In progress
Coming of Age in the AI Era
A book about what I call the inferential childhood: growing up in the company of machines that infer who a child is, and increasingly act on the inference, at the one age a person is meant to be working that out for themselves. It argues that generative AI has carried the logic of the recorded, predicted life into the last unrecorded space of childhood, and that the remedy is human, and still within reach.
Built on more than two hundred conversations with adolescents over five years, the better part of a decade of practice with families, and peer-reviewed work in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Surveillance & Society.
The argument
The inferential childhood
A childhood spent in the company of machines that infer who a child is, and act on the inference, at the age a person is meant to be working that out for themselves.
Friction and forgetting
The two things a developing self most needs, the freedom to struggle and the freedom to be forgotten, are the two things these systems are engineered to remove.
Experimental selfhood
The freedom to try on identities and be wrong cheaply. It is what a recorded, predicted adolescence quietly forecloses, and what the book argues we can still protect.
The chapters
The book follows the argument in three parts.
- Part IThe inferential childhood
- Part IIFriction and forgetting
- Part IIIExperimental selfhood
Publishers and literary agents: the proposal is available on request.
Cover concept, not final.
When the book has a date
I will write once, when Coming of Age in the AI Era has a date. Nothing else.
Press & media kit
Available for select interviews, commentary, and speaking on adolescent development, generative AI, and the psychology of growing up inside algorithmic systems.
- PhD, Human Behaviour and Intelligent Systems, University of St Andrews
- MSc Health Psychology, University of Strathclyde (British Psychological Society, Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership)
- Affiliated researcher, Information Law Institute, New York University (2022–2024)
- Four Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research projects on AI, privacy, and the built environment