What can destroy us can also save us. Here’s how I think we can stay in charge of the choice.

From the Rocky Horror Picture Show, source

Casey Harrell is a climate activist. For years, ALS had been slowly taking his speech, until even the people closest to him struggled to understand what he was saying.

In July 2023, surgeons at UC Davis implanted tiny sensor arrays in the part of his brain that controls speech. AI learned to read the signals his brain sends when he tries to talk, turned them into words, and spoke those words aloud in a voice rebuilt from old recordings of him.

The first time he heard it, he said: “It feels a lot like me.” People who hadn’t heard his voice in a long time cried.

I’ve always believed that what can destroy us may also save us. Power can be wielded in many directions. It’s never just black and white.

Right now, most people who aren’t tech bros or tech sisses are either avoiding AI altogether or working from a narrow view of what’s actually happening (and what’s possible). Many are scared. The consensus seems to be: AI is coming for us, and that’s probably gonna make everything worse.

After a global pandemic and a fresh round of nuclear anxiety, AI feels like the next unprecedented thing. The one that might finally be the nail in humanity’s coffin.

But what if it’s not?

‘Good’ AI is a choice.

What intrigues me about AI is exactly this power: the potential for harm is enormous, which means the potential for good is too. Yin and yang.

So what if it all goes right?

Humans have always been driven by what if. It’s how we’ve crossed oceans, tamed fire, and ended up, well, here.

Exactly here. Collective anxiety, crisis, tech that seems to be racing away from us. It’s no coincidence.

But that potential. The opportunity. The blank canvas. The thrill of not knowing exactly what will come out of something is as scary as it is fascinating. And it’s what we’ve always been pushing towards.

This exciting sweet spot between what’s possible now and what it might make possible is what got me into designing products for a living.

And if that work has taught me one thing, it’s that technology is never neutral. Every product is a stack of decisions: who it serves, what it rewards, what it refuses to do. A feed that keeps you scrolling at 2 am is a design choice. So is a tool that hands you back your evening.

And the good AI stories, while harder to find in an endless feed of doom and gloom, are not lucky accidents. In every one of them, someone decided who it was for, put the right people in the room, and kept humans in charge.

Good is a choice someone made. What if we make more of those?

Yes.

What if?

What if it cures cancer?

AI is already catching cancer earlier.

Here in Sweden, Lund University ran the MASAI trial. Around 106,000 women in the Swedish screening programme were split in two: half had their mammograms read the traditional way, half with AI support. The AI group saw 29% more cancers detected. The final results showed 12% fewer cancers slipping through between screenings. Fewer of the aggressive kind, too.

As a carrier of the breast cancer gene, with at least one mammogram a year since I turned 30, I’ve spent nights worrying, not about my own risk, but about my daughters’. What if AI solves breast cancer?

Zoom out from one disease to all of biology. For 50 years, working out the 3D shape of a single protein could take a scientist years. In 2020, DeepMind’s AlphaFold learned to predict those shapes from a sequence alone. Two years later, its team released predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins. It has since been used by over three million researchers in more than 190 countries. The creators have won the Nobel Prize.

And then there are the superbugs. At MIT, researchers trained an AI to scan more than 100 million chemical compounds for ones that could kill bacteria. It found halicin, which killed strains resistant to every known antibiotic in lab tests, and later abaucin. Halicin is named after HAL, the murderous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A reference to its significance.

The machine we were taught to fear is finding essential medicine.

What if interfaces fit every body and every mind?

For all of computing history, people have had to adapt to the machine.

AI is starting to flip that. Now.

Be My Eyes started in Denmark, founded by a blind furniture craftsman, as an app connecting blind people with sighted volunteers over video. In 2023, it added Be My AI: point your phone at a menu, a medicine label, or your outfit, and get a detailed description back.

Casey Harrell, whose story opened this piece, is the far end of the same idea: an interface that adapts so completely it meets you inside your own body — and maybe even mind.

So while most AI applications may feel like a boost for mass production, the opposite is also true. For the first time ever, we can create interfaces that shape themselves to us. Our eyes, our voices, our attention spans, our bad days. We can finally kill the norm and build custom at scale.

What if it gives artists better access to tools?

A friend told me about how low-income filmmakers in his community can now tell their stories due to accessible generative AI for film. And while “made without AI” is more meaningful, showcasing their storytelling skills may be the way to access funding that was limited to privileged groups.

I also see this in my life. It’s now easier for me to reformat my writing to make it easier to distribute, type off my handwriting to an online doc, and automate the organization layer of my creative process to allow me more time to actually create.

Last month I built an entire app to help me keep track of my ideas as voice notes. It auto-categorizes them and surfaces them back to me based on what I’m doing and where I am. It’s been a game changer for my process and one of the most fun things I’ve done lately: the app’s design is inspired by my kids’ squishy obsession, so the visuals and haptics are satisfying to watch, and tinkering with them was as fun as working on my usual pottery.

What if AI gives back to Earth?

Rainforest Connection hangs solar-powered listening devices in the canopy. AI listens for chainsaws, trucks and gunshots, and pings rangers’ phones the moment it hears one. The rangers from the Indigenous Tembé community use it to defend their land. The network now covers more than 736,000 hectares in 37 countries. What if we can protect the Earth before it’s too late?

Floods affect around 250 million people a year. Google’s Flood Hub uses AI to forecast river floods up to seven days ahead, even where there are no river gauges, and now covers places where 700 million people live, in over 100 countries. Google says flood forecasting in Africa is now on par with Europe. I can imagine there’s even more tech that can do to protect us.

There’s more to planet Earth than nature, so…

What if it helps unite us, humans?

In 2024, DeepMind researchers built an AI mediator, named the Habermas Machine (after one of my favorite German philosophers), and tested it with more than 5,000 people debating divisive issues. People preferred its summaries to a human mediator’s, groups moved closer together, and it worked minority objections into the final conclusion so everyone felt heard. The team behind it trained Habermas to mediate, not to persuade. The job was to find where people already agreed and write it down. If you think about it, it’s the same kind of technology behind the outrage engine of our feeds, just pointed the other way.

Could something like this eventually bring us closer together? Make us comfortable discussing and disagreeing again, so we can move toward a compromise and away from extremes and isolation?

AI as a peacekeeper. A tempting thought. A machine that helps us hear each other might be a step in the right direction.

What if it doesn’t take our jobs?

For most, this is the scariest part.

And yes, jobs will disappear. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on more than 1,000 employers, expects 92 million jobs to be displaced by 2030 and 170 million new ones created, a net gain of 78 million. The fastest growth is expected in frontline human work like care and education.

Forecasts are guesses, though. And even if you believe this optimistic prediction, a net gain is no comfort if the job lost is yours — or if your next one might only be available after years of retraining.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In 2024, Klarna announced that its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents and handling two-thirds of its customer chats. About a year later, its CEO said the quality had suffered, and the company started hiring humans again.

What I’m trying to get at is this:

AI built to replace people tends to make things worse. AI built to support people tends to make things better.

MASAI didn’t fire radiologists; it gave them back 44% of their reading time. Casey Harrell didn’t need a new voice; he needed his own.

Whether AI takes our jobs or transforms them isn’t decided by the technology. It’s decided by people in meeting rooms, choosing what to automate and what to protect. Some of those people are designers. I’m one of them.

Most of those people do care.

I choose to believe that they, like me, take their responsibility personally and seriously. And that we can and will figure out a way to make AI work for good.

What if it actually frees up our time?

Last week, my friends over at Sanna, a Norwegian AI-accounting startup, announced that they were introducing a 4-day work week for their accountants.

In 2019, Finland’s then-future prime minister asked on a party panel why a four-day week or a six-hour day couldn’t be the next step, and whether eight hours was really the ultimate truth. It never became Finnish policy, but the question stuck. And we now know the answer can be yes. In the UK’s 2022 pilot, 61 companies cut hours with no cut in pay. Revenue held steady, resignations fell by 57%, and 56 of the 61 kept the shorter week.

I am hopeful that AI will finally be the technology that doesn’t turn efficiency into more work — because now the gains are so obvious, why would we not spend them on leisure, self-fulfillment, being with each other? Not doing that feels insane to me. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I can imagine it.

A Friday that belongs to me: reading, writing, hanging with my kids, or maybe doing nothing at all. The stuff of Renaissance paintings. And maybe our future?

What if it takes us offline?

This is my most hopeful what if.

Almost every example in this piece still happens on a screen. That’s where we are. Right now. But I don’t think it’s where we’re headed. Screens add a digital layer to life that takes away from our lived experience.

I’ve always thought screens were never the point. I’m almost sure you’d agree.

We stare at our phones because that’s where the doing happens: the booking, the paying, the replying, the finding. Endless apps, each built to keep us locked in. If AI can do the doing, the reason to stare goes away. You say what you need, and get on with your day. And even further: what if you don’t have to be proactive at all; it can organize based on what it learns about you. The interface becomes secondary. Maybe, it goes away.

Think back to Be My AI. A blind user points a phone at a menu, hears what’s on it, and puts the phone back in her pocket. Think of Casey Harrell, speaking with no screen at all. The most advanced interfaces are already the ones that disappear.

Wouldn’t it be funny if AI is what finally breaks our phone addictions?

And there’s another argument.

When content becomes infinite and basically free, it stops being worth much. One-to-infinite, the logic of the feed, gets flooded with sameness. And when everything is generic, what becomes valuable again is the specific: the handmade, the local, the person who actually knows you, the things you can touch. With your heart, mind, and soul.

One-to-one, not one-to-infinite (I wrote about this before, here).

What if AI pushes our tech obsession so far that it solves it? It runs itself in the background. And we just do us.

Humans, human to human, together.

Don’t dream it, be it.

None of my musings cancel the risks. AI can (and already is) be(ing) used to surveil, manipulate, replace, and harm, and people far more qualified than me are right to sound the alarm.

But — I hope this came across in my piece — there is as much potential for good as for evil. Yin and Yang.

The future isn’t something that happens to us.

It’s something we build. And we can only build toward what we can imagine. If the only story we tell about AI is the one where it ends us, we leave the steering wheel to the people who don’t mind that ending. It’s their greatest weapon: to make us feel defeated, choiceless, numb.

From the Rocky Horror Picture show, source

So this is for the people who make things.

The designers, the writers, the engineers, the product people, the ones in the meeting rooms. We are the ones deciding, one screen, one button, one sentence at a time, what this technology rewards and what it refuses to do.

Ask who it’s for.

Put the right people in the room.

Keep humans in charge. MASAI kept a radiologist in the loop; Rainforest Connection put the tool in the hands of the Tembé rangers rather than a central authority.

Let’s build the version you’d want your mother to use at 3 am or your daughter to carry in 20 years.

And for everyone else: stay curious. Look past the headlines. Ask for the good version. Demand it. Stray from your feed. Occasionally, turn off the news.

Who knows what will happen? What can destroy us may also save us. Believing it might save us is our only chance.

So: what if it all goes right?

What if, one day, we look at the world we built with it, and say what Casey Harrell said when he heard himself again?

It feels a lot like us.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on LinkedIn. Find her portfolio at nicoletells.com.

What if AI sets us free? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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What if AI sets us free?