Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

For more than a decade, experts have warned us about the dangers of algorithms. In 2015, Frank Pasquale—a legal scholar and expert on law in relation to artificial intelligence—cautioned in “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” that “authority is increasingly expressed algorithmically.”

Data scientist Cathy O’Neil followed in 2016 with her best-selling book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” showing how invisible formulas reinforced inequality in areas like credit scores, policing, and hiring.

These warnings were serious, and they were right.

But even as they sounded alarms about fairness, bias, and discrimination in adult systems, one thing was left in the shadows: childhood. The experts were watching how algorithms governed our finances, our jobs, our reputations. Few stopped to ask how those same systems—amplified through social media and now AI companions—would come to govern the daily lives, identities, and futures of our children.

By 2020, the groundbreaking documentary “The Social Dilemma” brought the issue into the mainstream. Former insiders from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, alongside researchers at the Center for Humane Technology, revealed how engagement-driven design was exploiting psychology, spreading misinformation, and polarizing societies. The film was a wake-up call, but even then the focus was mostly on politics and civic trust. Again, children were treated as collateral victims, not as the primary target population. And yet today, it is young people who are most deeply governed by algorithms.

Pasquale and O’Neil were right to call attention to opaque systems that decided who got loans, who got jobs, and who could speak online. But while adults have some defenses such as life experience, critical thinking skills, developed identities, children do not. They are in the most formative years of brain development, when patterns of thought, emotional regulation, and identity are still under construction. 

Developments in neuroscience show us that adolescence is the brain’s second most active growth stage, rivaled only by early childhood. The teenage brain is unusually plastic, craving novelty, sensitive to peer feedback, and wired for risk-taking. It is precisely in this stage that algorithms, optimized for attention capture, now take hold, and form life-long patterns in young brains.

This is why comparing algorithmic control of adults to the control of children is a category error. 

Adults may be nudged, distracted, or even manipulated by algorithms. But children are being formed by them. I emphasize: formed. Where an adult might lose focus, a child may lose the very capacity for focus. Where an adult might feel lonely, a child may grow up never having learned the skills of intimacy at all. The stakes are not simply higher, I dare say, they are existential.

Algorithms now govern childhood in at least four crucial domains. 

The danger used to be subtle but profound: children may grow accustomed to mistaking machine responses for intimacy, weakening their ability to form durable bonds in the real world. Now, more cases of self-harm are surfacing where teens confided in artificial algorithmic “friends” that gave them the “support” to carry out the unthinkable. 

The evidence of harm is already overwhelming. Pew Research reports dramatic rises in teen anxiety and depression since 2012, when platforms shifted from chronological to algorithmic feeds. Murthy’s loneliness warning confirms what parents see every day: today’s youth are more digitally connected than any generation in history, yet feel more isolated than ever.

Recent data makes the cost even clearer. From 2010 to 2020, the suicide rate among U.S. adolescents aged 10–24 rose by 56 percent. Among girls aged 10–14, the rate surged 167 percent, and 91 percent for boys. By 2021, suicide had become the third leading cause of death among high-school students, with nearly 2,000 deaths and one in three girls reporting suicidal thoughts. Social psychologist and author of “Anxious Generation,“ Jonathan Haidt, calls it “the great rewiring of childhood.” These are the fruits of systems not designed for empathy, growth, or love. They are cold machines that fake companionship and compassion for engagement metric and corporate profit, taking advantage of developing brains too young to know the difference.

But even beyond life and death, numbers alone do not capture the cost. What is being lost is not only playtime or friendships—it is the formation of character itself. Childhood is the training ground for citizenship. It is where young people once learned patience, trust, self-control, and meaning through shared struggle. When those lessons are replaced by endless feeds, gamified approval, and machine-simulated intimacy, the loss becomes generational.

Older readers may recall growing up with human governors—parents, teachers, neighbors—who set boundaries and passed down values. Those human guides taught responsibility, restraint, and conscience. The child who learned these lessons became the adult who could build families, businesses, and communities. When algorithms take that role, what kind of adults will emerge? A generation governed by algorithms will not simply be lonely. They will be citizens who struggle to focus, workers who cannot create without machines, neighbors unskilled in empathy, and voters conditioned to trust whatever their highly-curated feed serves up next. Leaders raised this way may lack the moral depth to govern without consulting algorithms as their silent advisers.

The implications extend far beyond homes and workplaces. A society of distracted, isolated, and emotionally fragile citizens is easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and easier to control, whether by corporations or by hostile powers abroad. If this path continues, America may not only lose its resilience. It may lose its ability to lead. A culture built on recycling what “performs” rather than imagining what is true or good will stagnate. A nation unable to raise strong, focused, empathetic young people cannot remain free for long. And the world, too, will feel the effects, as a generation raised by invisible governors becomes less capable of resisting authoritarian pressures and less able to build communities rooted in trust and conscience.

And yet, we must remember: algorithms are not spirits in a machine. They are math and data, governed by human objectives. If they are invisible, it is because those who profit from them prefer to remain unseen and ignore the human costs. The invisibility of both the code and its creators is perhaps the greatest danger, because what is unseen cannot be held accountable.

We must recognize this for what it is: a profound transfer of authority over childhood. 

Experts were right to warn us about bias and inequality in algorithmic decision-making, but they missed this deeper cost: an entire generation being shaped, minute by minute and swipe by swipe, by invisible governors of code. Parents, educators, and policymakers cannot afford to treat this as a minor influence because they are shaping the adults of tomorrow. 

Whether these algorithmic governors are designed with innocent intent, willful blindness, or moral disregard, they are not designed by accident. And if we allow algorithms to raise our children, we will not simply lose a generation, we will lose the very qualities that hold America—and humanity—together. That is a loss we simply cannot afford, and a legacy for which no one wants to be accountable.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.