InnovateUS 
Last week, I had the opportunity to host a unique workshop in partnership with Capita titled AI, Families, and the Common Good.
Along with Jay Chaudhary, we brought together an unusual mix of service providers, advocates, philanthropists, journalists, technologists, researchers, policymakers, and community leaders from across the country.
These are the people who wake up every day thinking about the challenges families face and how to address them—from helping people access benefits, supporting children in foster care, and expanding economic opportunity, to strengthening the institutions and systems that make those outcomes possible.
Many participants arrived with little experience using or discussing AI. But they came with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to engage with a technology that is increasingly shaping the lives of the families and communities they serve. Most importantly, they were there because the stakes are becoming too high for the populations they serve to sit out the conversation.
The question of what brings people to the table to move toward democratically governing AI sat at the center of our time together. Or, more specifically, if AI is going to reshape our institutions, our economy, and our daily lives, what will motivate people to begin to engage? Especially when so much of the AI narrative is tied to a sense of lack of control.
I believe that our decision-making, our motivations in life, the things we wake up for and go to sleep with, and what shapes who we are as human beings, are the people we love. And that if we want to influence the trajectory of AI, it has to be connected to what makes us fundamentally who we are, our family.
If it’s not centered there, we’ll cede the conversation to those currently driving the decisions, who may not have public outcomes at heart.
To capture the discussions we had over a three-day period, I interviewed Anya Kamenetz, an award-winning journalist whom I deeply admire, to help tell the story of why we came together and what we are working toward achieving.
Tell us who you are.
My name is Anya Kamenetz. I live in New York City, I have two children, and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster. I do speeches and lead workshops, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I sometimes call generational justice, or human thriving in a time of intense change, and the polycrisis, the multiple interconnected crises we're living through as a human civilization.
I like thinking about things from a 30,000-foot view, but also from lived experience.
What drew you to a workshop on AI, families, and the common good?
I knew Joe Waters' work and have worked alongside him. I really appreciate where he's coming from. And I've known you and your work in different contexts. But honestly, AI has been a gap for me in terms of my analysis of what's happening. Part of that is emotional. This just seemed like an amazing opportunity to think about it alongside a group of people who I know are very values-aligned.
The family piece is really where my expertise lives. I wrote The Art of Screen Time, which is really trying to reconcile the promise and the peril of technology in family life and what it means to be a parent in a digital time, when we don't have the neighbor over the back fence to talk about parenting decisions with, but we have the entire internet, people parenting online, sharing.
And then all of these incredible questions and anxieties about the impact of fast-changing digital technologies on our children's healthy development from age zero through the workforce.
I've thought about that a lot. AI feels like a new ball game.
What ideas or questions are you leaving with?
It's been an emotional rollercoaster. To come here, we had to unbutton a lot of feelings people have been carrying around. People have a lot of fear. Some resentment. We heard about places where AI has been imposed on communities without their consent. I personally shared that I'm part of a class action lawsuit and that three of my books were used as training data. For a lot of journalists, this is coming directly for our jobs right now.
So these aren't abstract concerns.
We started with that airing out, and then we looked at resistance as a form of adaptation. We talked a lot about the data center conversation and the different ways communities are galvanizing around AI.
And once you pull out that Jenga piece, a lot of things start falling. It's inherently connected to the concentration of wealth, to billionaires, to taxation, and to the actions of the current administration.
But then we got our minds around the fact that AI is a baggy term. It's got a lot of different aspects. Are we talking about generative AI? Are we talking about agentic? Are we talking about a RAG — a subsystem where you're drawing on a particular dataset or database?
There was a lot of interest in the room in apps that are offering a connection to underlying information. Once we drilled down, people really shifted. I felt the energy and feelings shift because we started thinking about putting this technology in the hands of the people who need the most help and what it can actually do for them. And for us.
You used the phrase "resistance is adaptation." Can you say more?
Did the labor movement stop industrialization? No.
Resistance isn't futile; it's how you push the trajectory forward.
But it was an important entry into the struggle that allowed society to ameliorate the impact on people. Resistance isn't futile; it's how you push the trajectory forward.
There are two competing visions for the future, and one might prevail.
But you don't know how many degrees off target you can push. And I think that's kind of the debate we're having right now.
Why are families absent from AI governance conversations?
The answer is really a question of alignment and incentives, and concentration of power.
One of the valuable parts of today was going through the historical model, thinking about how the Industrial Revolution was imposed on families, how the mass media and mass communication revolution was imposed on families, and how it really took a long time for those in positions of power to face a backlash, for there to be organizing, and for a coherent response to emerge.
So it's pretty easy to understand why families haven't been in the center.
The questions we're asking right now are about facilitating that voice being heard. We do have models — co-design, user-centered design — that already exist in social entrepreneurship and social innovation. This is really about driving that forward.
You've spent so much of your career reporting on how technology shapes childhood and family life. How do we take those lessons and use them, not to be paralyzed in fear, but to take action?
There was a little more of a honeymoon in the previous waves. Some of that was hype, which is inevitable, but there was genuine wonder too. I put two three-year-old twin girls with iPads on the cover of Fast Company — the headline was "A Is for App" — and it explored how mobile, touchscreen, video-first, broadband technology was revolutionizing the level of engagement that very young children were having with digital tools. We thought television was a big deal, but now it's in the stroller, it's in their hands, it's in the crib.
Around the same time, you had people talking about MOOCs, about whether college could be free for everybody, whether you could make the iPod playlist version of college. The idea was you could democratize education, and it coincided with the optimism around the Millennium Development Goals.
We don't have time to build universities across Africa, but what if this could fill that need? It was a starry-eyed moment.
None of that panned out exactly the way people expected. But some of it did. Technologies kind of disappear once they become really useful. We're sitting in an electrified room right now, and we don't even notice that we have Wi-Fi and can instantly stream a street fair in Somalia, because it's just normal.
The ability to learn has been democratized. But what we learned was that access to materials is a tiny fraction of what we need in education. And there's often a cost.
Are you familiar with The Diamond Age?
[No.]
You need people, you need relationships, you need real-life experiences. Technology will never replace that.
It's a Neal Stephenson novel — a fable of a version of AI that serves as a child's perfect tutor from birth, their lifelong companion that teaches them everything they need to know. My husband still calls it his dream. And I'm like — we've been living in this reality, and that is not what you need. You need people, you need relationships, you need real-life experiences. Technology will never replace that.
With AI, the honeymoon period is little or nothing. It came incredibly quickly; the dangers are very evident and extreme, including the undermining of education and potentially of cognition itself.
I was never on the alarm side when it came to ed tech. I always said there's agency in this, we have choices, it's not inevitable. But when we start thinking about offloading reading and writing and people no longer seeing the point of them, that's a scary proposition. We're having the same debates, but on a much shorter timeframe.
How do we make families co-creators rather than just recipients?
I think you're off to a good start with the Burnes Center for Social Change and the Governance Lab co-design community-led pilots I heard about today.
The benefit of AI is that it lowers barriers to entry. The notion that nonprofits — which often don't have access to developers — will be able to experiment and iterate the way we've all learned to do with social media: I think there's a real possibility there.
But it needs to be supported, it needs to be facilitated, people need to be brought along. It is empowering. It genuinely is.
If AI were genuinely built with families instead of for families, what would actually be different?
To imagine that happening, you need to reimagine a major realignment of ownership and governance. I don't think it happens because of goodwill; I think it happens because of activism, public pressure, all kinds of pressure.
If we got the reins of the most powerful engine of growth into public hands, then first, you'd need time and space
But if that happened, if we got the reins of the most powerful engine of growth into public hands, then first, you'd need time and space. That's a big thing. People were asking for that here: a pause, a little time to really convene, to surface people's deep-seated needs and unfulfilled desires.
And coming out of that: what are the things that families and communities really need? We talked a lot today about access to services, very basic things to survive. Access to livelihood. The ability to create their own work and workflows, and to feel in charge.
The difference between someone who is terrified of getting replaced by AI, and someone like my husband — a senior software engineer who says this is the most amazing thing ever because it's tripling his output — that's a lot of education, a lot of background, a lot of familiarity. But it's also a whole infrastructure that's optimized to help him do better, not to get him out of the way.
I'd love to see teachers feeling really supported and helped, able to make their curriculum match each kid. I'd love to see students using AI in a way that feels creative and interesting, not as a replacement for other things.
What I really want is for us to be increasingly clear about the proper division of labor between humans and computers.
What I really want is for us to be increasingly clear about the proper division of labor between humans and computers.
It's 2030. What would tell you we built this right?
A few things.
A real movement for public AI — compute that is owned by, worked by, and used by students and communities. I'd love to see it in a university setting where people are genuinely thinking about how to use this for the public good.
Some kind of protection for the time that AI saves you. Think about a doctor saving two hours a day of billing time; how long before the HMO steals that time back from her and her patients? As a freelancer, if I become more productive for my clients in less time, I get to keep that time.
How do we create structures where people — especially families — actually get to keep what AI saves them?
How do we create structures where people — especially families — actually get to keep what AI saves them?
And the third piece is how we're actually introducing this to young people. "Introducing" is a misnomer; they're already in it. They're using AI, having conversations with it, having relationships with it, turning to it. And it's our most vulnerable kids who are turning to it most.
So we need the whole apparatus that surrounds young people, overburdened as it already is, the counselors, the after-school programs, the mentors, the librarians, the parent educators, the faith leaders, anybody who can open up a dialogue: What is this generative AI stuff? What does and doesn't it do? What are some ways of having a healthy interaction with it?
Running through a tough conversation before you talk to a friend — maybe. Doing research — sure. Having it do your work for you — no. Making it your confidant — no.
And the corollary: do we have serious guardrails in place five years from now, given the real liability fights and flagging and safety built in? You never get full safety. But safer.
One concern I have heard talked about is children forming their first relationships with AI. What do you make of that?
One of the first talks I gave about AI compared it to Darwin — to his theory of human evolution and the profound backlash it caused, because it was so decentering, such a shaking of the human self-concept. What are we? What is our position in the universe? Are we unique, or one of many? Are we descended from monkeys, or are we angels? What makes us special? This is starting those questions all over again.
The parasocial relationship is a well-documented concept in child development. Children personify and anthropomorphize everything because that's how their brains work at that stage. They talk to their teddy bears, they talk to books. When television started to define early childhood, there was fascinating research showing that children's imaginative play changed: instead of doing fully imaginary play, they followed scripts — He-Man and She-Ra scripts that were so gendered, violent, and limiting because they were working off popular culture rather than just making up stories. That has been woven in for 50 years.
The human capacity for attachment doesn't change, but what we're fitting into that slot is changing
This is a new version of it. The human capacity for attachment doesn't change, but what we're fitting into that slot is changing. And that requires of us a high-level ethical conversation that keeps going back to the common good: What do we wish for our children? What is beneficial, and what is not?
Why does the family frame matter so much to you personally?
Families are one thing AI doesn't have.
Families are one thing AI doesn't have. Authentic human relationships are in real demand in today's world. And I know from the messaging work on climate that love and concern for children and future generations is the number one motivator — and yet we're often actively discouraged from bringing it to the table when making so-called rational, professional decisions.
I think that framing is really powerful. I hope it comes to a wider focus.