AI on Purpose
Updated: 4 hours ago
What is all this intelligence for?
A Founding Note · 2026
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On June 10, 2021, my son Atticus was stillborn.
There are sentences that divide a person's life into a before and after. That's certainly one of mine.
I remember the ultrasound — how still he was. I remember how quiet the room became as we realized the hell we were entering. I remember my wife's face, staring at that screen, and how badly I wanted to look away. I remember helping her into the next room. We couldn't talk. Then our doctor, whom we'd met for the first time that day, came in and told us that the worst thing we had ever lived through was about to get worse, because our son still had to be born.
I remember going home to pack an overnight bag. I remember trying to be present for my daughters as they realized they'd never meet their baby brother. I remember shutting myself in my room, then my closet, and crying tears from a place I didn't know existed. Something in me was breaking. At three in the morning, my mother-in-law called to say it was time. I was new to the city, half-broken with grief, and I got on the highway going the wrong direction, away from the hospital where my wife was waiting for me to do the unimaginable.
That kind of pain changes your relationship to the future.
For a long time I thought I was grieving Atticus. I came to understand that I was grieving possibility itself — the conversations that would never happen, the version of fatherhood I would never meet, the parts of me that would only have come alive in relationship to him.
In the years that followed, grief, deconstruction, and AI all began to converge. I kept telling my students to be brave, knowing I was still organizing too much of my own life around safety. Eventually I understood that my daughters weren't only listening to what I said about courage. They were watching what I was willing to build with mine.
Around the same time, I began to see AI not only as a tool but as a question about the future itself: what kind of intelligence are we building, and what kind of people will it help us become?
Humanum Huis began at that intersection: grief, imagination, responsibility, and a future my children will have to live inside. It also begins with the simple belief that this intelligence should serve life. And it begins with a warning that AI does not tell us who to become. It shows us who we already are.
The AI future has been branded.
But the human dream has not.
This is a founding document. A reckoning, yes, but also an invitation. And it is for the leaders, builders, educators, parents, artists, and students who feel the AI conversation getting louder and thinner at the same time — who suspect something essential is being skipped, but haven't yet had language for it.
Here is some language. By the human dream, I mean something simple and difficult: that pain at scale should go down, possibility at scale should go up, and intelligence should serve life instead of merely accelerating what already exists. A future worthy of the people who have to live inside it. A dream isn't serious until it changes what we build, measure, fund, teach, reward, and refuse.
That dream isn't being told. And silence, here, isn't neutral.
The Dream No One Is Selling
Look at what we've been sold. Speed. Productivity. Disruption. Capability. Inevitability. These ideas have extraordinary brand power: the confidence of a category that already knows how to sell itself. The race to build and profit from AI is being narrated with tremendous confidence and almost no transparency about what the dream actually is.
Now I really do want to be fair about this, because the people building these systems have slowly started answering the question, some of them at length and with real feeling, and their answer is mostly a story about what the machines will do for us, cured diseases and abundance and time given back. Lately the same people have started arguing in public about how fast the machines should be allowed to go. What I still haven't heard with anything like the same force is the other half, the half that depends on us, what we will have to see, decide, practice, and refuse so that any of it arrives as something better than acceleration. I have heard almost no one ask how fast people are becoming ready, and that is the pace I care about most.
Every day that dream goes unbranded, the other one — dreamless acceleration, power without purpose, capability without conscience — consolidates more cultural territory. The ideas that protect human flourishing have been outbranded by the ideas that exploit it. That's not inevitable. Marketing problems can be solved.
When the human idea loses, the cost isn't theoretical. It shows up in classrooms, companies, homes, hospitals, childhoods, and nervous systems.
The future will not become humane simply because it becomes intelligent.
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The Mirror
Here is what I have seen watching organizations begin to integrate AI: the technology rarely changes who they are, at least not at first. It shows them who they are, faster, at scale. The incentives they reward, the voices they suppress, the futures they can and cannot bring themselves to imagine — all of it becomes visible. An organization built on fear and efficiency will tend to use AI to watch and automate, and an organization built on curiosity and care will tend to use it to listen better and build things worth building.
A mirror can distort. I know that now. The questions we ask shape what becomes visible. The conditions we create shape what people are willing to say. And the person holding the mirror is never completely outside the picture. So the test is not whether the first picture is perfectly true. It is whether the people inside it can look at it, argue with it, correct it, and make it truer.
That is why I have started thinking of AI as a kind of moral exposure event. Used carefully, it can make parts of an organization's hidden operating system easier to see. Not because it introduces new values into an organization, but because it removes the lag between what an organization claims to value and what it actually does.
Most organizations reach for efficiency first because it is the easiest purpose to imagine and the easiest to measure, and it lets an institution move without ever saying out loud what it is for. I don't want to pretend efficiency is small, because an afternoon given back to a nurse or a teacher matters. It just can't be the only question in the room. AI shouldn't only help us move faster. It should help us become clearer about where we're going, and honest about whether it is worth going there.
The organizations that deploy AI without first asking what they are for will simply become faster versions of what they already were. And some of what they already were, we cannot afford to accelerate.
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The Question Beneath the Question
I grew up inside systems that taught me certain versions of power: religious power, masculine power, institutional power, credentialed power, the quiet power of belonging in rooms where others have had to fight harder to be heard. For a long time I moved through those doors without asking why they opened. I benefited from arrangements I now want to change. I've participated in the things I critique. I don't have clean hands. I've mistaken access for merit, certainty for truth, and charisma for care more times than I want to admit.
I'm not telling you this to perform accountability. I'm telling you because the work I am describing requires a kind of honesty that has to start somewhere, and the only honest place I can start is with myself.
The question underneath my life and my work has always been some version of the same thing: what is this power for, finally? In a moment when human beings are acquiring the most concentrated technological, economic, and informational power in history, that question feels less like philosophy and more like a test we cannot outsource. It's also the question most institutions have learned to postpone.
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From Grief to Architecture
After Atticus, possibility stopped being abstract. It became embodied, fragile, and urgent. Grief doesn't make me right, but it does explain why I cannot look away.
Nothing I build will replace what we lost, and I don't want anyone to read this work as an attempt at that. What I can do is let the possibility I lost become a way of making possibility somewhere else, for someone else, and that is what this work is trying to do.
The sentence I gave you at the start, that pain at scale should go down and possibility at scale should go up, became the design brief for everything we build. I'll admit that for a long time I wanted it to harden into a framework neat enough to fit on a slide, and every version I built made the work look more finished than it is. So what I carry now is a handful of questions I bring into every room where AI is entering a decision. Whose burden does this lift, and whose does it quietly add? What does it help people see that was hidden or misread before? What does it let them imagine that they couldn't imagine yesterday? Are the people inside the system coming out more whole or more used? And what, finally, is all this power for?
Those questions don't come in an order and none of them outranks the others, and an organization that can answer only one of them has barely begun to ask what it is doing. That is as close as I can come to saying how grief became architecture, and I expect the architecture to keep changing as people argue with it.
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The Human Readiness Gap
There is a distance between what AI can do and what most people and institutions are ready to do with it, and I've come to call it a formation gap, because what is missing is rarely the tool. What is missing is the clarity, the imagination, and the moral architecture it takes to use that much power well.
From what I've seen, and from what the large surveys keep reporting, many institutions now have AI everywhere and are still pointing it at one or two things, automating tasks, cutting costs, improving processes they already had. That work is real and it gives people time back. The risk comes when it is the only thing anyone asks of the technology, because the organizations that only ever ask how AI can make them more efficient may miss something they can't get back, and may amplify something dangerous along the way.
The same tool that could give a teacher back an afternoon with a student could also give a manager one more dashboard for distrust.
The choice isn't made by the technology. It's made by the organization's imagination of what it is for. The better question — harder, riskier, more generative — is: what becomes possible now that was not possible before? What futures are worth building? Who gets to co-create them? AI adoption is limited less by the technology than by the imagination of the people implementing it.
That's the gap I'm trying to close.
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Better Ambition
This isn't a call for slowness, caution, or the kind of ethical hand-wringing that functions as a sophisticated way of doing nothing. I'm for scale. I'm for ambition. I believe the AI age needs more creative, committed, courageous people working seriously, together, on problems worthy of our tools.
What I am against is ambition that has not asked itself what it is for. Rebecca Henderson has spent much of the last decade making the case that purpose-driven firms aren't a naïve alternative to business discipline — they are a serious response to a world where trust, legitimacy, climate, inequality, and institutional resilience are strategic realities. The evidence is serious and so is the argument. What's still missing is the brand power. The ideas of human flourishing, responsible AI, and dignity-first leadership need the cultural force that Nike gave athletic identity. Right now those ideas are being outrun by their opposites, mostly by default, mostly because so few people have built the marketing infrastructure for the human dream.
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AI on Purpose
To use AI on purpose means deliberately — not by default, not because the efficiency case was easy to make. It means you have thought about what you are building and why before you deploy the thing that will accelerate it.
To use AI with purpose means something harder: that purpose is not a filter on decisions but the operating system underneath them. That the values, the commitments, the questions about what an organization owes its people and its world — these are not branding exercises. They are load-bearing structure. Everything else is built on top of them.
Organizations that use AI with purpose, on purpose, will not just be more competitive. They will be more honest, more imaginative, more worth being part of. That's the bet I'm making with my career, my savings, and my family's sense of what is possible in Amsterdam.
A future is not humane because it is advanced. It is humane because someone made choices in that direction.
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What Humanum Huis Is Building
I spent too long describing this work as a list of services, so let me say plainly what it is. Humanum Huis helps people and institutions build two capacities. The first is a way of listening, a way for a person or a whole organization to see what is actually true about itself, including the parts that are hard to say out loud, and to argue with that picture until it gets truer. The second is a way of imagining, using what the listening revealed to describe a future ambitious enough to be worthy of the power we now hold, and then taking the first real steps toward it. The Mirror is where the listening begins, and the Future Draft is where the imagining gets written down so people can correct it. The ideas are tested in practice, and the practice stays open to evidence.
But I want to be honest about what I think this is pointing toward. The human dream needs an institution behind it — not just companies doing good work, but a public-interest body with real accountability structures, real transparency about what is working and what is not, and real imagination about what becomes possible when you recruit the most creative, empathetic, and ambitious people you can find and give them a serious problem to work on.
We're not that institution yet. What I'm building is larger than what I can build alone, which is exactly why I'm writing this. I'm moving toward it carefully, with the right people, with every piece of infrastructure I can wire in now, toward a foundation with receipts, a movement with methods, and a house for the conversation that most needs to happen.
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The Commitments
That's the ambition. We're at the beginning of it. And we hold ourselves to three commitments, wired in:
Accountability
We say what we set out to do and we are honest about whether we did it. There is one thing we will never publish, and it is the first commitment rather than an exception to it: what someone said to us in confidence. The honesty that makes this work possible comes from a promise about where words go, and a promise kept only when it is convenient is not a promise. Where a client chooses to be named, we will say so, and let them describe the work themselves.
Transparency
We show our reasoning, not just our conclusions. When a framework is incomplete, we say so. When the evidence is uncertain, we say so. When we were wrong, we say so first. The work is confidential. The method is not. You can see how it is done, what it costs, and what we would do differently, in enough detail to judge it before you spend anything.
Imagination
We refuse to accept that what is currently possible is all that is possible. The imagination gap in most institutions is also a diversity gap, which is why the room needs artists, philosophers, parents, and poets alongside the strategists and the technologists. We ask what becomes possible now before we ask how to automate what already exists.
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The Invitation
If you are a leader who already feels the pull between what your organization could become and what it's actually optimizing for — this is for you.
If you are an educator who suspects that preparing people for an AI world means something more than teaching them to use the tools — this is for you.
If you are a parent who lies awake thinking about what kind of world your children are inheriting, and whether the people building it are asking the right questions — this is for you.
If you have been carrying a vague, unnameable discomfort about the speed of all this — the feeling that something important is being skipped — you were not paranoid. You were paying attention.
Humanum Huis isn't the only answer. It's one answer, built by imperfect people who decided that the gap between what AI makes possible and what human beings are ready to do with it is too important to leave to whoever gets there first. Come think with us. Come build with us. Come tell us what we are missing.
Here's what I believe: the future will be built by ambitious people. The only question is whether they have also developed the wisdom and conscience to be trusted with what they are building.
That question has always mattered. But right now, at this scale, at this speed, it's the question that everything else depends on.
We are building a place where that question isn't an obstacle to the work. It's the work.
Pain at scale should go down. Possibility at scale should go up. That is the human dream.
We are walking toward it. Come with us.
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The Charge
Let me put the document down for a minute and just talk to you.
I've never had more fun in my life than I'm having right now. I want to say that first, because everything you hear about AI is either terror or hype, and almost nobody is telling you the third thing, which is that working this way — with imagination, on purpose, at the edge of what you thought you were capable of — is the most alive I've ever felt. I'm not building Humanum Huis out of duty. I'm building it because I found something, and keeping it to myself started to feel like a kind of theft.
So here's what I found.
The most important question of the next decade is not what AI can do. It is what you will point it at.
Whatever you point this technology at, it gets very good at. Point it at surveillance, you get very good surveillance. Point it at manipulation, you get manipulation at scale. We are already pointing it at warfare. I understand why. But armor isn't a dream. A world that uses its most powerful technology to defend itself from itself is a world that has stopped imagining anything better. We can point this at each other's armor, or we can point it at each other's wounds. That's the actual choice underneath every other choice.
Point it at the best part of yourself — your curiosity, your care, the thing you'd build if you weren't afraid — and something else happens. You stop looking for the fastest way and start looking for the most beautiful way. The pointing is the moral act. Everything downstream is just physics.
And I'm talking to myself first. I don't have clean hands — I said that earlier and I will keep saying it. I've spent years amplifying things that fed my ego instead of my purpose. I know what it is to chase the next credential, the next room, the next proof that I am enough. So when I say what I am about to say, I'm not saying it from above you. I'm saying it from beside you, as someone still doing the work.
If You Have A Platform
You have a decision to make. Professors — you're shaping the minds that will point this technology for the next fifty years. What you model in your classroom about curiosity, honesty, and courage will outlive every syllabus you write. Athletes, artists, writers, anyone holding a microphone the culture actually listens to — look at what your platform amplifies. So much of what sells right now runs on one engine: that incessant dripping that you need more, that you're not quite good enough. That's not marketing. That's insecurity, industrialized. And here's the hard part: you cannot point AI at something whole if you are using it to armor something wounded. Some of this work is not strategy. It is healing — finding some wholeness in who you are, no matter what you have done or what was done to you — because the implication of this technology is too great to be steered by unexamined pain.
Students
You're the first generation in history that gets to think with something beyond your circumstances. Your access to great thinking is less rationed by your zip code or your luck in mentors than it has ever been. So don't use AI to finish assignments. Use it to find out what you actually believe, and build the most ambitious version of that. And be clear-eyed about one thing, because the first jobs that used to teach people judment are the ones this technology is mostly likely to absorb, which means your judgment has to be built on purpose, by you, starting now. Access matters way less than it used to, and your imagination matters more.
Leaders
The business case for being better is getting harder to ignore. Empathy can reach further than it could before, and curiosity compounds faster when you have a thinking partner that never tires of your questions. You can become a more honest version of yourself at work, intentionally. Most of the old excuses are getting weaker. Use this to give people time back, and then have the nerve to ask what the time is for.
Builders, Makers, Parents, Teachers
The fear of not being ready was always the tax on human possibility, and that tax is falling fast. And if you decide you want to grow — this is the new thing — you get to design how. For most people, that was never true before, but it's becoming true now.
If you want somewhere to start this week, build one honest room. A meeting or a conversation where someone asks the real question and then stays long enough to actually hear the answer, instead of managing it. You don't need a budget or a title for that. You need the nerve to ask, and the discipline not to rush what comes back.
I'm doing the thing I'm asking of you. I'm building this studio in public. I'm writing the shows and the books. I'm pointing everything I have at the human dream — pain at scale going down, possibility at scale going up — under my own name, with my own savings, in front of my own children, because they're watching what I'm willing to build with my courage. And yours are watching you.
Movements don't travel through institutions. They travel through one person deciding something is real and telling one more. Somewhere in your life is someone who has been carrying the same quiet suspicion you have. You know who they are.
Send them this.
Wishing you peace and every good,
Parker
AMSTERDAM, 2026
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How This Was Written
I want to show you how this note got made, because it's the most honest demonstration I have of what I mean when I say we can think with these tools instead of only producing with them.
It started as me talking out loud, and then I handed what I'd said to two different AI systems and asked them to try to break it, and they didn't always agree with each other or with me. Some of what I believed didn't survive. The framework I mentioned earlier, the one neat enough for a slide, arranged five purposes like steps, and when I argued with it long enough I could see it was teaching people to rank what they should be weighing, so I took it out even though I had built a lot on it. I had written that no one was telling the human dream, and one of those systems pointed me to the long essays the builders themselves have published, and the sentence got more honest because of it. I had written that the mirror doesn't lie, until a colleague asked me whose bias was inside my method, and now this note says the mirror can distort. I had promised a public map and called it the first, and I took that out because I couldn't prove it.
The scenes here are mine, and so are the decisions about what they mean. What the tools did was hold more of my own thinking than I could hold at once, show me where it contradicted itself, and keep asking what I was actually willing to stand behind.
This version is dated September 2026. If you find something wrong in it, tell me, and the next version will say what changed.
The First Door
If this names something you have felt, write to me and tell me where you see the human readiness gap from where you stand. I read everything, and nothing you send will be published or used without your permission.
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What the Field Notes Are
This founding note is the whole vision in one piece. It is the house. The Field Notes that follow are different. They are not another founding statement. They are the record of how I actually came to see this work — one scene at a time, one room at a time.
Each one starts from something real I lived or witnessed, and then asks what that moment reveals about AI, institutions, leadership, and what it is going to take for human beings to be ready for the power we are adopting. Where this note tells you why the work exists, the notes show you how I found my way to it.
A professor's letter that taught me how power can flatten people
A lunch where I could not make my dean see what I could see.
A ceiling that disappeared for me before it disappeared for the room.
A trust gap that turned out to have almost nothing to do with AI.
A lesson in listening I learned first, and hardest, at home.
A mirror that worked before the institution was ready to keep looking.
A question about power, and what it now owes.
The same test, turned on myself before I turned it on anyone else.
A word cloud that showed me what other people could see in me.
And, at the end, the question underneath all of it: who gets to imagine the future, and how do we make that room bigger?
You can read straight through, as a season. Or you can wander from room to room. But if this founding note is the house, the Field Notes are where the vision gets tested against lived experience. This is the dream in one piece. The notes are the path I took to find it.
And the season does not end there. Everything in the notes is what I have seen and thought and lived — a working way of seeing, not a settled finding. What comes next is the research: sending mirrors out into the world, gathering honest signals about where people and institutions actually are, and reporting back what they show, including the parts that surprise me. If this founding note is the house and the notes are the rooms, that work is us opening the doors and inviting the world in to help build.
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