Redefining Hope in AI (Part 1)

A personal reckoning with responsibility

This series is my attempt to tell my own story honestly, and to situate it within a longer lineage of social movements that taught me how people move from discomfort to responsibility. The way I think about power, agency, and ethics in AI today did not come from technology alone. It was shaped by how others before me have named moments of choice under unequal conditions. I’ve been influenced by the work of Marshall Ganz, Joanna Macy, and Ruha Benjamin, not just as authorities to cite, but as companions who helped me recognize patterns I was already living.

There is an Islamic Hadith that has guided my relationship to injustice.

Abu Sa’id al-Khudri reported that the Prophet Muhammad PBUH said:

“Whoever among you sees wrongdoing, let him change it with his hand. If he cannot, then with his tongue. If he cannot, then with his heart, which is the weakest level of faith.”

For a long time, I believed I was honoring that rule.

How I learned to stay

I was building a career in tech. Climbing ladders that had taken sacrifice to reach, especially as an immigrant woman.

With a North African passport in Germany, I never felt entitled to take risks lightly. I told myself I had to be careful. That I had to earn my place. That speaking too loudly or pushing too hard could cost me more than it would others.

So I found ways to care that felt legitimate and safe. I signed up for every DEI initiative that came my way. I joined internal working groups. I took Sustainability trainings, I introduced empathy in everything I touched, I even led large CSR programs inside major tech companies. I believed in that work, and I still think some of it mattered. It gave me language and a sense that I was contributing.

I also want to be clear about something : I felt joy in my work.

I loved traveling. I loved designing strategies, running workshops, running executive meetings, helping organizations move faster, work better. I liked building things. I liked being good at what I did. Innovation excited me. The work was not empty.

That is why this story is not about being trapped in a system I hated.

If I had to describe it honestly, I would say it’s about how easy it is to stay comfortable inside a system that doesn’t ask for much disruption. About how responsibility can be expressed in ways that soothe your conscience while leaving the deeper structure untouched.

At the time, I told myself this was what it meant to be reasonable.

Looking back, I see how carefully restrained my sense of responsibility had become.

The cost of staying

What staying started to cost me was the alignment, with my core social justice values, with the instinct I grew up with not to look away when communities are harmed, especially the most vulnerable ones.

I learned that way of looking by two parents who taught for living, and who taught me to see beyond my own position.

I also come from places that rarely make it into decision-making rooms and that live with the consequences of choices made elsewhere.

Reaching those rooms myself was not just personal success, it carried a duty of care.A duty of representation. And over time, I could feel that duty slipping into something symbolic instead of real. I was present, but careful. Included, but restrained. The cost was knowing that I was no longer sure who that access was serving.

What became harder to ignore was my own implication. Not as an individual villain, but as someone whose position made certain things smoother, more acceptable, more invisible. Being inside those rooms meant benefiting from decisions already taken, from trajectories already set. My work didn’t create harm (at least not directly), but it helped normalize the conditions under which harm could be explained, deferred, or absorbed. That realization mattered.

And at some point, I couldn’t keep telling myself that same story.

During the day, I was in meetings talking about innovation, efficiency, progress. And then I’d go home and read about workers being crushed, ecosystems collapsing, communities paying the cost, civilians dying at scale, all happening in real time, with technology and infrastructure quietly sitting underneath it all. The same infrastructure I was promoting every day. None of this was secret. I knew all of it.

What changed was that I couldn’t switch it off anymore when I walked into work. I’d hear myself speaking in a language that left all of that out, and it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t justify.

No one was treating me badly and I wasn’t under pressure to lie.

But I was splitting myself in two: one version of me that could function professionally, and another that couldn’t unsee what i knew. Keeping those two apart took more and more effort. It was this constant work of containment. And eventually I understood that what was becoming unsustainable wasn’t the job itself, but the cost of pretending these realities had nothing to do with each other.

I was burning out not from the work itself, but from trying to maintain the two realities at the same time.

And that was the tipping point.

Why me

But then I kept asking myself why me, and the answer wasn’t heroic.

For years, I learned how to stay, to fit in, and benefit. I learned which questions were welcome and which ones would cost me, and I accepted that trade more times than I want to admit. Silence wasn’t forced on me. It was rewarded.

So when I ask why me now, it’s not because I think I’m special. It’s because I recognize the moment when silence stops being personal and starts doing political work.

Marshall Ganz says that in public space, if you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you, and it won’t be people who have your interests at heart. And of course, power always has a story ready.

I knew how that story was written. I had helped shape narratives about progress, innovation, and speed. I had repeated those lines thousands of times myself. And we can see it clearly with AI. Someone is already telling a confident, polished story about inevitability. That this is just how things will be. That resistance is childish. That adaptation is maturity.

I know that story well. I helped live inside stories like it.

And still, I never felt fully at ease. With my background, my passport, my history, I always knew my position was conditional. I couldn’t afford to be reckless. I couldn’t afford to be the loudest voice. I learned to speak carefully, to frame concerns in acceptable language.

So when I ask why me now, the answer is simple.

Because at some point knowing is enough, and everything else is a decision.

A.D

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