This is Part One of The Human Reckoning: A Future of Trust Series
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Trust is fragile.
When it comes to trust, I have always believed that it begins within. How we trust ourselves influences how we extend trust to others, and often how trustworthy we are in return. Human behavior, and the internal patterns that shape it, has been my passion for much of my life.
When I began The Future of Trust, my intention was to go wherever trust took me. From artificial intelligence and leadership to our own internal landscapes.
As I started writing, my attention was largely directed outward towards artificial intelligence, so that became the direction of my first essays. I was watching, and more than that, participating in, a transformational era unfolding around us.
I have been building AI for humans since 2023, and I believe deeply in the positive impact it can have on humanity. But a hopeful outlook doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to build responsibly. It requires us to look just as carefully at the potential risks as we do at the possibilities. Some of the upstream issues our team anticipated ultimately informed the way we designed our own technology.
That was the impetus for The AI Reckoning, a twelve-part series exploring my concerns about an industry deploying technology before we fully understood its second-order consequences.
I was watching builders and enterprises optimize for speed to market while responsibility to people struggled to keep pace. At the same time, a younger generation was pushing back against a future they didn’t design and weren’t sure they wanted.
Since that first article was published, and with the series now complete, many of the upstream effects I wrote about are coming into focus. Yet much of the conversation about what comes next is still happening among the people building technology, while the broader population experiencing its effects remains too far outside of it. The trust signals I was seeing haven’t gone away. If anything, they’re getting louder.
The AI Reckoning
As money poured into the industry and the sea of AI companies continued to grow, I took a look at the physical infrastructure required to support this extraordinary growth along with the water and energy demands that didn’t seem to make their way into the business case. I also looked at the economics and what happens when the cost of delivering increasingly sophisticated intelligence collides with expectations for profitability. I explored what it means to build businesses on platforms you don’t control, and what happens inside organizations when technology moves faster than people can absorb the change.
The subjects were different, but the thread running through them was trust.
From the beginning, I described The AI Reckoning as a trust series that happened to be using AI as its lens. I wasn’t interested in predicting whether AI would succeed. I believed it would. I still do. What concerned me was that we were building extraordinary capability at unprecedented speed without paying enough attention to signals that were already telling us something about where it might lead.
Now that I have completed that exploration, I find my attention shifting.
I am less interested in what AI is becoming, and increasingly curious about what is happening to us alongside it.
That shift began showing up in my writing before I had really named it. As I explored empathy, I found myself thinking about what trying to teach a machine to practice it might reveal about the way we practice it ourselves. The growing desire to know whether something was made by a human had me thinking about authorship, effort and trust. More recently, I have been thinking about authenticity and identity, and what happens when technology can amplify our abilities while making it harder to know where our contribution ends and the machine’s begins.
These aren’t really questions about AI. They’re questions about us. And I think I am ready to follow them.
The Human Side of the Equation
I care about human flourishing. It is one of the reasons I am so optimistic about what AI could make possible.
I want AI to increase our capability. I also want it to increase our capacity. If technology can take repetitive work off our plates, help us move through certain tasks more efficiently, or give us access to capabilities we didn’t have before, that can create space for something else. Ideally, some of that space gives us room for greater creativity and innovation, for learning and connection, and perhaps simply the opportunity to rest and restore.
That is an extraordinary possibility, but I am not sure it happens automatically. We have been promised greater efficiency from technology for decades, yet we have a remarkable ability to fill whatever capacity we create. The hour we save doesn’t necessarily become an hour spent thinking or connecting with someone we care about. It can just as easily become another hour of work. Greater productivity can raise expectations for even greater productivity. More access to information can leave us consuming more while understanding less.
AI can give us capacity. What we do with that capacity is still a human choice.
The same is true of capability. AI can help us write, analyze, research, create and solve problems at a level that would have been unimaginable for most people only a few years ago. I find that exciting. I don’t want to preserve difficulty simply because something used to be hard.
But I also don’t want us to confuse being able to produce something with developing the human capability that once went into producing it.
We develop judgment by exercising it, and some of our confidence comes from doing difficult things and discovering that we can. Curiosity develops when we allow ourselves to follow what we don’t yet understand, while creativity can emerge from the wandering, frustration and unexpected connections that happen before we ever reach the finished product.
If AI can shorten some of those journeys, wonderful. But we should understand what was happening to us along the way before we decide that every part of the journey was simply inefficiency.
For me, that isn’t an argument for doing less with AI. It is an argument for expecting more from our relationship with it.
What Are We Designing For?
I have spent years thinking about empathetic AI and what it could look like if we designed technology around people rather than simply asking people to adapt to technology. I still believe in that possibility, perhaps more strongly now than when I began.
I want AI to help us become more capable without making us feel less capable. I want the capacity it creates to give us room for better thinking, healthier connection and greater creativity rather than simply more output. At its best, I believe this technology can support our confidence and judgment and even help us reconnect with one another in healthier, more positive ways.
More recently, I have been thinking about authenticity and identity, and what happens when technology can amplify our abilities while making it harder to know where our contribution ends and the machine’s begins.
There is an incredible upward spiral available to us.
Technology can extend human capability and create greater capacity. That capacity can give us more room to think, create, connect, learn and restore. Those experiences can make us more capable, more confident and perhaps more connected to the parts of ourselves that matter most.
But an upward spiral isn’t inevitable simply because the technology exists.
We have to design for it. And I think this is where the conversation needs to go next.
The Human Reckoning
The AI Reckoning asked us to look more carefully at what we are building and what we may not be accounting for as we build it. I don’t consider that conversation finished. There will be developments worth returning to, and I expect I will.
But I am ready to turn the lens around.
The Human Reckoning is not going to be a series about protecting humans from AI or drawing a defensive line around the things machines should never be allowed to do. I don’t think that is where the most interesting or useful conversation lies.
I want to explore what becomes more important for us as AI becomes more capable. That means looking at how our relationship with technology affects the way we think, create, learn, trust ourselves and relate to one another, while remaining active participants in deciding what we want this technology to add to the human experience.
I don’t know that I have answers to all of my questions. In some cases, I am fairly certain I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I want to write about them.
A reckoning doesn’t have to mean something has gone wrong. It can be an accounting. A moment when we look clearly at where we are, what we have created, and what we want to do next.
We are still early enough in our relationship with AI to have a meaningful say in what that relationship becomes. We don’t have to accept every efficiency simply because it is available or preserve every old way of doing something simply because it is familiar. We can decide what technology should take from our plates and what we want the resulting space to make possible.
We can ask more of AI than productivity. We can ask whether it is helping us flourish. And we can ask more of ourselves than simply keeping up with it.
For all the attention we give to designing the future of artificial intelligence, perhaps the greater opportunity is recognizing that we are also designing the future of the human experience.
We don’t have to be passengers in a future AI creates for us. We have the opportunity to be its architects.
That is The Human Reckoning.
About the Author
Sheryl Anjanette is the founder and CEO of Parsley360, an AI company focused on the human side of transformation. She is an author, speaker and behavioral expert whose work explores trust, human behavior and our evolving relationship with AI. The Future of Trust examines what happens to people, organizations and trust as technology changes the world around us.