Choose Our Future with AI
What Happens When Communities Shape the AI Conversation
This is the first post in our “Choose Our Future with AI” series. Each post goes deeper into one of four conversations from our April gathering at KQED.
Dozens of stories were shared at KQED in April. One described students using AI voice tools to practice job interviews. They could rehearse, get feedback, refine their answers, and build confidence before entering a real conversation.
Another story raised a concern about young people forming emotional attachments to AI companion bots during pivotal years, substituting those relationships for human ones at a formative stage of development.
Both stories are part of a larger conversation, one that brought educators, technologists, students, and community organizers together. They gathered for a series of charrettes, small-group conversations about what kind of society we want to build with AI.
The conversations covered the future of work, learning, metrics, and community life. Underneath all four, one concern kept surfacing: will humans remain active participants in shaping the future of AI?
A designer working on civic and public-space projects framed it this way: “If AI is the measure of average, how do we continue to raise the bar from there?”
This question moved the conversation away from familiar debates about whether AI is good or bad, and toward something more complex. If AI can increasingly perform at or above average across many domains, what do we value more as human beings? What skills, relationships, and forms of judgment become more important, not less?
During the community conversation, a participant drew a distinction that clarified the stakes. Social media went after our attention. AI is going after our emotional attachment. These are not the same vulnerability, and they don’t call for the same response.
What made these conversations unusual wasn’t that they surfaced new fears. It was that they kept returning to a different kind of story, one about people actively choosing how to use AI rather than waiting to see what it would do to them. Students reached for AI tools to practice, organize, and build confidence before stepping into professional opportunities. People with disabilities used AI to access work and expression that had previously been out of reach. Individuals in crisis found support they wouldn’t otherwise have had.
The most compelling stories were not about automation. They were about access and the ability to show up more fully than before.
The four conversations took place in different rooms, with different questions, but the same conflict beneath them all. AI is moving fast. The systems designed to support people are not moving at the same pace. And the people most affected by that gap are rarely in the rooms where the decisions get made.
No one left with an easy answer. But something else was clear. People hunger for spaces to ask these questions publicly, collaboratively, and across generations, without assuming the future is already written.
The future is not already written. It’s ours to choose.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll share what happened in each of the four charrettes, including the stories, the tensions, and the questions each room kept returning to. We’ll also be sharing student voices and continuing to explore what it might look like to measure human flourishing in a world increasingly shaped by AI.
H-Corps is a community exploring how AI can strengthen human agency, creativity, and connection.