My journey into the future began in a laundry room that my mother converted into a chemistry lab for me. In the late 80s and 90s, when it was rare to see young girls in Lagos being pushed toward technology, she’d drive me across town, through thick traffic, to computer science classes. She saw something in me, and she nurtured it. That early spark became a throughline - from engineering to founding one of the first retail tech companies to use machine learning and computer vision, and later to GoogleX, where I led Moonshot projects at the edge of what technology could do. That early path gave me a front-row seat to the evolution of intelligent systems, from their earliest experiments to their world-shaping applications. But my understanding of AI changed when it collided with something far more personal. What began as a professional fascination with technology became something deeper, more urgent, and far more human.
My relationship with AI deepened years later, when my son was diagnosed with a severe neurological condition. He is nonverbal. Like all mothers, I searched for ways to help him. My instincts naturally led me toward technology and data. I began collecting information from other families with children like mine, desperate to find patterns that might emerge. And I found myself asking: What if AI could give my son a voice? What if it could reveal parts of him the world hadn’t yet seen?
But those questions led to harder ones. If AI had predicted his condition before he was born, would I have made different choices? Would I have had him at all? In my case, I wouldn’t change a thing. But the very fact that AI raises questions like these shows us that it carries the full weight of our values. And these values aren’t just written in code, but lived through our choices they enable.
Along this path, I've learned that advancing AI requires more than technology – it requires clear intention, bold imagination, and most importantly (and often deprioritized) systems founded on human trust – systems with values that can both endure challenges and evolve with our needs.
About 2070: A Future Memoir
This series explores the future of humanity in an AI-powered world. While it is partly informed by my professional technical experience, I look beyond the high-level systems discourse that tend to dominate the headlines. Instead, I’m examining the coming transformations through a more personal lens – our lives, our families, our choices. By combining deep research with speculative storytelling and lived experience, I hope to encourage all of us to confront one of the most urgent questions of our time:
What does it mean to stay human when intelligence itself is automated?
Promising a specific future – utopian or dystopian – inevitably falls short, but examining plausible futures through speculative fiction generates unique insights - that might reveal something deeply true. Most transformative tech products were conceived at the intersection of science fiction and cutting edge science. (In one of the best-known examples, the 1992 novel Snowcrash inspired the creators of Google Earth as well as the metaverse, while other sci-fi inspired the creation of self-driving cars, virtual communities, ChatGPT, and cryptocurrency.)
Just as tech companies use sci-fi to envision future products, I use speculative fiction to imagine how these sci-fi futures and technologies will transform our lives.
Each installment in this series will move between the scientific state of play and research-based speculative writing - narratives that show how AI and other emerging technologies may alter the most intimate parts of being human. From grief to birth, love to crime, money to power, politics to relationships, nothing is off limits.
With sharp analysis and human-centered imagination, this series probes tensions and possibilities that aren’t in the far-off future. They’re just around the corner.
2070 | A Future Memoir is not just about intelligent machines. It’s about who we are becoming because of them.
Starting With the End
I start the series with Death.
You may wonder why begin with something so heavy, so morbid? Honestly, I’ve asked myself the same thing.
I don’t like thinking about death. I fear it.
Not the abstract idea of dying, but the very real fear of leaving my children behind. That hollow panic you get in your chest at 2 a.m. when your mind wanders through the infinite what-ifs.
I know I’m not alone. Many of us tuck death away in polite silence, as if naming it might somehow summon it.
And yet, across centuries and civilizations, spiritual teachers, philosophers, and scientists alike, from Stoics to Buddhists to bioethicists, have urged us to bring death closer. To integrate it into life. To sit with it, not as a threat, but as a teacher. Because when we name it, talk about it, and wrestle with its permanence, something interesting happens: it loses the sting of “why me?” and becomes part of being alive.
But why death and AI? Why pair something so ancient with something so new?
Because AI is going to touch every part of our lives, from the first breath to the last byte. In fact, it may eventually allow us to escape death’s finality.
I’ve spent much of my career building with data – leading personalization and privacy at Google and founding a machine learning startup with facial recognition technologies. One question has quietly followed me through it all: What happens to our data when we die?
Just five years ago, the full implications of that question would have seemed distant and theoretical. Now, they are very relevant and timely. One young woman recently asked me at the HumanX conference. “Who owns our data after death?”
Her question resonated with me because I’d been thinking the same thing. Not just who owns the data, but who becomes it. Could my digital footprint, Claude, Perplexity and chatGPT chats, the voice memos, texts, posts, purchase history, sleep cycles, search queries, and the AI agents managing my life and work teach future generations something about me? Could it power a posthumous version of me? Could it…whisper in my voice?
As radical as these questions sound, they are not unprecedented. For example, we already make decisions about whether our organs will live on in another body. Perhaps one day, we’ll do the same with our data – willing it forward as a life saver or an inheritance.
This series explores the changing technology of mortality and the world it might inhabit. It’s designed to be provocative and to inspire what-ifs. It’s written not from a place of certainty, but of curiosity – the same kind that keeps me up at night. My hope is that it helps us imagine what it could mean to be remembered, reconstructed, or even reborn in silicon.
Thanks for being here.
The first installment on death, data, and digital afterlives drops Tuesday 5/27/25. I hope you’ll join me as we begin… at the end.
If this resonates, feel free to share it with someone who’s been thinking about the future too. And if you’d like to follow along, don’t forget to subscribe below so you don’t miss what’s next.
