Harnessing The Unhappiness of Future Generations

Whether AI will support the happiness, or the misery, of future generations is up to us

I didn’t need a world happiness report to tell me that young adults in North America are suffering alarming levels of unhappiness.

I witnessed this first hand last week, when I went to see Dune with a young family member and his girlfriend. They couldn’t make it through the movie without an argument that required leaving the theater, which they did right during one of the most crucial scenes. It sucked watching the movie alone, but I’m grateful to Timothée Chalamet for teaching me that giant people eating sandworms can actually be harnessed, and ridden through the grim desert of Arrakis. It helped me frame how we might better support this anxious generation, and future ones.

It should be no surprise that the first generation born into a world mediated by smartphones are suffering. The tech world competes for their attention and loyalty with predatory algorithms, while the educational system still offers too little in the way of emotional skills development. How can it, when the generation who mentor them never received that education themselves?

It could be argued that there was a time when socio-emotional skills didn’t need to be taught in schools. The pace of life was slower, the pressures on families less, opportunities greater, prosperity more evenly distributed, or so the story goes.

But whether or not you agree with this narrative, it should be easy for us to come to a consensus on one thing. We’re not going back to that time. The disconnect between the accelerated pace of technological development, and the heartbreaking underdevelopment of this generation’s emotional resilience is growing every year. We need to put our collective energy towards learning, and developing better ways to teach socio emotional skills in ways that actually use the technology that is part of their daily activities.

Riding the sandworm

If we are to lessen the potential impact of this disconnect, however, we need to reign in this growing crisis from two angles. First, we need to make sure that this generation benefits from the growing body of science on how emotional resilience is developed and sustained. Second, we need to make sure that this generation receives the education they need to better understand the mechanics of AI algorithms, their power, and how that power can be harnessed to exploit our weaknesses, or harnessed to build and accelerate our strengths.

North America is fortunate to have a growing bank of frameworks and resources to support teachers and youth in acquiring AI literacy. Whether it’s through the efforts of code.org in the U.S, or The Algorithm and Data Literacy Project in Canada, there’s good reason to be optimistic that this generation can acquire the understanding and skills they need to scope the problems that AI can solve and the problems it can’t.

Alongside the more obvious technological developments we are seeing everyday from AI, however, is a slower, but equally important revolution. This is the growing body of science to support the theory that our brains and bodies can develop stronger and more sustainable states of brain waves associated with joy and resilience; but only if these skills lead to and strengthen connection with an emotionally healthy community and to a life of purpose and meaning.

What’s on the ground already?

It’s actually not a stretch to imagine how AI can contribute to the development of emotional skills. In the last decade we’ve seen how apps have contributed to a more widespread adoption of both ancient and modern stress regulation practices like meditation and biofeedback. Whether it’s through platforms like Insight Timer, Headspace, or Healthy Minds, more and more people are experimenting every year with meditation practices that can support and strengthen emotional skills.

We also don’t have to imagine this in the education space. It’s already happening. Way back in 2020, the non-profit Sown to Grow published its plan on Medium to use AI as part of its Socio Emotional Learning platform for educators in the 4–12 space. Since then Sown to Grow, has demonstrated success in a number of studies, most recently as part of a a study conducted by Harvard’s Education ReDesign lab .

When the study began in Metro Nashville, the school district had already adopted Sown to Grow, based on the positive response it had received from teachers. Students log onto the platform, are prompted to choose an emoji to describe their mood, and can share reflections in an open-ended field. Teachers can review the responses, type their own comments or use AI-generated responses that Sown to Grow produced in collaboration with social workers.

Students view and access their own data, so they can observe trends over time. “Learning can be elevated when students can see their own trajectories and trends over time and draw connections,” says Rupa Gupta, Sown to Grow’s cofounder and CEO. “That’s where they start to learn, ‘What strategies work for me?’”

Tremors!

Creating diverse and engaging strategies that students can draw from will be the key to giving them agency over both their digital and emotional growth in the future.

It was inevitable that someone would figure out how to use the technology behind Chat GPT to create a meditation bot. Last September Vince Fakhoury Horn of Interbeing inc and co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, introduced Meditatewith.ai. This bot helps onboard new practitioners to noting practice, a mindfulness technique that over time can result in better mental clarity.

The potential of Fakhoury’s hack is endless. After trying out his unplugged “mindcraft” meditation practice, designed to bring a sense of play and imagination into meditation, it’s easy to see how these kind of group meditation practices could be supported by AI and to introduce meditation to the Minecraft generation. Building on platforms that are already successful, AI bots can support schools in ways that are fun, creative, accessible, inclusive and already intuitive thanks to the ubiquity of Minecraft in both formal and informal education spaces.

But as Fakhoury points out in a recent podcast, these bots are intended as a low floor to onboard people who might feel uncomfortable sharing in a group. The eventual learning objective is what he calls “multi-player meditation,” which necessarily involves other humans.

Building a sustainable sangha

If digital practices start and stop with facilitator bots, there’s only so far emotional growth can go. These need to be used as tools to accelerate social connection and increase inclusion. Students know how important community is to mediating their relationship with technology, as beautifully articulated by this essay by a highschool student fortunate enough to be offered a course in Global Buddhisms at Phillips Andover.

After being challenged to develop a more intentional use of his smartphone in line with the philosophy and practices they had been studying, this student’s advice to fellow students was:

Find, or help to cultivate, a community of people who are aligned with your personal aspirations for greater awareness, honed discipline, or other goals. This is not a Buddhist cure, and doesn’t pertain only to Buddhist aspirations, but it is in taking refuge in a sangha, that you can find the strength to practice life as you want to.

Humans need and will always need human teachers and human communities in formal and informal education spaces. Bots best serve us when they lead us back to our humanity.

Without creative educators, without better policies and without sustained funding to support youth in developing both technological and emotional skills, we may have to start suiting up for a different kind of battle in a different, but still very real desert.