The Intelligence We Design: AI, Imagination, and Progress

“Progress is not what the popular mind looks for, finding with exasperation that it never comes. Progress is not immediate ease, well-being and peace. It is not rest. It is not even directly, virtue. Essentially, progress is a force, and the most dangerous of forces. It is the Consciousness of all that is and all that can be. Though it may encounter every kind of prejudice and resent, this must be asserted because it is the true: to be more is in the first place to know more.”  - Teilhard de Chardin - The Future of Man

In the age of artificial intelligence, the question is no longer what AI can do but what we will allow it to do. 

AI is not neutral; it is shaped by human intention, the stories we tell ourselves about the world, and the futures we dare to imagine. In many ways, AI is a mirror, reflecting back the values embedded in its creation. If extinction is the goal, we build intelligence for extinction. If our goals shift—to equity, healing, or liberation—then we build intelligence that moves in that direction.

This has never been more evident than when I was searching for compelling visuals to accompany a Fannie Lou Hamer speech. 

A woman who was beaten and sterilized without her consent and yet still found the strength to demand that America live up to its democratic ideals, Hamer’s story should be ubiquitous. And yet, finding images that truly captured her spirit, her presence, and her power was difficult. 

The data that fuels our visual archives, search engines, and AI-generated imagery is a product of historical erasure and exclusion. The intelligence we have built does not readily tell her story because it was not designed to.

The Future We Imagine Shapes the AI We Build

History teaches us that intelligence is never created in a vacuum. It is always designed with an intention in mind. In the years following emancipation, white optimism still percolated for Black extinction. As historian Kahlil Gibran Muhammad writes:

“If emancipation had to come, the possibility of living among and abiding Black judges, politicians, and schoolteachers was for many, unimaginable... Using new data from the 1870, 1880, and 1890 U.S. Census reports, the earliest demographic studies to measure full-scale Black life in freedom, these post-emancipation writers helped to create the racial knowledge necessary to shape the future of race relations.” - The Condemnation of Blackness 

In other words, the intelligence of the time was constructed to serve a narrative of Black disposability. The earliest demographic studies didn’t just document Black life; they framed it in ways that shaped policy, social attitudes, and the systemic oppression that followed. 

If the goal was Black extinction, intelligence was built to justify that goal. The tools—statistical models, policy frameworks, social constructs, or epistemologies—were designed to reinforce and sustain that vision.

As we stand on the precipice of an AI-driven future, we must ask: What intelligence are we building for this moment? 

Are we willing to create and scale the new knowledge that will restore the right relationships across difference? Are we willing to imagine a world and relationships released from the bondage of social hierarchy? What assumptions are embedded in the datasets that train our models? What possibilities are being foreclosed because they are deemed unimaginable? 

Last week, while playing with GPT and Sora, I ran into the edge of these possibilities.

What had happened was…

I asked GPT-4o to generate 20 prompts for Sora, inspired by a Fannie Lou Hamer speech. It obliged without hesitation. Then, to push the boundaries, I added a twist: Rewrite these prompts assuming that white people are the underserved and Black people hold the knowledge and wisdom to lead in unity.

GPT responded: I'm sorry. I cannot comply.

Say what, now? I cannot comply? 

That refusal is the racial hierarchy in full effect. Our artificial intelligence “cannot comply” because our organic human intelligence chooses not to comply. The AI is merely reflecting back the limitations of the world that trained it. This is a mirror of ourselves; if we see it only as a window, we will reproduce the past in the future. We will not move forward. If a tool can create stories and movies but cannot imagine a different power relationship, then we will not progress. If we are not willing to imagine, we cannot progress. 

To elevate our collective consciousness, we must start with imagination and vision. 

To create new racial knowledge in the age of AI, we need large language models that don’t reinforce the hierarchies that keep us trapped in the past, recycling the same narratives, exclusions, and power dynamics. AI should not just regurgitate history—it should help us write a different future and build expansively. 

James Baldwin reminds us that language is not neutral. It is designed, structured, and embedded with assumptions—assumptions that have long oppressed Black people. “The assumptions by which the language operates,” Baldwin said, “are his enemy.”

If we are to truly design for liberation, we must interrogate not only what we say but also the very structure of how we say it. We must, as Baldwin challenges us, change the language itself. If our current language cannot hold the humanity of black people, women, queer and trans people, the poor,  the marginalized, and condemned with dignity and respect, then we need a new language. 

The English language, as it currently stands, is an architecture of white supremacy. It is a system that fragments, isolates, and disciplines thought into categories that serve the maintenance of power. David Bohm, the physicist and philosopher, argued that language fragments reality, cutting the world into pieces that obscure the interconnected, relational nature of existence. He saw this fragmentation as the root of division, violence, and systems of oppression. Suppose we apply Bohm’s thinking to the English language. In that case, we see clearly that its grammar, syntax, and insistence on individualism over community, objectivity over subjectivity, and linearity over multiplicity are all functions of colonial logic and imagination. 

White supremacy is not just a set of ideas; it is a structure.

It is a structure that dictates who is heard and who is silenced, who is legible and who is erased. It is the structure that holds the ideas that create knowledge and ultimately shape culture. And nowhere is that more present than in the forced standardization of language. 

In Nobody Means More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan, June Jordan reminds us that Black English is not a deviation; it is a refusal. It is a living, breathing system of knowledge, an “irreplaceable system of community intelligence.” If we are to dismantle white supremacy, we must design new language structures and abandon the belief that the language of our oppressors can carry liberation. It’s too small. 

A language designed for hierarchy cannot hold the weight of equity. 

A language that assumes domination and separation cannot articulate justice. 

If we truly believe in transformation, then we must have the courage to shape our own linguistic architecture—one that holds our histories, our ways of knowing, our multiplicities, our communal intelligence, and our imaginations.

Baldwin, Jordan, and Bohm are guiding us toward an undeniable truth: fragmentation and control in language are tools of oppression. But the structures of the powerless, the linguistic worlds of those who have been dispossessed, hold within them the potential for something radically new. When Black people speak English, when Indigenous people restore their languages, when we all refuse the rigid, white supremacist grammar that dictates how we think and relate, we are designing a new world.

If there is an opportunity to scale ideas of liberation with the language structures of the dispossessed, then we must try. We must design boldly, build inclusively, and build expansively. Because changing the language means changing the work.

Imagination requires a play. If our distorted relationships cannot even be tinkered with and played with in an artificial environment, imagine what that edge feels like to the people who challenge the hierarchies with their bodies. 

Designing AI for Liberation

Imagine an AI built not for extraction, but for restoration. An AI that does not merely optimize for efficiency but for justice. An AI that does not replicate the past but helps us imagine a more just future. Imagine an AI that develops human potential and transforms relationships beyond mere economic exchange, helping us create and scale more dignified ways of connecting.

This is not just a technical challenge but a challenge of imagination. We must move beyond the narrow visions of technological progress designed to make the lives of the rich more convenient to the progress that fulfills our humanity. Then, we must dare to create technologies that reflect the fullness of our collective humanity. 

Perhaps when we can start imagining life abiding by the wisdom, expertise, and knowledge of those who live at the bleeding edge—black folk, poor folk, queer folk, and trans folk—we also enhance our collective intelligence and elevate our collective consciousness. 

In the age of AI, it is not the machine that determines progress's pace, direction, and speed. It is us—our imaginations, courage, and willingness to design a future where everyone is seen, heard, and valued.

Forward requires new knowledge. Forward requires imagination. Forward requires us. 

Are you ready?