I was six the first time my father raped me. The day after, I looked him in the eye and read him Leviticus 18. I had already read the Bible cover to cover twice.
6 None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord.
17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness.
He did it anyway. For nine more years.
AI is not the problem. Listen to the Kággaba, who said it first.
AI isn’t ruining humanity. We are not going to be able to be in relationship with the tool if we can’t be in relationship with ourselves.
Everywhere I turn, I see one of two storylines. Both are prescriptive, telling you what to do. Both are normative, telling you whether your choice is moral. One is finger-pointing. The other is doomsday.
Gross.
Finger-pointing: Don’t use AI. It’s bad for the environment, it costs jobs, it spreads misinformation and deepens existing biases.
Doomsday: The AI age is here whether you like it or not. If you don’t use it, you’ll be behind, less productive, less competitive, poorer, and ultimately less happy. Even the engineers don’t really understand how it works, let alone how to regulate it.
Anthropic’s own IPO prospectus warns that
“sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
Wired’s Instagram summary concludes:
“while much has been made about the extent to which AI represents an existential threat to humankind, the specific mechanisms by which it could bring about that destruction are largely opaque.”
Here’s why I’m not buying either story.
We are leaving the capitalist world behind, and something new is coming in its place. AI is going to be in that new world too. But the how, the what, the when, the whom, the owners, the stewards, the winners, the losers ARE ALL UNKNOWN.
I am building confidence in my relationship with the unknown. I’ve had the practice.
For my first fifteen years, I was raped, and it was UNKNOWN whether I would ever live my life on my own terms. My pedophilic father, Severine Wamala, controlled the narrative. The Lowell Sun published his accounts and posited that maybe it was their role to maintain his innocence, because he had not been proven guilty… yet.
Spoiler alert: his ass was guilty. He raped his own daughter (me!) from age six to fifteen.
I was fifteen when I learned that even with evidence, and laws that state with such clarity who should be believed, I would not be. It took me nine years to self-advocate, and even my court case, the State of New Hampshire v. Wamala, wasn’t a walk in the park. I was cross-examined and told I was a liar, just an ungrateful, rebellious teenager. Yes, he was sentenced. No, he didn’t serve the full time.
It took years of self-compassion and tenderness work, silent meditations, DBT, and many mental health diagnoses to reunite with my youngest parts: the parts of me that thought it was my fault, and the rage and incessant, calculating vociferating I carried well into adulthood.
I have a hundred reflexes that make me smaller. So often, I forget whether executing the plan is the plan, or whether the goal was ever mine to begin with.
I was building a case for myself everywhere I went.
His daughter went on to become a Division 1 basketball walk-on at the same school as MNBA Nova Knicks legends, Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart. The youngest person and first female ever to win the Massachusetts State Chess Championship, at fourteen. A Rhodes Scholar.
See?
Disciplined.
See?
Useful.
See?
I’m not what you think.
I can hear Little Jess in that rhythm now. She is not just trying to win. Younger versions of me tried to become unarguable.
And none of it made me happy. I kept betting that the next accomplishment, the next milestone, the next title would make me feel like I belonged, like I mattered, like my ideas mattered.
I learned early that silence could be misread. And I didn’t want to be misread. So I explained. I clarified. I softened my cadence. I led with my credentials. I taught systems how to read me before they could mislabel me. It worked. Until it didn’t. Because the more I translated, the more I disappeared.
Using my brilliance to try to argue with every possible reader is depleting. It leaves me insecure, reaching for curation as performative armor. My deepest fears all lie in being misunderstood, and in the story I made up about who I was if I wasn’t believed.
The promise of unknown unknowns
Monday, October 26 at 2:32pm. Claude refined a scratch draft email agentically, which means it can automatically pull from my meticulously arranged event tracker. Then I spent ninety minutes inside that Gmail draft, making it mine, adding additional recipients, and changing around some concepts and words.
At 4:07pm, I caught one wrong line about the proposal that showed me there was a flawed assumption upstream, as the primary source referenced was incorrect. I told Claude where the truth was in the original proposal and that it got it wrong in the original email to ensure any other wrong assumptions aren’t propagated later.
At 4:08pm, it answered:
Claude: “I took the lighting line out of the draft; the rest is unchanged.”
Excuse me Claude, the rest was not unchanged. Claude had replaced the whole email with its own copy minus the one sentence incorrectly referencing the primary source. Ninety minutes of my words, gone.