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The Soul of AI: Children Of The Internet
Post Date
January 14, 2026
TSoAI
If you want to know what water is like, don’t ask a fish.
A fish doesn’t know it’s in water.
The children of the internet are the exact same. Personally, I remember having a shared family desktop, in the kitchen. I remember when “real life” and “online life” were two completely separate entities. I have a before to compare to.
The generation which come after me doesn’t have a before to compare to. The generation after me were born connected to the Internet. Being away from the internet is more foreign than being connected to the internet. A device has always been in reach. Technology wasn’t something to be learned, but instead something they were raised by.
In my previous article, I wrote that AI (and technology as a whole) is a mirror reflecting human intention and awareness back to us. However, the children of the internet were born in front of that mirror and have never stepped away from it. Can you really be conscious of something that’s never been absent from your life?
Pre-digital cognition was built on patience. You wanted something, you had to wait for it. The photos you took on a disposable camera weren’t printed instantly. It could take days or weeks before you held the physical items in your hands. You had to selectively choose the moments you wanted to capture. This taught patience.
All creation was the same. Music, art, writing. The process and craft had to be learned. Plenty of poor outputs before something of note was created. The gap between wanting to be good and becoming good built resistance to struggle.
You had a question. There was no Google. You had to accept the reality of not-knowing. You’d have to learn to find answers. Whether through reading, asking around or coming up with the answers yourself. This gap taught the ability to imagine & scour.
Children of the internet don’t have to do any of this.
Photos are taken, plenty in one session. Infinite storage means there’s no need for discernment when trying to take a photo.
If you want to create something you can dump that responsibility on AI or simply pay someone on the internet to do it.
A question can be asked and answered in the same breath. Desire and fulfilment of it fall into the same moment.
This isn’t good or bad. However it raises the question; if the structure of systems before taught patience, the ability to struggle and the ability to imagine and discern, what happens when the systems that taught those skills disappear before the skills have formed?
Scarcity created meaning. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. When anything is accessible at any time, how do you decide what matters? If the algorithm decides for you, curates your feed, shows you what you think you want, do you ever decide? Choice becomes a battle between prioritising what the platform wants versus what you want. Can you trust what a system decides is important?
The children of the internet have grown with the assumption that what the system prioritises is what is important. Their consciousness has developed with algorithms, not before it.
Tech consciousness, defined as the intentionally aware use of technology, assumes you have a reference point outside of technology, as an entity separate to yourself. The children of the internet don’t have this reference.
This is where it’s evident tech consciousness has a different starting point & significance for everybody. For children of the internet, tech consciousness isn’t just recognising the ills of social media and when to use it and how to use it responsibly, tech consciousness is recognising that the choice to step away exists at all.
The fish can’t describe water. However the fish can learn that the water isn’t the be all and end all, that other conditions exist.
Pre-digital cognition still exists. But for children of the internet, it exists only as a choice to be made deliberately. As something that isn’t coming back.
The soul of AI (and technology) depends on the depth of the consciousness that uses it. The consciousness depends on recognising that you have a choice, even if you’ve never known anything else.
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