Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?
Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”
“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”
As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.
My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z—the cohort born between 1996 and 2012—plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s? I first focused on the role of overprotection (“coddling”). But since then, there’s been a growing body of evidence implicating technology, particularly smartphones and social media.
