I’ll be honest. I walked into this conversation expecting to feel behind. Michele L. Jawando is a former Google executive, a civil rights attorney, and the CEO of the Omidyar Network, a social change venture that works at the intersection of technology, democracy, and economic opportunity. She has testified before Congress, appeared alongside Van Jones at SXSW, and been covered by Politico, WIRED, and the AP. She is also the co-chair of Humanity AI, a coalition bringing together philanthropy, education, and civil society to shape what artificial intelligence actually becomes.
She is also a mother of four — ages 15, 13, 11, and a seven-year-old she calls her COVID baby — living in an intergenerational household with her husband and her parents. She talks about all of it with the same warm, slightly-amused matter-of-factness, the way someone does when they’ve stopped pretending any part of life is simple and decided to just find it interesting instead.
Within about ten minutes, she had made me feel something I did not expect from a conversation about AI: genuinely hopeful.
The backdrop to any conversation about kids and AI right now is the data, and it isn’t pretty. A recent Gallup study found that Gen Z’s excitement about AI dropped 14 points in a single year. Hopefulness is down 9. Anger is up 9. These are not the numbers of a generation thriving in its relationship with technology.
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Michele isn’t surprised. She watched the social media era unfold, saw what it did to kids, and she thinks we have an opportunity to do something different this time.
“AI is not destiny,” she told me. “It is designed. And we can design something better this time around — because we can remember the shocks. We’re still experiencing the shocks and the pain of social media. We can shift what we’re designing.”
That belief isn’t naive coming from her. She spent years inside the machine. At Google, she worked with the National Federation for the Blind on accessibility, thinking about who needs to be at the table before a product ships. She watched what happened when they weren’t. She grew up, as she put it, a sci-fi tech nerd who saw Star Trek as a model for what technology could do — traveling to foreign galaxies, sure, but using every tool in service of protecting people, solving problems, getting closer to each other.
“At its core, that was the thing technology was supposed to do,” she said. “Every great technological invention is somehow connected to: how can I be closer to other people? The railways, the phone, the early internet. And then what we did was we bastardized that. We changed the dynamic and we put it all toward profit and addiction and the worst impulses. And I firmly believe there’s a whole other way to do this.”
She sees AI as the moment to find it. Not because the technology is inherently safer, but because, for the first time, there’s a broad enough coalition of people who know what “getting it wrong” looks like — and they’re not willing to do it again. More than 25 states now have some form of AI legislation. She ticks off the unlikely alliances: churches, moms, seniors, young people themselves. Her organization has grantees who are teenagers building new social applications because they want something different than what they inherited.
“The only person I would never bet against is a parent. Because parents will go to the mat and we will fight with everything that we have for our children.“
Here is what Michele finds interesting about those Gallup numbers. Buried inside the declining excitement and the rising anger is this: 49 percent of Gen Zers still say they feel curious about AI. Nearly half. The optimism is fading, but the curiosity is holding.
She calls it the curiosity gap, and she thinks it matters more than the headline numbers. “The curiosity is actually grounded in critical thinking,” she said. “What is happening, and does what I’m getting match what I actually want? They grew up as digital natives. They’ve seen the effects of social media across their entire childhood. So they’re more discerning now. They’re not disinterested — they want something better.”
She paused, then: “That instinct that something is off, that this feels like — ” and she used a phrase that totally sums it up — “weak sauce. That there should be more to this. They’re right.”
So what do mothers do with that? The first thing Michele says is: stay curious yourself. Get underneath what your kids are actually using and why. Not “are you on Snapchat” but what is it about Snapchat, what does it give you, have you seen this other thing that doesn’t harvest all your data. Get the real answer before you try to steer anything.
The second thing is harder to remember but more important: you have more power than it feels like. Companies are already making different choices. Ecosystems are being built around responsible technology. She pointed to the social platform Spill that made a deliberate decision to modulate content in ways that protect users — and then actually did it. “We can move as consumers toward things that are safer, more holistic, more wholesome,” she said. “You are not alone, and there are whole ecosystems being built.”
She also thinks the conversation about AI regulation is moving faster than social media ever did, precisely because parents were the ones who ultimately forced a reckoning with social media. “It was parents who made the biggest breakthrough in understanding what happened,” she said. “We were seeing it. We were experiencing it. We saw our kids, and we were like: what is happening here.” That muscle memory, she thinks, is now activated earlier.
* * *
I asked her about the shortcut problem, because I live in it. My daughter uses AI for homework. My son is in college and I have no illusions about how he’s using it. How do you talk to a kid about the difference between reaching for a tool and just outsourcing your own thinking?
She didn’t give me a script. She reframed the question.
“Every child in school right now has grown up with a device in front of them their whole life,” she said. “And then they hear: screen time bad. Don’t use the technology. But also, here’s an AI tool for your classroom. The messages are completely disconnected. And we’re surprised when they game it.”
The deeper problem, she thinks, is that we’re still asking questions AI can just answer. When was the Gettysburg Address? AI knows. What’s underneath it — the tensions, the stakes, what it means right now, what question nobody has thought to ask yet — that’s where actual thinking lives. That’s what we should be asking for. And if we’re not asking for it, we can’t be shocked that kids aren’t offering it.
But she went somewhere I didn’t expect. She said: “I think we too often skip over our children’s individual wisdom. We don’t make space for the question — for the thing they don’t know yet, for the mistake, for the moment of not-getting-it. Because they worry somebody will say they’re not smart, or they don’t understand. So how do we create spaces again for the humanness?”
This is the thing Michele comes back to again and again, and it’s the part of the conversation that I keep turning over. The argument isn’t just “AI can’t replace human creativity” — we’ve all heard that. It’s more specific than that. It’s that this moment is forcing us to ask a bigger question: what is uniquely, almost divinely special about your child? What’s the story only they can tell? What is the individual wisdom they’re walking around with that no model was trained on?
“Our identities, the things that are yours and mine,” she said, “that’s what we have to go back to. Actual intelligence. And then how do you use technology to augment those things — not replace them.”
“This moment is forcing all of us to ask: what is human right now? What is unique and special? And what is the story that only you can tell?”
She has been thinking about this through the lens of her own kids, which is where it gets concrete. One of her daughters is autistic. In the early days of Roblox, she found her community there — neurodiverse kids who could play and build and connect in a space that had less of the friction of in-person social dynamics. Technology as genuine accommodation. Technology as belonging. “I get to see this through their eyes,” she said, “and then I get to work on it at home and at work.”
She also sees the other side — her mother has been the target of online scams, and Michele has had to help her navigate the aftermath as a civil rights attorney with knowledge of exactly how those systems work. The same technology that gives her daughter a community can strip her mother’s savings. That duality is not a contradiction to her. It’s the whole point. The question is never whether technology is good or bad. The question is always: who is it designed for, and who gets to decide.
* * *
Near the end of our conversation, I told her she was making me emotional. That after a decade of watching social media flatten everyone into a two-dimensional highlight reel — the curated self, the performance of a life — there was something genuinely moving about the idea that this moment might actually push us back toward depth. Toward individual identity. Toward the question of who you actually are underneath the feed.
She laughed, warm and immediate. “I love that,” she said. “And that is why I want to design a better future than the one we’ve been given. That is what I am waking up every day fighting for. For my kids.”
Then: “And the only person I would never bet against is a parent. Because parents will go to the mat. People cannot understand that. I thought I was good before — and then I became a mom. I would take you out.”
Neither would I.
MEET THE EXPERT
Michele L. Jawando is the CEO of the Omidyar Network, a social change venture working at the intersection of technology, democracy, and economic opportunity. A former Google executive and civil rights attorney, she previously served on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staff and co-chairs Humanity AI, a coalition bringing together philanthropy, education, and civil society to shape the future of AI. She lives in an intergenerational household in the Washington, D.C. area with her husband, four children, and her parents.
