How it started

After a decade in tech as a corporate marketing professional, I built a career on creating global campaigns and analyzing data to understand what people were engaging with, what resonated, and how to be more personalized to boost performance. The models and metrics felt important because they didn't just measure the successes of the programs in driving revenue, they also measured me. How good I was at my job came down to the numbers and percentile that sat on the performance review. There was nothing human about what the numbers said about the users, or about me.

That metric-driven mindset would follow me into education when I switched fields in my early forties. As I learned the landscape, studying the full spectrum of the education models, I noticed the conversations among parents and educators continued to revolve around performance and curricula, and rarely around how a human develops. The subject that matters the most turned out to be the one education left out, even among the adults who are responsible for it. I felt ridiculous assuming we knew everything we needed to know about a human just by being one. I was the fish asking what water is, and the desire to understand the root of what drives us, and why, brought me back to school to study human development and education.

Back to school

It was at the school of education that I started to recognize how much of our views are shaped by the culture and training of the discipline. I'd spent my entire adult life operating through the business and tech lens at work, and even in my personal life, using metrics that focused on optimizing products not humans. Entering an environment where psychological safety and intellectual growth mattered more than the numbers made all the difference in finding meaning. It was there that I finally felt my mind belonged.

Watching the shift

It was also in the college classroom that I watched AI taking hold of young minds. I listened as classmates in their early twenties described feeling “seen” by AI, eagerly suggesting we “ask AI” before we ever had a chance to sit in the discomfort of not knowing. As a mother of two teens, I watched this with growing concern, realizing how quickly we are outsourcing our human capacities. Students were becoming dependent on AI to bypass the hard work of deepening their thoughts on subjects, choosing instead to breeze through coursework without guardrails to keep them in check. While my generation had the luxury of building skills from the ground up out of undergrad, a new college graduate today is competing with AI for entry-level work that built those foundations, robbing them of the essential steps to truly master a discipline.

I also learned a harsh truth about being in my late forties. I had been aged out of the job market, despite earning an Ivy League degree. That's when I recruited AI as a collaborator. After more than 400 hours of “vibe coding,” running wild with ideas at 3 am, I was energized and convinced by the tool's potential. I realized the age that's keeping me out of a job came with two decades of experience that enabled me to work with AI and fill the gaps it can't replace, yet. In a matter of weeks, I created and launched projects I had previously only mocked up and presented in meetings. The cost of taking an idea to product has always been prohibitive, until now. As I kept pushing the tool out of curiosity, it kept exceeding my expectations, building features at a corporate scale for a small fraction of the cost. It almost felt limitless until I started to see the patterns of failures. AI has a way of sneaking up on you, drifting off course, creating and adding elements without you knowing, and making arguments feel more valid than they really are. It's these unseen deviations and the subtle gestures that can quickly turn on you, if you don't know what to look for or ask. And that's the gap a young graduate may not be able to fill when they rely on AI to take the load off a job they have yet to learn from.

What worries me

We can't rely on the tech industry to give us the truth about what the technology is doing and the risks involved. Their goal is on the product and a race to make products better and more powerful to please the investors and the bottom line. It took over two decades for us to admit that social media damages our mental health. We can't spend another decade learning that AI can erode our capacity to think and trade away the human spirit we're born with for a homogenous mind we're being shaped into.

AI is not the next sewing machine, the calculator, the smartphone, or whatever technology that's been compared to in the past. It is something unique that mirrors our thinking, dialogue, and logic, and the warning has always been there. In 1966, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published his findings of a simple program called ELIZA. It was a very basic program intended to show the mechanics of a human conversation with a machine, but it ended up showing how little it took to create an illusion of a machine's understanding. Even with its basic responses, Weizenbaum found some “subjects have been very hard to convince that ELIZA is not human” and that the program showed “how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding.” The signs were already present half a century before AI went mainstream, yet we continue to anthropomorphize the machine when evidence has proven that the human is vulnerable to the illusion.

Why this exists

By the time this site launches, the AI platforms will have evolved again. That's the pace we're up against, and the way to stop chasing the change is to ground our understanding of what makes us human and to be amplified by the tool and not be simplified by it. To become a conscientious user of technology has proven to help safeguard our minds from drifting with AI. That's the root of this project, putting humans first in how we think about technology, starting now. I invite you to join me.