From Greta Thunberg’s student-led climate strikes to the youth-driven protests in Hong Kong and Chile, the next generation is increasingly demanding a voice on pressing issues. Youth movements are reenergizing paralyzed debates among adults with fresh perspectives, inconvenient questions, and the rhetorical power of having to live with the long-term fallout of our short-term thinking.

With another monumental societal transformation on the horizon—the rise of artificial intelligence—we have an opportunity to engage the power and imagination of youth to shape the world they will inherit. Many of us were caught off guard by the unintended consequences of the first wave of digital technologies, from mass surveillance to election hacking. But the disruptive power of the internet to date only sets the stage for the even more radical changes AI will produce in the coming decades.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Urs Gasser is executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the principal investigator of the Center’s Youth and Media project, and a professor at Harvard Law School.

Instead of waiting for the youth to respond to the next crisis, we should proactively engage them as partners in shaping our AI-entangled future. Young people have a right to participate as we make critical choices that will determine what kind of technological world we leave for them and future generations. They also have unique perspectives to contribute as the first generation to grow up surrounded by AI shaping their education, health, social lives, leisure, and career prospects.

These “AI natives,” like digital natives before them, often use and relate to technology in unanticipated ways. For example, our focus groups have made it clear that, contrary to what many adults assume, young people do care about privacy and have developed creative techniques to manage their reputations online (though they are less aware about the privacy implications of the data trails they leave behind). Youth have reimagined platforms like Instagram by using multiple accounts curated in different ways to manage their digital public personae. Observing youth practices can illuminate potential unexpected uses of new technologies and offer a source of inspiration for reimagining concepts like reputation or identity.

Different generational attitudes toward and understandings of technology were on clear display last year when Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress and an older cohort of legislators demonstrated how little they understand Facebook’s product or business model. Meanwhile, the Zuckerbergs of the next generation are already developing innovative AI-driven technologies to solve problems relevant to their lives. Teenager Emma Yang designed an app called Timeless that uses facial recognition to help people with Alzheimer’s, like her grandmother, recognize and stay connected with their loved ones.

Photograph: BEN STANSALL/Getty Images

Young people like Yang can inspire and inform us. But they also have a right to participate, because they will have to live with the long-term consequences of today’s decisions. AI will transform their career prospects, for example, and 85 percent of young people are worried about how it will threaten the job market. As Turkish teenager and inclusivity advocate Ecem Yılmazhaliloğlu said at this summer’s AI for Children event, “AI is being developed by adults, but we need to make sure these adults think about what children need while developing it.”