In submission
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.
Manuscript complete, about 58,000 words, and in submission.
It draws on more than two hundred conversations with adolescents over five years and on the better part of a decade of practice with families. The research behind it is peer-reviewed, in Human–Computer Interaction, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Surveillance & Society.
Read an essay from the same ground: When the Watcher Became the Confidant.
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 takes away, 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. No publisher is named until a contract exists.
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 interviews and commentary on how people decide with generative AI, as consumers, at work and as they grow up, and for talks to schools, conferences and leadership teams. Bios, portrait, topics and credits are in the press kit.