ChatGPT Diagnosed How to Ruin a Generation. Turns Out We Need Humans to Evolve.
- Leah
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
In a piece entitled ‘The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation’, Jonathan Haidt wrote about a question that began circulating online. People asked ChatGPT:
“If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation without them even knowing it?”
ChatGPT’s diagnosis wasn’t unsettling because it described an apocalypse coming out of nowhere. It was unsettling because it described Tuesday; just another day of the slow, invisible erosion that's already happening — in hearts, minds, and the social fabric itself.
It’s a toxic recipe dissolving our capacity to thrive as individuals and as societies:
Fragment attention
Replace meaning with metrics
Turn identity into tribal warfare
Normalise passivity
Confuse truth until people disengage
Disconnect people from the sense of community
None of this required overt malice. It only required systems that reward the wrong behaviours at scale, efficiently and profitably, without anyone noticing. Well, some of us actually did notice, including me. We are already living inside these dynamics.
What AI Can Diagnose — And What Only Humans Can Do
Here's what AI can't solve: We need humans to evolve.
Not just intervene (though we do). We need humans themselves to evolve. We need people to become harder to manipulate, more discerning, more resilient to the systems currently eroding us from the inside.
AI can diagnose the problem. Only humans can architect the solution. And only evolved humans who develop a kind of epistemic immunity — resistance to manipulation, distortion, and cognitive capture — can sustain it.
This is why a few years ago I embarked on the work I shared in my four-part series, ‘How Democracies Lose Their Minds — And How We Rebuild Them’.
Naming the Problem Is Just the Beginning
I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
This has been a lonely journey at times — trying to articulate something that sits between psychology, civic health, information systems, culture, and ethics. It’s difficult to package. Hard to simplify. Uncomfortable for people to confront.
I’ve been watching the collapsing structures, pointing at cracks others would rather ignore. It’s easier to ignore it and go about life as usual.
But I’ve kept going. Be it because I know solutions are possible. Because I still believe in the moral beauty of our societies despite the ugliness on full display. And because frankly, I feel a sense of duty.
We Are the Transitional Generation
Here's the uncomfortable truth we need to face:
We are likely the last generation that experienced a different baseline of social reality.
We inherited something precious from those who came before — and didn't fully appreciate it until it started disappearing.
Many of us remember:
Life before algorithmic attention capture
Childhoods with unmediated play and boredom
Slower information cycles (and the breathing room they created)
Stronger local ties that didn't require constant digital maintenance
Less performative identity
Communities that felt real, not curated
Younger generations inherited something else entirely — the outcomes of systems they never chose:
Always-on digital pressure from childhood
Collapsing trust in institutions and each other
Fragmented attention as the default state
Identity conflict baked into their social infrastructure
Polarisation as as a business model
Normalised anxiety
That places a responsibility on those of us who saw both worlds.
That doesn’t make us morally superior. Our generation made plenty of mistakes (including building or tolerating the systems causing this mess). But it does make us witnesses. We remember what's being lost, even if we can't always articulate it.
This isn't nostalgia. It’s stewardship.
From “Devil’s Plan” to Design Problem
When people see ChatGPT’s answer to the question, 'how would the devil destroy the next generation?', most feel that doing something about it is out of their hands. The scale feels too large. The systems too entrenched.
Instead of focusing on how to fight the agents of chaos, I started asking: What systems would produce healthier humans, better discourse, stronger civic trust, and more resilient societies — even when existing incentives push the other way?
That question led me to Epistemic Defence Systems.
So, What's This 'Epistemic Defence Systems' (EDS)?
It's an unsexy name for infrastructure that could be — forgive the immodesty — genuinely civilisation-preserving.
EDS isn’t a new gadget — it’s the scaffolding for how humans can stay human in an era built to distract and divide. At its core, EDS is an immune system for our shared reality, cognitive resilience, and civic coherence.
We have defence systems to protect us from military threats, cyber attacks, and other threats. But we’ve ignored protecting:
Our ability to think clearly under pressure
Our shared information environment
Our capacity for disagreement without fracture
Our institutional coherence
Where today's systems optimise for engagement, speed, emotional reactivity, and attention extraction — EDS optimises for discernment, coherence, psychological resilience, and collective sense-making.
It's not one platform. It's not ideology. It's layered civic infrastructure designed to make healthier humans and stronger societies possible — even in adversarial information environments.
It’s designed with three layers, each building on the last:
Information infrastructure that curates quality while teaching discernment
Dialogue infrastructure that enables disagreement that's constructive
Accountability infrastructure that makes institutional coherence trackable
(This architecture is outlined in more detail in Part 3 of the series)
A Living Blueprint — Not a Finished Product
I don’t see EDS as a finished blueprint.
I see it as a living architecture that must evolve through collaboration.
That’s why I keep reaching out.
I’m looking for fellow non-conformists, and I invite debate on what I’ve laid out.
No single person can design society’s immune system alone.
But together? We can build something even better than what we inherited.
A Choice We Still Have
The 'devil's plan' only works if we stay passive. If we accept dysfunction as inevitable. If we keep treating symptoms while ignoring root causes.
We still have time to offer younger generations something better than algorithmic chaos masquerading as connection. Not nostalgia for some imagined golden age. Not regression to simpler times that weren't actually simpler, just different.
Rational, responsible renewal. Infrastructure that makes healthy discourse, shared reality, and collective sense-making possible again.
An Invitation
If you've felt this tension — the sense that things have veered off course but it's not too late to find our way back — you're not alone.
This work needs builders, thinkers, designers, educators, backers, promoters, and skeptics with integrity.
The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we either design consciously or leave as an inheritance by default.
We're the last generation that remembers what we're losing. That makes us responsible for what comes next.
The door is open.
Interested in discussing it? Reach out: info@theno.online
The full essay series on 'How Democracies Lose Their Minds — And How We Rebuild Them'.
Part 4: Building in Public
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