Artificial Intelligence
The Last Generation's Choice
Why our AI strategy could change everything.
Posted November 3, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
We are the last generation to remember a world before generative AI. Our children won't know what it was like to write an essay without wondering if a machine could do it better, or to make a decision without algorithmic guidance whispering in their ear. This makes us accountable for something unprecedented: designing the mental infrastructure in which future minds will develop.
AI is reshaping society. The question is whether we'll shape AI with intention — or let it shape us by default.
The Logic Is Simple. The Stakes Are Not
Think of technology as a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a window. What matters is the hand that holds it, and more importantly, the vision that guides that hand. We need human leadership for humane technology — systems designed not for efficiency alone, but for human flourishing.
This is where ProSocial AI enters the conversation. These are AI systems deliberately tailored, trained, tested, and targeted to bring out the best in people and planet. Not AI that maximizes engagement at the cost of mental health. Not AI that optimizes profit while externalizing environmental damage. But AI that asks: What kind of future do we actually want to build?
Making that happen requires something we're rapidly losing: agency amid AI. Agency means the ability and will to act autonomously, to feel that your choices are genuinely yours. When algorithms curate every song, suggest every purchase, and filter every piece of information you encounter, agency doesn't disappear overnight. It erodes, grain by grain, until you can't quite remember what it felt like to decide for yourself.
The Intelligence We Actually Need
The solution isn't to reject AI. It's to pursue hybrid intelligence (HI). This is intelligence that arises from the complementarity of natural and artificial minds working together, each contributing what it does best. Humans bring context, wisdom, creativity, and ethical judgment. AI brings processing power, pattern recognition, and scale.
But hybrid intelligence doesn't emerge automatically from putting humans and AI in the same room. It requires double literacy — a foundation built on two pillars. First, human literacy: a holistic understanding of self and society, people and planet. Not just reading and writing, but emotional intelligence, systems thinking, and ecological awareness. Second, algorithmic literacy: understanding what AI is, why it exists, how it works, and crucially, how it influences our thinking without us noticing.
Without double literacy, we're flying blind into an automated future.
We're in the Danger Zone
Right now, we're navigating what can only be described as a hybrid tipping zone. Three forces are colliding simultaneously:
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At the individual level, agency is decaying as algorithms make more decisions for us.
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At the institutional level, AI is becoming mainstream before we've agreed on guardrails.
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At the national level, countries are racing toward AI supremacy, prioritizing speed over safety.
Meanwhile, planetary health is in free fall. Seven out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. The ecosystem on which humanity depends is sustaining irreversible damage. And AI, for all its promise, is energy-intensive and resource-hungry.
We're at an inflection point. The decisions we make in the next few years will reverberate for generations.
Every Country's Special Moment In History
This is why a bold proposition is being put to every government in the world right now — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a concrete blueprint for action:
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Integrate double literacy into schools from kindergarten to university. Make it as fundamental as mathematics or language. Students need to understand both the human condition and the algorithmic systems reshaping it. This isn't about adding another subject. It's about weaving these literacies through the entire educational experience.
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Establish a ProSocial AI Hub to connect unlikely allies across sectors and generations. Innovation happens at the intersection of different perspectives. Bring together technologists and teachers, policymakers and parents, businesses and civil society. Create spaces in which they can co-design AI applications that genuinely serve the public good.
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Standardize a ProSocial AI Index to measure what actually matters. What gets measured gets managed. If we only track efficiency and profit, that's what AI will optimize for. But if we measure social well-being, environmental impact, and human agency, we create incentives for AI that serves broader values.
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Weave 'regenerative intent' into the national AI and ethics framework. Don't just aim to do less harm. Build systems designed to actively restore and regenerate communities, ecosystems, and human potential. Make regeneration a design principle, not an afterthought.
Values In, Values Out
There's an old programming principle: garbage in, garbage out. If you feed poor data into a system, you get poor results. But there's a deeper truth here: values in, values out.
We cannot expect the technology of tomorrow to be better than the humans of today. AI learns from us. It reflects our biases, amplifies our priorities, and scales our values — for better or worse. If we build AI in a culture that prizes extraction over regeneration, competition over cooperation, and short-term profit over long-term well-being, that's exactly what we'll get. At scale. At speed. And potentially beyond our ability to course-correct.
The choice is ours, but the window is closing. We are the bridge generation—old enough to remember pre-AI autonomy, young enough to shape the AI-integrated future. 'Generation GenAI' is watching. They won't ask why we built AI. They'll ask why we built it the way we did.
Every country has an opportunity to lead not by building the most powerful AI, but by building the most purposeful AI. To show that a nation can embrace technological advancement while keeping human flourishing at the center. To prove that agency and innovation aren't opposing forces, but complementary ones.
The time for action is now. Not because we have all the answers, but because waiting for certainty guarantees we'll be too late.
