Does the rise of AI leave room for Sovereignty, Privacy or Dignity?
A forty-year career ends. What follows when the thing you built your life on gets structurally invalidated. This is hard for me. I’m not someone who likes to talk about myself — I’m a person who values my privacy. But circumstance compels me to share some things, so you know who you’re listening to. I started in computers young — before I had one to use, before I had a classroom to learn in, before any of the infrastructure that’s supposed to produce people like me existed in my life. Forty years later I was a Sr. Technical Architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Bellevue, WA. The work: walking into rooms with enterprise customers — from frontline to C-level — earning their trust by asking the right questions, all while listening equally for what wasn’t being said. No code. What I brought was the vision that forms where experience and imagination intersect, and the ability to turn a room that couldn’t move into one that could. That kind of contribution is genuinely hard for people not doing it to understand. Nearly impossible to put on a resume without sounding like you’re bragging. In January 2023, Microsoft decided they no longer needed me. What came after is a story a lot of people know from the inside right now. The sense that the identity I built over a lifetime had just been structurally invalidated. Not because anything I did was wrong — but because a future where computers reason for themselves is dawning in the eyes of business, and all they see is profit. My anger was brief. What replaced it was harder. Watching a freight train approach — that particular dread, that moment of disbelief where you can see it clearly and still can’t act. The depression that came alongside it. The helplessness of not knowing. That was the hardest part. I couldn’t go back to what I’d been doing. Not because I wasn’t capable. Because I was beginning to understand the cost of doing work that isn’t seen for what it is, in service of goals I didn’t share — in service of organizations whose relationship to the people they serve was: commoditization and data extraction for profit. I was frozen. Time elongated and stretched — what should have been a moment became months, and then more. I couldn’t take my eyes off the train. At what seemed like the last possible moment, a dream — a vision that dispelled the fog — I pivoted… I latched onto that train. What came next was… David Davids is the founder of HaiberDyn Industries and the Terran Accord Foundation.