Response to Mike Ajouz: AI's Impact on Children's Identity, Agency & Independence

September 3, 2025

Mike, thanks for the question. Here are some initial thoughts. I enjoyed the provocation.

• A lot of people want AI to be a silver bullet for broken education (because according to just about every measure, our schools are failing our kids), but education isn't just or mainly broken due to content delivery—it's broken because we've lost sight of what human formation requires. The quality of the formation has everything to do with the people. For Christians, they should see education as a lot to do with wise, God-led adults shepherding souls to discover who God made them to be and how they can step into their calling. No algorithm or device can replace that sacred responsibility—and I'm glad a bit of the 'AGI' mania is fading, because there has been a lot of talk about AI tutors replacing humans.

• One way that parents let kids be formed by AI is already happening in millions of American households: Let the YouTube algorithm govern what information forms or deforms their brain. There's a special place in hell for whoever designed the Cocomelon era of brainrot. I've spent a bit of time in households with young kids and it's alarming to see how their brains turn off when they turn on YouTube.

• A quick aside about YouTube for adults: I would like to think I've gotten more value than wasted time on YouTube. But I suspect for the VAST majority of people, who like me have gone down the wrong kinds of ideological or entertainment rabbitholes, it's a net waste of time that might just be destroying people's brains with falsehoods and half truths and ruining people's lives en masse. I don't know if I would know how to fine tune a mentee's YouTube algorithm to be net useful for them. There has to be a parallel challenge for fine tuning any edutainment type AI-powered platform.

• On the topic of identity, kids raised on / schooled heavily by AI risk outsourcing identity formation to systems that can't understand the human soul. AI might identify academic patterns but cannot discern, say, spiritual giftings. Also, heavy AI reliance trains kids to seek algorithmic answers about themselves rather than developing spiritual sensitivity to hear God's voice, or learning to seek wise human counsel.

• Grind culture associates the word 'agency' with grinding your way to MRR or changing the world in some trendy way. I am no longer interested in arbitrary changes to the world / finding just any way of making money in the world. So let's talk about 'divine agency' — which might be defined as acting independently based on wisdom, discernment, and moral conviction. Divine agency develops through wrestling with questions, making mistakes in the real world, learning to hear God's voice. What concerns me about AI chat systems is that it kills the friction that happens when you wrestle with questions and decisions, creating dependence on algorithmic assistance for navigating basic things in life. If AI always provides the "right" answer or at least an answer that pacifies them, kids never develop the spiritual and intellectual muscles needed for the development of wisdom. By the way, can you think of anything less divinely agentic than someone stuck in GPT psychosis?

• The independence I want my kid to mature into comes from right dependence—on God first, then healthy family + community interdependence. AI + iPad parenting/schooling creates kids who can click around in apps but can't navigate relationships, moral complexity, or spiritual warfare.

• AI could supercharge the "iPad kids" problem by creating hyper-personalized dopamine loops based on individual neurological patterns. This trains brains to expect constant novelty and stimulation. Kids raised this way struggle with boredom, contemplation, and the sustained attention that real learning and spiritual formation require.

• Instead of just asking "How do we use AI in education?" ask "Who are the adults shaping our children's souls?" My future kids need people who are spiritually mature, led by the Holy Spirit, wise in the world's ways but not of it, grounded in God's Word, and able to recognize spiritual gifts. AI can be a tool in such hands but cannot replace them.

• How do we raise children so secure in their identity in Christ, so practiced in hearing His voice, so grounded in His truth that they can use any tool—including AI—without being deformed by it? Let AI handle information retrieval and skill drilling and formatting of writing (like this bullet list), but keep identity formation, moral development, and spiritual discernment with Spirit-led adults. It's misguided to just send your kid to a school that drills kids to get high state test scores. You want to plant your kids in an environment where they can form into warriors in God's kingdom who can thrive in this current/coming flood period.

• On the note of this kind of God-centered formation environment, it would be exciting to work on an experiment in this area if I connect with the right partners. My Alpha experience reinforced the critical importance of forming the right team. It's easy to think that if you just deploy a crap ton of money to quickly hire credentialed people that they will just figure out how to make it work. I now think that's a terrible idea. The amount of low character people in high positions there is alarming. Alpha should not be scaling at this pace if it wants to create the kind of people the world is missing. But it's not trying to do that. It's creating a novel pipeline for Ivy League schools. It's creating more secular salespeople who can make speeches at WEF. But let's say you actually wanted to chip away at the education/formation crisis in a way that pleases God? How do you assemble a team that could make a ton of money in secular environments, but would choose to make less money? Well, you have to find people who see creating the REAL future of education/formation as their calling from God.

Overall, I barely trust that I have not been permanently deformed by my athiestic upbringing paired with my Duke education paired with the giant science experiment that has been letting AI (via Twitter, YouTube, TikTok etc) attack my brain for most of my life.

So all of my thoughts are shared with humility that I don't know much about anything, except that it sure seems that Christ is indeed King and formation systems that detach people from that reality are misguided if not demonic.

So we should probably not replicate those systems or assume that minor tweaks to these systems are the solution our families need.