Jean Twenge
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Jean Twenge. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Jean Twenge's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The number I could not stop seeing was not a revenue figure or a productivity multiplier. It was twelve.
Twelve years old. The age at which the trend lines for adolescent mental health broke in 2012 and never recovered. The age of the child in my book who asks her mother, "What am I for?" The age at which a developing brain is most hungry for the mastery experiences that build the psychological infrastructure for everything that comes after — and most vulnerable to having those experiences quietly replaced by something faster, smoother, and developmentally empty.
I wrote *You On AI* from the frontier of what AI can do. I wrote it in a state of productive vertigo, thrilled by the collapse of the imagination-to-artifact
