We came of age waiting for the dial-up to connect. We listened to its strange mechanical screech like it was promising something important, though no one could say exactly what. We hung in anticipation during the noisy pause before connection, where hope and impatience lived side by side in the small, flickering glow of a computer screen.
Most of us were born between the eighties and mid-nineties, into a world that still believed in things like pensions and meritocracy. Our parents told us to go to university, which we did, acquiring degrees and debts in equal measure. Many of us were in college or senior year of high school when 9/11 happened. We watched the towers fall on grainy TV screens, trying to make sense of a future that suddenly felt harder and scarier to imagine. The world seemed to become darker and colder at the very moment when we were about to set foot in it. It felt like the space for innocence had been quietly carved away while no one was looking.
By the time we finished college, the sub-prime mortgage crisis ballooned, the economy collapsed, and the climate was in crisis. Still, we found each other on Facebook and kept posting photos of our breakfasts online. We learned how to talk about our feelings in theory, which mostly meant we texted each other late at night and avoided eye contact in the morning. We had grown up believing in progress, or at least in the stability of things. In our late twenties and early thirties, we found ourselves sharing flats with strangers, applying for jobs that didn’t exist ten years ago, and trying to be ethical consumers in a collapsing world economy. It wasn’t exactly tragic, but it wasn’t what we had hoped for, either.
Around the same time, Steve Jobs stood on a stage in a black turtleneck and held up the future in the shape of a phone. It was sleek and edgy, like something out of a film we’d watched as children. Suddenly the internet wasn’t a place we went to, it was a thing we carried in our pockets. It felt like technology was accelerating towards something profound, and plenty of people pretended to know what.
Meanwhile, the tools we grew up with, the ones that once felt like toys or tricks, were quietly becoming something else. The internet stopped being a place and became a presence. At first, it curated our preferences; then it began predicting them. It finished our sentences, anticipated our thoughts, mapped our desires. Somewhere along the way, machines stopped waiting for our commands and started learning to reflect ourselves back to us.
We didn’t notice the exact moment it happened. Like so many transformations, it arrived slowly, then all at once. A chatbot passed the Turing Test, not with fireworks, but with a shrug. A line that once seemed impossible to cross had been blurred long ago, almost casually. It didn’t feel like magic. It felt like an inevitability. It felt like something that had been coming for a long time, a voice that had been listening long before it learned how to speak.
For a generation raised on the promise of agency, on the belief that human will, creativity, and intelligence were our defining powers, this shift is not just technological. It’s existential. If machines can now write, design, decide, predict, what, then, are we for? Putting aside the question of what jobs will be left, what meaning will remain in our identities?
And now we stand facing the midpoint of adulthood, at the precipice of shifting from being descendants shaped by the past to becoming ancestors responsible for the future. Everything that once seemed stable looks provisional. We worry about entire job categories being eliminated due to AI. Some of us are cautiously optimistic that new jobs will be created to fill the gap. Others are not so sure. Those of us in leadership roles are already reshaping our organizations for a workforce that is fit for purpose for AI.
For those of us building the products shaping this shift, it raises uncomfortable questions. If we’re designing systems that can generate ideas, automate work, and mimic judgment, what are we really optimizing for? Convenience? Profit? Alignment? What does it mean to build ethically when the consequences of our designs ripple out invisibly, touching lives we’ll never see?
We used to believe technology was neutral, just a tool, shaped by its user. But we’ve learned it’s never that simple. Products carry values. Decisions compound. And when intelligence becomes ambient, woven into every interface, every decision-making process, we’re no longer just making tools. We’re shaping the boundaries of human agency itself.
We know AI will make its sweep both faster, and in some important ways more slowly, than the pundits would have us believe. But there’s one thing we can all agree on. The sweep is inevitable. Quietly, as we sunset entry-level roles that were once safe, steady on-ramps into the workforce, we wonder what kind of world the generation that follows us will step into.
What does it mean to inhabit a world where machines can match or surpass our intelligence, reshaping the very nature of work and purpose in ways we’re only beginning to understand? How do we build this world so that we leave it in a more sustainable place for the generations to come?
We‘re young enough that the future is still ours to live, and yet also increasingly ours to pass down. What kind of future will that be? Will we choose our principles over power, not just theoretically, but in the architectures we design, the trade-offs we accept, the incentives we set? Will we push the limits of our understanding, not only of what technology can do, but what it should do, and who it serves? Or will we simply choose to dance between the red lines, careful not to cross them, but not asking who drew them, and why?
So here we are, the first generation to grow up with the internet, and the last to believe it might save us. We came of age believing in progress, and now we find ourselves questioning what progress really means.
As someone who works and leads an organization in tech, I carry these questions with me every day. I think about what it means to build, to lead, to shape systems that others will live inside. I wonder what we owe the future, not just in innovation, but in integrity.
This space is where I want to explore the tension between hope and realism, between disruption and care, between what technology can do and what it should do, and where technology, experience, and culture intersect. I don’t have all the answers. But I believe that asking better questions, out loud and together, is a good place to start.
If any of this resonates with you, and if you’ve also been wondering how we navigate this next chapter, I hope you’ll stay. Let’s see what we can build.