is not. But because, like many men, even though I have always believed that life is about growth and fulfillment in our personal and professional lives, I kept those worlds separate. The professional and the personal. The public and the private. The mentor and the father. Was that a mistake? For a real father in an AI world?
Progress over Perfection
What I understand now is that they are the same work. The principles we apply when mentoring a young professional trying to make sense of the technology world are not different in kind from what a father applies when raising a child trying to make sense of the world. Presence. Honesty. The willingness to say, “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” or “I got that wrong.” The patience to guide rather than command. The understanding that genuine development cannot be rushed, packaged, or treated as a ‘copy-paste’ exercise.
In ICT mentoring, one of the most persistent problems we encounter is what I call the “silver bullet” mentality. The search, the desire, for the one programme, the one certification, the one contact that would solve all career problems at once. People want guarantees. They wanted formulas. They did not want to hear that growth that is sustainable is slow, nonlinear, and deeply personal. This was one of the primary reasons for running the free IT career seminars. In a way, fatherhood has exactly the same problem. We want a manual. We want a method. We want someone to tell us that if we do these specific things in this specific order, our children will turn out well.
There is no such manual. There never was. Reality is much messier.
Attention is the Superpower of the Real Father in an AI world
What matters instead is presence. Your attention is the most powerful gift you have as a father. It is more powerful than any resource you can provide, any school you can afford, any device you can purchase. One of the greatest obstacles to career development is not a lack of intelligence but a lack of information and guidance from someone who is genuinely present. Someone who notices what you struggle with, who secretly knows your strengths without asking, and who recognizes your silent anxieties or upsets even when you smile.
The same is true in a home. A child with access to the internet but no father or responsible adult, actively guiding them through it is not a digitally empowered child. They are exposed, not empowered children. Closing the gap between access and wisdom, between connection and direction is a father’s job. And in Digital Nigeria, it is one of the most urgent jobs there is.
More Nigerian children have access to the internet than ever before. But access without mentorship is a recipe for confusion, not capability. I have argued in policy contexts that infrastructure investment without human capital development is hardware without software. The same logic applies at home. Providing a device without providing guidance is not digital parenting. It is the abdication of digital responsibility.
Pushing back against fear-based approaches to development in the professional context has always been a priority for me. When training and mentoring are built on blind obedience rather than curiosity, and on authority rather than trust, the result is people pretend when being watched and disengage when they are not. The same dynamic plays out in families. When you raise a child using fear, they learn to act obediently for show while secretly doing whatever they want the moment your back is turned. It doesn’t build character. It builds pretence. And in a digital world where so much happens invisibly on screens, in private group chats, in spaces a parent cannot see, keeping secrets online can truly be dangerous.
The alternative is harder and slower. But it is genuine and it lasts. It requires dialogue instead of decrees and directives. It requires the courage to admit what you do not know. In my mentoring work, some of the most powerful moments came not when I had the right answer, but when I said honestly. “I do not know, but let’s figure it out together.” That sentence communicates something that no lecture can: that learning is a shared, ongoing process; that uncertainty is not failure; that the goal is not to perform competence but to build it genuinely. Fathers who can say the same thing to their children are giving them one of the most valuable orientations they can carry into an AI-shaped world.
Because the reality is that despite all its power and sophistication, artificial intelligence cannot sit with your child in the specific difficulty of their specific life and truly mean it. It cannot model recovery from failure, because it does not fail the way humans fail. It cannot demonstrate integrity under pressure, or show what it looks like to apologize genuinely, or communicate through unhurried presence that this person, this particular child, matters more than whatever else is competing for your attention. These are purely human contributions. That is the difference fatherhood makes.
The world we, young and old, are entering is being shaped by AI in ways that make human qualities such as emotional intelligence, ethical grounding, adaptability, the capacity for genuine relationship, more valuable than ever. These are important to be a real father in an AI world.
In technology policy conversations, I have said that the children who will thrive in the digital future are not necessarily the ones with the earliest exposure to the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones who have been raised to think, feel, care, adapt, and lead. That is the greatest inheritance you can leave as a father. Not property. Not money. Not credentials. Not digital assets. A child who is capable of being fully human in a world that is increasingly inhuman.
You will get fatherhood wrong. Repeatedly and in ways that surprise you, or where the impact of the mistake is not recognized or felt immediately. Some errors lead to frustration, resentment, or separation. I have certainly had many regrets and, with the benefit of hindsight, wish I had done better. But still, I realize that embracing it is a learning experience. The goal has never been perfection. In mentoring, in leadership, or in this, the goal is consistency and honesty: the courage to keep showing up, to keep learning, to keep being real, and to keep choosing presence over pretense.
In a world of artificial intelligence, be a real father.
That is enough. That is everything.
Happy Father’s Day. 🙌🏾
Author: Jide Awe
Science, Technology and Innovation policy advisor.
Nigeria’s Inaugural Tech Mentor of the Year
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