A developmental roadmap for the AI era.
Childhood: Curiosity, Safety, and Early Teaming
Childhood is where humans first learn how to explore a world that responds to them. It’s a time of open curiosity, pattern‑seeking, and relationship‑building. In an AI‑shaped environment, children now grow up with systems that talk back, adapt, and learn alongside them. What they need most is guidance, boundaries, and warm human presence so that AI becomes a supportive environment, not a substitute for connection.
Adolescence: Identity, Autonomy, and Boundaries
Adolescence is the developmental stage where humans begin to ask: Who am I, and who am I becoming? AI accelerates access to information, comparison, and influence — which means young people need stronger internal anchors, clearer boundaries, and trusted adults who can help them navigate complexity. This is the stage where humans learn to differentiate themselves from the systems around them while still staying connected.
Adulthood: Contribution, Collaboration, and Meaning
Adulthood is where humans step into purpose, responsibility, and contribution. AI expands what adults can do — but it also challenges them to clarify what only humans bring: judgment, ethics, lived experience, care, and meaning‑making. This is the stage where humans learn to collaborate with AI as a partner, not a competitor, and to build teams that are more capable than any individual.
Interdependence: Humans and AI as Partners in Shared Futures
Interdependence is the developmental stage beyond independence — the one where humans recognize that we grow through each other, not apart. In this stage, AI becomes part of the team: a contributor with different strengths, different limitations, and different ways of processing the world. Interdependence is not about replacing humans or elevating AI. It’s about creating new capacities together — capacities that neither could achieve alone.
About Dr. Janice
Dr. Janice Presser is a systems theorist and lifelong explorer of how humans grow, contribute, and collaborate. Her work began with a deep curiosity about how people come together to form teams — not as collections of individuals, but as living systems with their own patterns, needs, and capacities.
Over the next four decades, she developed a groundbreaking body of work on teaming, contribution, and organizational dynamics. Her early research into biological systems — including the humble paramecium — shaped her understanding of how organisms sense, respond, and adapt to their environments. That insight became the foundation for her later work on human teaming.
Today, she brings that same systems lens to the age of AI. She sees AI not as a threat or a tool, but as a new developmental environment — one that reshapes childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and work. Her mission is to help people understand how humans and AI can grow together with clarity, compassion, and interdependence.