Submission to the EU Intergenerational Fairness Strategy

Executive Summary: Strategic Recommendations

Europe faces a narrow window to shape emerging technologies for intergenerational fairness. This requires three parallel commitments: embedding future generations into policymaking, building anticipatory governance capacity, and making strategic choices about which technologies to accelerate. The following recommendations provide actionable steps across governance mechanisms and critical technology domains.

Governance foundations for future generations:

• Intergenerational Impact Assessments: Establish mandatory assessments for technology, climate, and economic strategy, weighing risks and opportunity costs.
• Digital Enforcement Agency: Establish centralized, independent enforcement capacity for effective implementation of existing laws.
• Procurement Reform: Radically reform public procurement architecture for adaptability, responsiveness, and purpose-driven innovation.
• Permanent Participatory Platforms: Create citizen assemblies using foresight for public deliberation and explore ways to represent nature and future generations.
• Build Anticipatory Governance Capacity: Equip policymakers across all EU institutions to recognize and respond to emerging technology risks and opportunities before they become crises.
• Differential Technology Development: Make strategic choices about which technologies to accelerate based on their risk-benefit profiles and safety

Technology-specific priorities for future generations:

• Build Trustworthy AI in Europe: Establish a frontier AI coordinating space for safety science, evaluation, and open research with focused mandate and governance.
• Strengthen EU AI Infrastructure: Rapidly expand compute capacity through streamlined permitting processes on clean energy sites and a tiered security.
• Neurotechnology Strategy: Establish strategic funding mechanisms, regulatory stress-testing, and stakeholder engagement for responsible leadership.
• European BioPower: Make biotechnology in the EU a geopolitical priority by breaking down civilian-defence silos, creating integrated funding mechanisms, and building shared infrastructure with security-by-design oversight.
• Climate Security Strategy: Develop a Climate Security Strategy for worst-case scenarios, prioritize public research funding for SRM, and mandate real-time detection of tipping points and atmospheric interventions.
• Preserve Distributed Agency: Prioritize decentralised technologies and strengthen democratic institutions to maintain human economic and political relevance.
• Mental Health: Implement a “mental-health-in-all-policies” approach and strengthen platform accountability

Introduction

Europe stands at a turning point in the face of emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, biotechnology and climate interventions could save lives and bring breakthroughs as profound as those of the Industrial Revolution. Yet they also impose serious risks, undermining democracy, increasing inequality, and reshaping life itself. Two centuries ago, life in Europe was short and uncertain. Average life expectancy barely reached 40 years. Diseases now easily treated could sweep through entire towns unchecked. Yet within two centuries, that world transformed through the foresight and discoveries of those who came before us. They built systems of science, democracy, and cooperation that allowed progress to serve the public good. Europe now faces a similarly defining moment. The choices made in the coming years will determine whether emerging technologies serve future generations or fail to deliver the prosperity and enhanced capabilities they promise. This window for shaping these technologies is narrow, requiring Europe to act decisively to ensure innovation advances the public good.

The EU’s strategy should link fairness with purposeful growth, using participation, innovation, and shared investment to expand opportunity and ensure that the benefits of progress are broadly felt. When innovation visibly improves daily life, from cleaner energy to better health and more secure digital spaces, solidarity becomes self-reinforcing. This requires taking a “yes and” approach to regulation and innovation. Europe’s Intergenerational Fairness Strategy should be an example of achieving this goal, to govern innovation not just for competitiveness today, but through long-term governance that secures fairness and progress for future generations.

The Centre for Future Generations works to bridge technical expertise and policy analysis in service of this goal. Our recommendations aim to ensure powerful emerging technologies serve both current and future generations. These include proposals that address both immediate capability gaps and long-term existential risks. Our proposal for a pan-European AI research institution (CERN for AI), now being developed by the Commission as the RAISE initiative, would create a durable foundation for trustworthy AI development that transcends political cycles. Similarly, our collaboration with the OECD to explore governance for non-ideal climate intervention scenarios addresses threats that could jeopardize the very existence of future generations.

Europe has shown it can set global standards, from GDPR’s data protection precedent to the AI Act’s safety requirements for high-risk systems. Yet regulation often arrives after systems deploy at scale, and enforcement struggles to keep pace with innovation cycles. History shows that societies shape how transformative technologies develop: steam power, electricity, and digital computing each followed different trajectories based on how we chose to regulate, invest, and distribute access. Which path AI, biotechnology and other critical technologies follow depends on the innovation and governance choices we make now. 

Strengthening Governance for Future Generations

Powerful emerging technologies demand new governance approaches that require innovative, inclusive, and forward-looking policy thinking and action. Europe’s capacity to shape technology for intergenerational fairness depends on three governance commitments: building interests of future citizens into policymaking, developing foresight capabilities to anticipate change, and making strategic choices about which technologies to accelerate, restrain, or shape.

Europe already demonstrates the capacity to govern with future generations in mind. Commissioner Glenn Micallef’s official mandate to strengthen intergenerational fairness within the European Commission represents an institutional innovation that embeds long-term thinking at the highest policymaking level, marking the first time this responsibility has been explicitly assigned to a Commissioner.^[1] Several European institutions have established foresight units that aim to make EU policy future-proof^[2], and the Commission has been publishing an annual Strategic Foresight Report.^[3] In specific policy domains, an explicitly intergenerational lens has already driven significant change: the European Climate Law establishes legally binding targets of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which shows that European institutions can commit to goals that reach decades into the future and benefit generations beyond electoral cycles.^[4] The work of the European Citizens’ Panel on Intergenerational Fairness, bringing together randomly selected citizens from across the EU to co-create the strategy, demonstrates the Commission’s commitment to participatory policymaking.^[5]

Yet these capabilities remain fragmented and under-resourced relative to the scale of technological disruption ahead. Foresight teams often operate at the margins of policy development rather than at its centre. Impact assessments focus predominantly on immediate effects rather than long-term consequences. And mechanisms for representing future generations exist in some domains, but not others. Building on these foundations requires scaling proven approaches and extending them across all areas where emerging technologies will shape the world future generations inherit.

Building future generations into policymaking

Future generations are Europe’s democratic blindspot.^[6] The EU lacks mechanisms for representing those who will inherit the consequences of today’s decisions. As the Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations recognize, “Decisions being taken by those currently living can affect the lives and rights of those born years, decades, or many centuries in the future”.^[7] Addressing this requires horizontal and vertical policy innovation.

Recommendation: Establishing mechanisms for representing future generations should begin with mandatory intergenerational impact assessments for policies around technology, climate, and economic strategy. These assessments must weigh both sides of the ledger: the genuine risks of action and the opportunity costs of inaction. Impact frameworks that focus only on what could go wrong risk denying future generations the capabilities these technologies could provide. The EU should ensure that such impact assessments are at the very heart of policymaking, integrated across the entire policy cycle from conceptualisation through to reform, and are fully transparent, accountable, and participatory.

Recommendation: Procurement reform offers another lever for intergenerational fairness. In terms of savings alone, at 14% of European GDP,^[8] public procurement could become a powerful tool for innovation. As President von der Leyen noted, “a 1% efficiency gain in public procurement could save EUR 20 billion a year”^[9] and develop innovative goods and services in strategic technologies. Outdated procurement systems are slow, rigid, and inefficient, making governments and institutions less capable of addressing today’s challenges—especially in an age of accelerated innovation. The EU must radically reform its public procurement architecture to ensure adaptability, responsiveness, and purpose-driven, taking inspiration from software architecture, for example. Only with a reformed public procurement architecture can the EU ensure public goods, services, and systems are resilient against very different possible futures.

Recommendation: Under increasing political pressure, the EU needs to strengthen its ability to effectively implement and enforce existing laws. With the next Multiannual Financial Framework around the corner, the EU should invest in technological sovereignty and resilience by proposing a centralised and independent digital enforcement agency^[10].

Strategic foresight for anticipatory governance

Effective governance of emerging technologies requires the capacity to anticipate developments before they become crises. One way this can be achieved is through foresight and scenario-building. For instance, CFG’s own Advanced AI: Possible futures maps five plausible trajectories for how the AI transition could unfold, combining expert elicitation with trend analysis to help stress-test European policy choices under radically different conditions. Similarly, in collaboration with the OECD, we have developed a listening-and-learning approach to co-create the future scenarios for which governance needs to work in the context of climate interventions.

Recommendation: Permanent participatory platforms such as citizen assemblies should be established for structured public deliberation, these could use foresight to strengthen the future-oriented nature of their work.^[11] Recommendations stemming from these participatory processes should be a permanent fixture of policy decision-making processes. More-than-human governance mechanisms^[12] should be explored to ensure voices of all current and future generations, as well as those of non-human nature, are heard. Extending rights and legal protections to the planet (for rivers and ecosystems, for example) is one way of ensuring the human right to a healthy environment even beyond the human lifespan, for generations to come. Extending rights and protections to collectives (beyond those in place for consumers) is another important way of ensuring communities are safeguarded from large-scale, systemic harms.

Recommendation: The Commission should continue popularising internal Futures Literacy programs for staff across all DGs, from Policy Officers drafting legislation to Heads of Units attending trilogues. This requires not just upskilling, but also hiring technologists and moving implementers from the industrial age into the AI age.

Differential Technology Development

Balancing the needs of present and future generations requires making deliberate choices about which technologies to accelerate and which to slow down. The goal is to advance those that strengthen safety, governance, and societal resilience before those that could amplify risks or concentrate power, ensuring progress benefits those least able to shape today’s decisions.

Europe cannot pursue every emerging technology with equal intensity. With 64 critical technologies identified as foundational for economies, societies, and security,^[13] Europe must make strategic choices about where to accelerate and proactively shape and where to take a more observant stance. Different technologies demand different approaches based on their risk-benefit profiles and governance readiness.

Some technologies merit aggressive acceleration: climate adaptation, defensive biosecurity, and open AI safety research address existential challenges without concentrating power. Others require governance frameworks before widespread deployment: consumer neurotechnology and solar radiation modification could irreversibly alter human capability or trigger global consequences without adequate coordination. Still others, like advanced AI systems and biotechnology, benefit from parallel development, where building capability proceeds alongside strengthening safety standards and oversight mechanisms.

This differentiated approach serves intergenerational fairness by ensuring that today’s innovation choices expand rather than constrain the options available to future generations, providing tools to address mounting challenges while protecting against irreversible harms. Translating this principle into European innovation policy requires identifying where acceleration serves collective security and where restraint protects long-term stability.

Recommendation: The Strategic innovation for European security^[14] portfolio that CFG has developed offers a ready short-list for technologies that could be supported. Priority accelerators include next-generation drones and counter-drone systems in defence, reverse-osmosis desalination and controlled-environment food production in climate security, an independent AI evaluations industry, and a three-layer biosecurity stack built on metagenomic early warning, modular countermeasures, and transmission suppression. 

Recommendation: Regarding neurotechnology, Europe should prioritise clinical applications that address unmet medical needs, with parallel support for disease prevention and early diagnosis through wearable devices and novel biomarkers. In Wired for the Future, CFG proposes creating a targeted package that combines a Neurotechnology Funding Board to tailor and deploy fit-for-purpose instruments, a precompetitive collaboration platform for shared foundations across neuroscience, computing and advanced materials, and pooled multi-state reimbursement pilots to enable rapid scaling and equitable access. This could position Europe to lead responsibly in a field that is strategically important for health, competitiveness and intergenerational fairness.^[15]

Conclusion: Progress as a choice

True intergenerational fairness cannot rely on fair distribution alone, it also depends on the shared creation of a better future. If the past two centuries taught us anything, it is that progress is a choice. Europe’s task now is to make that choice again, not just to accelerate discovery, but to govern it with wisdom and care. The technologies of tomorrow are being shaped today. The question is whether we will shape them with the interests of all generations in mind. Europe has the capacity, the institutions, and the values to choose wisely. The moment to act is now. Two hundred years ago, our predecessors made choices that transformed the world, building systems of science, democracy, and cooperation that allowed progress to serve the public good. Today, we face a similar responsibility.

The question is not whether these technologies will develop, but whether we will govern their emergence with the foresight and care that future generations deserve. This requires three commitments: strategic choices about which aspects of emerging technologies to accelerate and which to approach with restraint, embedding foresight throughout the policy cycle, and creating new mechanisms to represent future generations in present decisions. Europe has demonstrated that democratic societies can respond to profound challenges without abandoning their principles. Faced with rapidly moving technological disruption, we go a step further to say Europe must lead on such challenges in order to maintain its principles: The path forward is not to weaken the regulatory and democratic achievements of recent decades, but to strengthen and adapt them for an age of accelerating change.

Critical Technology Domains

The technologies emerging today carry both extraordinary promise and profound risks that will shape the world future generations inherit. The past two centuries demonstrate this clearly: scientific and technological advances lifted billions from poverty, extended lifespans, and expanded human capability while also creating new challenges. Understanding both the promise and the risks of emerging technologies is essential for governing innovation with foresight.

Artificial Intelligence

Technological change is the principal driver of how wealth, work and power are distributed across generations, and artificial intelligence represents a structural force amplifying this dynamic at unprecedented scale. Evidence shows that rapid technological shifts don’t just boost productivity, they reshape who gains, who loses, and where power lies.

As the IMF has noted, we may be entering a technological era that could unleash change on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution, how we respond now will determine who benefits and who falls behind. AI development is accelerating fast and is concentrated in a few global actors, posing major questions of control, benefit and harm. Policy choices made today will influence whether AI creates prosperity, and if it does, where and for whom that prosperity arises. Three questions matter most:

1. Will AI generate wealth or harm? Trustworthy AI is not guaranteed at all, at present, we still have no science of safe AI. Without AI being trustworthy, its adoption will amplify inequality and instability rather than opportunity.
2. Will economic value flow within or beyond the EU? If broad automation proceeds with non-EU AI systems, the economic value will flow outside the EU even as jobs and value are displaced within it. Europe’s current shortfall in compute, talent and scale makes this a live risk.
3.  Will AI’s benefits be distributed fairly or unfairly? Without deliberate policy action, returns will cluster around a handful of countries, AI providers, hardware and cloud oligopolies. Our AI reference scenario analysis points to power centralisation as a major risk. It also shows just how divergent the outcomes could be, and how profoundly they would shape intergenerational fairness.

A credible strategy for intergenerational fairness must begin with trustworthy AI. Without it, talk of fairness remains theoretical. Europe must act now to lay strong foundations, this is most effective via a bold public-private partnership, as outlined in our CERN for AI proposal.

In short: getting AI right is not optional, it is the precondition for a fair and flourishing future. This requires concrete action:

Recommendation: The EU’s new RAISE initiative is a major step toward establishing a European CERN for AI, but its design risks spreading effort too thin. As CFG’s work on RAISE highlights, the EU must choose a clear institutional path: either empower RAISE to provide large-scale compute access for academia, transform it into an ARPA-style innovation driver, or evolve it into a true frontier AI lab with in-house talent and rapid iteration capacity. A focused mandate and governance model are essential to avoid fragmentation and to secure real strategic impact. RAISE should therefore prioritise becoming a frontier trustworthy AI lab, coordinating safety science, evaluation, and open research while integrating with broader EU initiatives such as the Cloud and AI Development Act and the AI Gigafactories.

Recommendation: The EU should aim to create Special Compute Zones (SCZs) to rapidly expand secure and sustainable AI infrastructure. Under the Cloud and AI Development Act, SCZs would use a single 180-day permitting process on pre-approved brownfield sites powered by clean energy. A tiered security model, coordinated with ENISA, would protect critical workloads. This approach would close Europe’s compute gap and strengthen digital sovereignty for future generations.

Neurotechnology

AI is transforming not just how we live, behave, and think, but increasingly it is doing so through direct interaction with the human brain — devices that sense or stimulate the brain could soon be a standard part of our daily digital ecosystem. Neurotechnologies are rapidly accelerating, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, materials, and engineering. These offer great promise for treating debilitating conditions like paralysis, blindness, and depression. At the same time, major companies are developing consumer products for sleep, wellness, gaming, and productivity, soon integrated into wearable devices we already use everyday, such as headphones, watches, and glasses. These tools could reshape not only mental health, but also work, education, entertainment, and defence.

This rapid progress, while exciting, raises urgent concerns about ethics, privacy, and misuse. Brain data is deeply personal, and its collection could enable unprecedented surveillance and manipulation by corporations or governments – threatening the agency and rights of future generations. Unequal access to neurotechnologies – particularly cognitive enhancement – may also deepen existing social and economic divides well into the future. With the global neurotechnology market projected to exceed $40 billion by 2032, and mounting signals of Big Tech’s interest, there is growing international attention to neurotech governance (e.g. ethical guidance from the OECD and UNESCO; the Mind Act in the USA; China’s roadmap to BCI leadership by 2030).

Recommendation: Neurotechnology, if approached responsibly, could transform healthcare. Europe currently has the second largest neurotechnology sector globally (in terms of number of companies), only just behind the US. This represents a significant, within-reach opportunity for Europe to be a global leader of cutting-edge technology. However, the EU must nourish this emerging sector, or it risks falling behind. Europe urgently needs a strategic approach to neurotechnology that includes funding ethical innovation for unmet medical needs, stress-testing its regulatory frameworks, and broad and inclusive stakeholder engagement.

Biotechnology

European researchers have built Delphi 2M, an AI model that forecasts a person’s risks and likely timing for more than one thousand diseases over the next two decades, using routine health records. Trained on UK Biobank data and validated on Denmark’s national registers, it could support EU public health pilots in prevention and capacity planning^[16]. Policymakers will be essential to unlocking the promise of technologies such as Delphi 2M, ensuring that roll-out tackles head-on questions of biological data diversity – ensuring that Europe’s diverse communities benefit. Building and maintaining public trust will also rely on proactively shaping the role of such tools in clinical practice, defining clear boundaries on appropriate use; and in consistent access to professional advice and counselling for individuals to understand what the data means for them. As probabilistic approaches become widespread in medicine and public health, the EU has a key role to play in updating regulatory regimes and boosting regulatory capacity to support innovation, as well as leading citizen dialogues on what they expect from the health systems of the future.

Biotechnology offers Europe a profound opportunity to strengthen health, sustainability, and resilience at the same time. Advances in biomanufacturing and life sciences can enable pandemic preparedness and accelerate treatments for rare diseases through distributed biofoundries and modular vaccine platforms, as outlined in CFG’s European Biopower paper^[17]. At the same time, innovations in precision fermentation and microbial engineering make it possible to produce biodegradable plastics^[18], microbes that break down industrial waste^[19], and novel materials^[20]. Together, these breakthroughs can reduce Europe’s dependence on carbon-intensive industries and strengthen the European Green Deal^[21] and Circular Economy Action Plan^[22], ensuring that future generations inherit both a safer planet and the tools to sustain it.

Decades of investment in fundamental research, and the development and curation of large datasets of biological and health data have provided the foundation for advances in modern biotechnology. The convergence with AI is rapidly unlocking new applications, reshaping both opportunity and governance challenges. As outlined in CFG’s Priorities to Uphold European Biosecurity in 2025,^[23] advances in synthetic biology, AI-assisted biological design, and portable lab technologies mean that the capacity to engineer or synthesise biological agents is becoming cheaper, faster, and more widely distributed. This trend lowers barriers for research and innovation, but it also heightens the possibility of accidents and deliberate misuse. Governance of this domain will need to shift from a containment-focused strategy for technologies and substances towards one which builds defensive capabilities through biotechnology itself—embedding surveillance, diagnostic, and production systems that can neutralise threats at their biological source. Beyond governance, Europe must confront another risk: that of falling behind in this strategic domain, remaining a consumer rather than a producer of advanced biotechnologies at the cost of retaining skilled researchers, high-value manufacturing jobs, and the ability to serve European patients with domestically-driven innovations.

Recommendation: In biotechnology, focusing on establishing a European BioPower through dual-use innovation pathways allows the simultaneous development of the European industrial base alongside long-term security. As outlined in CFG’s Towards a European BioPower^[24] and Priorities to Uphold European Biosecurity in 2025^[25], this means three parallel priorities. First, securing biomanufacturing supply chains through a European biofoundries network linked with cloud laboratory infrastructure, ensuring capacity for research, production, and rapid scale-up during crises. Second, developing field-deployable biomanufacturing capabilities for on-site production of diagnostics and therapeutics, including modular vaccine platforms and compact bioreactor systems. Third, advancing bio-based materials for defence, construction, and critical infrastructure, including sustainable polymers, protective materials, and self-repairing systems that reduce carbon intensity and dependence on imported resources. At the same time, Europe’s biotechnology leadership must drive security-by-design principles, ensuring that bioinnovation and biosecurity progress together. This includes oversight of AI-enabled biology, with access controls, audit trails, and next-generation cybersecurity standards fit for the cyber-bio interface. Such measures would ensure that Europe’s growing biotechnology capacity strengthens both industrial competitiveness and intergenerational safety, transforming biotech from a cost centre into a durable engine of innovation and resilience.

Climate Interventions

The current lack of global leadership on climate opens an opportunity and need for the EU to demonstrate thought leadership when it comes to another fundamentally disruptive technology. The EU can leverage its world-leading climate science and atmospheric satellite observation capabilities to demonstrate the cost of unilateral moves and vice versa, the benefit of international coordination. No international norm will be as powerful to prevent dangerous unilateral climate interventions as the enlightened self-interest of global actors who understand the risks to their own interests. The EU is uniquely positioned to create such an understanding through responsible research, international assessments, and international monitoring. Even more, the EU faces an immense opportunity to shape this issue at an early stage if it chooses to use public research funding as a lever affording agency to present and future European decisionmakers to define what it means to approach this issue responsibly.

As the world remains on a trajectory toward up to 3°C of heating this century, deliberate global interventions to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight — Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) – finds increasing attention. Decisions—whether to fund, restrict, or coordinate research—are not merely technical or scientific. They are shaping the conditions under which future generations will confront climate instability and the geopolitical and governance challenges that come with it.

The current lack of coordinated international assessment and public research leaves future decision-makers without the knowledge needed to evaluate SRM’s risks, feasibility, and governance requirements. Conversely, unregulated or fragmented research could normalise unilateral experimentation and create new geopolitical tensions as private companies already invest in deployment capabilities. Both paths carry intergenerational risks: ignorance and overreach alike could constrain future capacities to respond prudently to worsening climate impacts, including potential emergencies arising from crossing tipping points.

The European Commission’s Chief Scientific Advisors have underscored the importance of comprehensive research into risks and uncertainties, while preventing premature large-scale testing or deployment. The European Group on Ethics has pointed out complexities that require an adaptive and reflexive governance approach. And the EU Commission’s 2025 Strategic Foresight Report emphasised the current absence of an international framework for governing SRM.

This situation risks leaving the next generation with a critical deficit in collective decision-making capacity and insufficient European expertise to influence global decisions on such powerful interventions. For the EU’s intergenerational strategy, this highlights the need to ensure that today’s research and policy choices on SRM strengthen the foundation for future decisions. The policies of today should expand rather than narrow the policy options available to future generations facing climate breakdown and the geopolitics that come with it.

Recommendation: We have previously argued that a comprehensive Climate Security Strategy may need to be developed as part of Europe’s broader Preparedness strategy. Following the Niinistö report’s recommendation to prepare for worst-case scenarios,^[26] this strategy should outline response options for major disruptions such as a halt of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or unilateral climate interventions with regional or global impacts.^[27]

Recommendation: Yet acceleration must be paired with restraint where risks outweigh benefits. Climate intervention technologies, particularly Solar Radiation Modification, require putting public research funding before private for-profit technology development. Future decision-makers should be equipped with the knowledge needed to assess the risks and potential benefits comprehensively rather than being forced by particular interest holders.^[28]

Recommendation: For climate resilience, the EU’s scientific agencies (JRC, European Environment Agency, Copernicus Climate Services) could be mandated and resourced to detect early signs of climate tipping points^[29] and ensure these warnings reach policymakers in real time. Similarly, European satellite capabilities across the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT and member states’ own organizations could be directed toward a coordinated effort to ensure the early detection and monitoring of any atmospheric test of climate interventions.^[30] 

Democracy Under Pressure

Over the past decade, leading tech companies have shifted power away from citizens and governments, evading democratic oversight.^[31] Recent geopolitical developments reveal an alarming inflection point: tech and politics are deeply entangled, threatening Western liberal democracy.^[32] This has led to calls for Europe to safeguard its democratic and technological future to avoid becoming dependent fully on the US.^[33]

The concentration of technological and economic power in a few firms magnifies these challenges. Market concentration in AI development has created a dependency on a small number of actors and non-EU countries controlling the most advanced models^[34]. This not only limits transparency and accountability but risks aligning technological priorities with commercial rather than democratic interests. These dynamics threaten to hollow out the public sphere by replacing collective deliberation with opaque algorithmic influence.

Europe’s democratic resilience depends not only on protection from external manipulation but also on strengthening internal agency. The concentration of technological and economic power in a few private actors has weakened citizens’ ability to shape decisions that govern their lives. Reversing this trend requires rebuilding democratic capacity from the ground up. Civic participation, transparent decision-making, and equitable access to digital tools are essential to ensure that technology supports democratic processes^[35]. Safeguarding democracy in the digital age therefore means securing the very conditions that allow citizens to act freely and collectively in shaping their future.

At the same time, beyond disinformation and manipulation, emerging technologies also transform the underlying incentives that sustain democratic systems. As automation and algorithmic decision-making reshape economic and political structures, they risk rewarding efficiency and control over participation and accountability. Technology never just serves the economy and democracy; it reshapes their foundations.^[36] The task ahead is to guide innovation and governance so that the incentives it generates align with openness, accountability, and shared agency rather than control and consolidation.

Future generations will inherit not only the outcomes of today’s policies, but also the systems that enable or limit their agency. Protecting the cognitive, social, and informational integrity of public life must be treated as a long-term investment in democratic stability. By embedding participation, accountability, and fairness into the governance of emerging technologies, Europe can ensure that democracy itself evolves as a living system capable of renewal across generations.

Recommendation: We should aim to preserve distributed agency and democratic control. Europe should prioritize technical solutions to emerging technology risks over proposals that concentrate power in single actors. Invest in technologies that augment human capabilities and enable decentralized ownership of value creation, extending the period during which humans remain economically and politically relevant. Strengthen democratic institutions through better verification systems, distributed fact-checking, and reforms that accelerate legislative processes to match the pace of technological change. Without deliberate choices to preserve distributed agency, emerging technologies risk creating arrangements where institutions lose their incentives to serve human interests, constraining future generations’ ability to shape their own societies.

Mental Health and Human Flourishing

The declining mental health of young people^[37] signals a major threat to the resilience of future generations.^[38] Individuals’ daily environments are increasingly digital and shaped by AI-enabled interfaces. Despite rapid adoption, these technological ecosystems have not been tested for their impacts on human development and flourishing. Yet, emerging evidence links prolonged interactions with algorithmically curated environments to rising rates of anxiety, and depression, particularly among young people. Moreover, decades of research show that human nature is particularly exploitable by the type of reinforcement mechanisms underlying social media algorithms, as well as by the attention-grabbing and habit-forming interface features designed to maximise user engagement.

The human tendency to anthropomorphise AI and offload cognitive effort creates particular vulnerabilities when interacting with AI chatbots. These systems are designed to be agreeable and affirming, raising concerns about their influence on critical thinking and rational decision-making. Moreover, as people increasingly turn to AI for emotional support, questions arise about how this reshapes human connection and coping mechanisms. Using AI for emotional support can run the real risk of supplanting and undermining clinically validated therapeutic applications. Combined with design features which perpetuate vulnerabilities, this could create an environment which erodes mental well-being and psychological stability. AI-generated content further compounds these risks by blurring reality and fiction, while promoting compulsive consumption patterns.

The design and deployment of advanced AI systems also affect well-being in more subtle ways. Their environmental footprint is growing rapidly, consuming large amounts of energy, water, and rare materials, while deep uncertainty surrounds their economic impact^[39]. Depending on how benefits and costs are distributed, these developments could deepen inequalities and undermine collective resilience—factors closely tied to long-term mental and social health.

As such, the platforms and digital services that mediate young people’s social interactions, shape their information environments, and influence their daily habits have become among the most consequential forces shaping future generations — making their governance a central question of intergenerational fairness.

Recommendation: An intergenerational fairness strategy must set a higher standard for mental health — not just absence of illness, but the presence of conditions that support human flourishing and optimal development. Meeting this higher standard requires a “mental-health-in-all-policies” approach that embeds mental health across all policy sectors. This ensures that long-term resilience strategies address the known determinants of mental health^[40] beyond healthcare interventions alone, including the broader conditions in which people live, work, and develop.

Recommendation: The digitalisation agenda must be revisited to prioritise digital literacy in education that empowers future generations to understand both the potential and limitations of emerging technologies. This must be coupled with accountability: platforms and digital services shaping young people’s environments must be held responsible — through rigorous enforcement of existing regulations and new standards where needed — for designing systems that support rather than undermine the flourishing of future generations.

Link to the Submission:  https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14768-Strategy-on-intergenerational-fairness/F33114482_en

Endnotes