This post is long overdue. I was in Bangalore, back in December 2025, for the Quest 2 Learn Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. Quest and I go back to 2008, when I first attended one of their conferences. Our paths have kept crossing since: the Quest to Learning conference in 2018, conversations about youth and learning in India, hosting members of their team on the Silver Lining for Learning podcast and more. Over the years Aakash Sethi and his team, too many to name here, have become close friends and I have huge respect for the work they do.

The theme of the most recent summit was “Beyond the AI Hype: Building Radical Futures of Hope with Young People,” and my talk was about where the education system has fallen short in preparing young people for uncertain futures. I talked about AI as a smart, drunk, supremely confident, biased, sycophantic intern (a formulation I’ve been developing for a while now), about the creative possibilities and the genuine dangers, about supernormal stimuli and the Eliza effect, and about why “move intentionally and nurture things” might be a better mantra for educators than Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things.” You can watch the full keynote below.

While I was at the summit, I was introduced to a remarkable new report from Quest Alliance: The Complex Digital Lives of Young People. The report is based on fieldwork, conducted by a team led by Bhawna Parmar, across nine sites in five Indian states, involving 205 young people from government schools and Industrial Training Institutes. The research team didn’t go in with assumptions about vulnerable victims or tech-savvy digital natives. They listened. What they found is a world of tactical agency, folk theories about algorithms, gendered surveillance, cultural belonging, and aspiration formation, all unfolding in what they call the “digital maidan,” the public square of social media where young people gather for leisure, connection, and self-making.

This matters now because of what comes next. Generative AI is already arriving, and unlike YouTube, which at least leaves traces in browser history, AI conversations happen in private. No teacher, parent, or researcher has access. Understanding how young people navigate today’s digital spaces is essential groundwork for responding to tomorrow’s. I was moved enough by the report that when Quest asked me to write the foreword earlier this year, I said yes immediately. You can read the foreword here, and the full report is available here.

Alongside the report, Quest Alliance has also released a youth manifesto, “By the Young, For the Young, Of the Young: A Care-Centric Code for Better AI Futures,” created in collaboration with young people from across India. Together, these documents insist that young people are not just subjects of study but participants in shaping their own futures.

Quest has been doing this painstaking work for nearly two decades: understanding how young people in India actually learn, engaging through workshops and participatory design, and more recently, working with youth on futures thinking. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t always make headlines but matters enormously. I’m glad our paths keep crossing, and I look forward to further conversations and collaborations.