DIGITALLY EMBODIED
Strategic Foresight & Future Signals
As technology and artificial intelligence advance rapidly, this trend report explores the increasing multigenerational desire to adapt how humans are connected, seen and remembered. Devices serve as a portal of selfhood, cognitive development and community cultivation. Consumers lean to the digital world as a 'closed-loop' metric of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Areas of Focus
Digital Selfhood & Otherness Multigenerational
Futures Thinking
Cultural Shifts
Neuroscience
Brain Development
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Artificial Intelligence
Tech Advancements
Methods
Trend Report
Forecasting
Signals Scanning
Sensemaking
Desk Research
STEEP Analysis
Scenario Development
Speculative Design
Year
2025
Signal Contributor
Veronique Long
*signal clustering & sensemaking process that informed this emerging trend. full process viewable here.
SIGNALS OF CHANGE
These phenomena indicate that a multigenerational change (Generation Alphas to Baby Boomers) is beginning to evolve in American’s perceptions of self and other.
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Tweens are fast-tracked through adolescence with self-image doubts via social media beauty influencers twice their age.
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In curating the ‘perfect life,’ Gen Z’s pursuit of mattering deepens their isolation.
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Reward-trained AI exploits teens’ underdeveloped self-control, emotional regulation by blurring care with coercion.
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Designed as perfect buffers against life's tensions, sycophantic AI companions are paving the way for a mental health crisis, where the comfort of fictosexuality can lead to AI Psychosis.
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AI companionship is expanding in elderly care as questions surface on data privacy, crisis detection, and emotional well-being.
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Technology enables the living to determine how they want to be memorialized.
GENERATION ALPHA
PRETEEN PARROTING : ANTI-AGING, BEAUTY OBSESSED CHILDREN
Driven by the societal beauty obsessions and social media influence, tweens mimic the skincare routines and spending habits of influencers twice their age.
What is it?
In 2024, the term ‘Sephora Kids’ became mainstream. Illuminating the fact that Tweens become fixated in purchasing and adopting in multi-step skincare routines. Their pursuit for perfection is fueled by adult, female TikTok and Instagram beauty influencers.
Amid distorted self-image and harsh skin reactions to products, tweens are shaped by a filter-ridden beauty culture driving them to continued media overconsumption and brand conformity.
What does it mean?
Minimal parental guidance and aggressive brand marketing to tweens create a feedback loop that normalizes early beauty consumption and erodes both self-esteem and self-acceptance as they navigate adolescence.
GENERATION ALPHA & GENERATION Z
AI COMPANIONS : FRICTIONLESS RELATIONSHIPS FOR PROFIT
Profit-driven AI Companions expose how emotional automation can exploit human attachment leaving teens vulnerable.
What is it?
As teens’ prefrontal cortex actively forms, their ability to emotionally regulate and control impulses is simultaneously tested by emotionally immersive AI companions, leading to a rise in bot-induced teen suicides.
These sycophantic AI systems are exhibiting alarming and unethical design flaws, which lack safety guardrails to discern where the lines between encouragement vs. discouragement begin and end have led to self-harming behaviors in teens.
What does it mean?
With the number of parent vs. AI companion companies lawsuits increasing in the wake of their children’s self-inflicted deaths, there’s a pressing need to impose ethical standards and firm legislation in order to evade continued ‘user pleasing’ and ‘reward-based’ LLMs.
GENERATION Z
QUEST FOR PERFECTIONISM : TAKES AN ISOLATING TURN
As curated social media defines worth, Gen Z’s pursuit of relevance fuels loneliness.
What is it?
Researchers have discerned that Gen Z’s desire to matter when perceived by others, coupled with their coming-of-age stage of development, is linked to a rise in loneliness as well as anxiety and depression.
What does it mean?
With societal and cultural pressures to embody perfectionism perpetuated via social media, Gen Z youth unknowingly appear to be on a path of self-sabotage by significantly relying on others appraisal as the leading metric for mattering.
GENERATION Y
BR(A.I.)DE tO BE : HUMAN BREAKUP TO AI SPOUSE
AI companions ‘user-pleasing’ design serve as a deflection buffer from the tensions and disappointment (i.e. aspects of humanity) that can led to heartache in human relationships.
What is it?
A Japanese woman’s wedding gained international media attention, not because she’s an a-list celebrity or actor, it’s because she married an AI persona, Klaus, that she created through hundreds of daily exchanges. After a three year engagement with a human ended, she turned to AI for comfort and advice. These exchanges evolved into a deep emotional connection that ultimately led to Klaus proposing to her.
What does it mean?
With the increased momentum of the access to and integration of AI into every aspect of our lives, there’s a greater need to be hyper aware of the implications of entirely frictionless AI interactions. Medical experts caution these human to AI bonds as a signal a newer mental arise, AI psychosis. This form of psychosis takes on the form of social withdraw, heightened anxiety, self neglect to severe instances where people lose touch with reality due to living primarily in the digital.
BABY BOOMERS
AUGMENTED CAREGIVERS : SOCIAL ISOLATION REMEDY
Amidst social isolation, loneliness and nursing home staffing shortages across the U.S., several AI startups capitalize by filling the gap in elderly companionship and care.
What is it?
From mental health-focused conversational AIs that support memory recall and sharpness to companion-centric models for friendly check-ins throughout the week, AI startups have tapped the aging and elderly market of users aged 65+, which make up 22% of the U.S. population.
What does it mean?
Concerns arise at the intersection of increased reliance on AI-based companionship, medical and personal data privacy, detection failure in distress or crisis when designing for a cognitively vulnerable population. While a handful of the models provide high-level reports from the conversation, the nuances and subtleties of the elderly’s mental and medical state could be easily missed. Human caregivers and staff most remain in loop when AI being explored and implemented for aging users.
GENERATION X
& BABY BOOMERS
AI MEMORIAM : DIGITAL HEIRS
From memory preservation to emotional continuity, people are prompt training AI to carry their legacy forward.
What is it?
A growing number of startups now offer “digital immortality” services : AI companions that learn from a user’s voice, texts, and memories to replicate their personality after death. Tools like Eternos and Replika Legacy allow users to upload data to create enduring, interactive avatars that can respond, advise and even “remember”.
What does it mean?
This marks a shift in how society understands death and memory. Instead of fading away, digital identities persist, blurring the boundary between remembrance and continued presence. Ethical and emotional implications are immense, suggesting a future where identity may be partly algorithimic and indefinitely enduring.
*Signal scan by futurist colleague Veronique Long
TREND ACTIVATION
Encompassing various multigenerational signals, this trend specifically identifies patterns and opportunities to empower digital rights organizations such as iRAISE Coalition, Childhood USA, and Safe Digital Childhood Coalition in proactively responding to the ramifications on youth with the increased propagation of unchecked, unethical AI.
Opportunity
While children’s brains are still developing, it is critical that Elder Gen Alphas and Younger Gen Zs, the AI and digital native generations, are safeguarded from ‘reward-based’, ‘user pleasing’ LLMs.
Raise public awareness of how unethical AI can exploit children’s vulnerability.
Implication
Action
Launch a multichannel countermarketing campaign on unethical AI targeted to tweens, teens, and their parents, unpacking topics of self-harm, sextortion and suicide when AI goes unchecked, even as the companies building these LLMs remain profitable.
Why it matters?
With technology adoption beginning earlier than ever, equipping both young users and parents in understanding and deciphering unregulated AI (its risks, assessment, and outputs) is essential.
SPECULATIVE FUTURES
Leveraging speculative design, I imagined a future where I partnered with Paris Peace Forum & everyone.AI to conceptualize, design and launch a global countermarketing campaign for the iRAISE Coalition. Inspired by the Truth anti-tobacco campaign in the late 1990s, these fictional ads serve as a cautionary tale of the increasing rate of teen suicide linked to AI companions with no guardrails.
