The following is a recent piece pitched to a girls’ magazine, taking on the alarmist AI talk that tween and teen kids may be hearing. The aim is to give them a practical and hopeful approach to the days ahead.

AI Panic? Read This First
Spoiler: AI’s got nothing on you 

Look at you, crushing this life-as-a-human-on-Earth thing. You’ve done great so far. You even got through a global pandemic as a kid (which, if we’re being honest, your generation doesn’t get enough credit for). Now the brilliant, driven, occasionally reckless generation who brought you into this perfectly imperfect world has created a bit of a situation. It’s straight out of a sci-fi script, and you’re going to need some serious main character energy to meet it.

Here’s what’s going on.

AI has everyone talking. Maybe you’ve heard? The people who built AI — not random internet doomers, the actual scientists — are now warning that we’re approaching something like a new superintelligent species. One that could outpace human intelligence so fast, so completely, that it puts us at real risk. Cool. Cool cool cool. (Not cool.) They’re pleading with world leaders to regulate AI computing, fast.

Let’s roll it back a minute.

Five years ago, AI was a mind-blowing new tool in the hands of a few. Today it’s the assistant in your pocket helping with homework, planning your week, generating a meme for the group chat. Actually useful, and genuinely fun. That part’s great.

But here’s what’s not great: the data centers running all of this take a staggering amount of energy to cool, and environmental scientists point to that as one more log on the climate-crisis fire. Hottest summer on record, hello. And there’s a trust problem, too. AI is only as unbiased as the humans who built it, and it was trained on a mountain of human-made work nobody asked permission to use. When something can convincingly generate a “fact” that isn’t one, that chips away at our ability to trust what we’re looking at.

And now, erm, those concerns pale next to the extinction conversation. No big deal or anything. (Big deal.) 

Here’s how we get through this. Because we do.

Dario Amodei, one of the people building this stuff, offers up: “There’s a hugely better world on the other side of it.” Not guaranteed. Not automatic. But possible, if we act like it matters — which means staying informed, staying loud, and refusing to just accept doomsday scenarios and shrug.

You get to do three things starting today, and they matter. Here’s your AI survival plan. 

First: think for yourself. Use AI as a tool, not a dupe for your brain. Ask it questions, but don’t copy-paste an answer and call that learning. The future needs people who know what they think. That’s a skill you build every time you choose to wrestle with something instead of skipping the hard part.

Second: stay original. Creativity is the one place AI can imitate but never originate. It can generate art in half a second, but it doesn’t have a point of view. It’s never had a heartbreak, a best friend, or a weird obsession with your favorite band. Keep choosing your own outfits, finding your own dance moves, expressing yourself through big ideas. (Bigger!) That’s your voice. It’s proof of your existence as a specific, irreplaceable person.

Third: go outside. Study the living world like biology, ecosystems and the ocean. Love your people out loud. A robot can simulate a conversation, but it can’t feel one. It doesn’t get to have an inside joke or a first love or a really good Tuesday. You do. That might be the whole point.

Every tech panic in history, going back to the Industrial Revolution, has had a version of this moment. The fear was always about the tool but the real story was always about the people who learned to steer it. That’s you now. No pressure. (Okay, some pressure. You’ve got this.)