The AI of the Storm
My mother was a women’s historian.
That sounds like a simple enough sentence. But growing up in her house meant something specific. It meant that feminism wasn’t a bumper sticker or a rally cry. It was the water we swam in. Her dissertation, The Silent Sisterhood, wasn’t just a thesis she defended and filed away. It was how she moved through the world. A quiet insistence that women could not afford to wait for the patriarchy to take care of them. That the most radical thing we could do was show up for each other. Even when, especially when, our choices looked nothing alike.
I learned that early. And I have carried it a long time.
As an undergraduate myself during the coming of age of personal computing technology, I had an opportunity to watch how women used information technology within a liberal arts setting. We didn’t want to be coders (okay, I did but I was the exception) we wanted to use the bits and bytes to shape the work we wanted to do. To bend the technology toward us rather than bending ourselves toward it. When I landed the first information technology position at the women’s college where I had just graduated, I made myself a quiet promise. I was going to build something designed by women, for women. Something that said: you belong here too. Your work matters on this edge. Even if it looks different from the engineering students across the street.
Decades later, the ratio of women to men in tech remains woefully small. We have been at this a long time. And now we stand at what is the biggest technological threshold of our lifetimes, and some of us are telling other women to step back. To opt out. To keep their hands clean.
I understand the impulse. I do.
The harms are real and they are many. I won’t pretend otherwise.
Data centers are drinking our clean water dry and humming around the clock in communities that never asked for them and can’t afford to fight back. Artists and writers have watched their life’s work get swallowed whole to train systems that now compete with them for the same table. Workers are being displaced right now, in real time, in every sector, replaced by systems that will not pay into their healthcare or sit with them when things go sideways. The environmental footprint is staggering. The questions about bias, about who these systems are actually built for and who they harm, are not small questions.
But we are not launching our boat into pure waters, as we folly on Facebook or ask Alexa to remind us to take our meds. We are all already downstream of something. The question is not how to find clean water. The question is what we do from here.
I think about a woman who once chastised me as a new mom for using disposable diapers. She wasn’t wrong about the environment. She genuinely wasn’t. But I didn’t have the spoons for cloth diapers. I was running on empty in ways she couldn’t see from where she was standing. And the corporations dumping actual toxins into our actual water supply were doing so while we stood in the parking lot debating my personal diaper choices.
We have a long history of loading the weight of systemic problems onto the most exhausted person in the room. Usually a woman.
My personal choice of AI tool is not the crisis. The crisis is what happens when women are not in the room where the rules are being written.
I use AI in a variety of applications in my personal life. I am able to do some backend programming for virtual worlds that would be otherwise utterly unavailable to me. And as a disabled and housebound senior, virtual worlds are an important part of my identity. There’s simply no place for outside judgement of my worth or value. And while I understand folks who strongly disagree with the use of AI for refrigerator art (look ma what I made today) I do understand how it brings a smile to their face when able to fulfill their own personal artistic expression. And I don’t get to put my judgement about what ART is or is not to their happiness. That doesn’t mean we don’t inform folks and just put our head in the sand and ignore the elephant at the watering hole. All puns intended.
That doesn’t mean we look away from the real concerns. It means we hold both things at once. Which, if I’m being honest, is something women have always been asked to do.
There is no perfectly ethical AI company. I won’t pretend there is. They all have lawsuits, investors, government contracts, complicated histories.
But this tide is not going out. The clock does not run backward on technology. It never has. And my mother’s voice in the back of my head keeps asking the same question she always asked: who gets left behind if we don’t show up?
If we shame women out of engaging with these tools, out of understanding them, out of being part of the conversation about how they get shaped and who they serve, we answer that question. Women get left behind. Again. At a table where decisions are being made that will touch every corner of our lives.
We cannot afford that. We never could.
The sisterhood was never about making the same choices. It was about making sure no one had to face the consequences of their choices alone. It was about trusting each other to be informed adults. It was about showing up.
We are in the AI of the storm whether we chose it or not. The only question that matters now is the same one my mother was asking forty years ago.
Who steers? And who gets left behind?
Show up. Stay at the table. Steer the boat.
