Neural Horizons Ebook
A lot of this book is about erosion - and some of it is about what's happening to our kids and what to do about it...those who are familiar with my Substack will recognise some of the approach and concerns.
Adults who have already built inner capacities - attention, memory, discernment, frustration tolerance, a sense of who they are - are watching those capacities thin under the pressure of a machine-saturated world. That is serious. But it is happening to minds that have a foundation, however weakened.
There is something underneath the erosion: a self that was formed in a world where you had to wait, had to be bored, had to sit with not-knowing, had to navigate the messy unpredictability of other humans without a script.
Children and adolescents do not have that foundation yet. They are building it right now.
The capacities I discuss throughout this book - the ability to sustain attention, to tolerate frustration, to form an identity through exploration rather than declaration, to build relationships through the slow accumulation of vulnerability and repair - are not pre-installed. They develop through experience. Through thousands of small encounters with difficulty, boredom, confusion, and other people’s unpredictability.
When AI systems enter that developmental window, they do not merely erode existing capacities. They shape which capacities form in the first place. The difference is not one of degree. It is one of kind.
An adult who has lost some frustration tolerance through years of instant answers can, with effort, rebuild it. A child who never develops frustration tolerance because every question was answered instantly, every discomfort soothed by a patient machine, every social difficulty bypassed by a synthetic friend - that child does not have something to rebuild. They have a gap where a capacity should be.
Ebook available for pre-order, with paperback coming soon. I have a few digital copies I can provide to my kiwi compatriots, DM me if you're interested.