What We Learned About Power, Before AI Scaled It

This is me. My playful, curious self. All of me. Turning up as my full self. The self women cannot always turn up as. Told to quiet down. Be less difficult. Shape ourselves for those around us.

And this year, I have found myself thinking about International Women’s Day a little differently.

We are living through a moment of enormous acceleration. Geopolitics is shifting, technological capability is advancing rapidly, and the race to lead and adopt artificial intelligence has become a defining global priority.

In moments like this, societies tend to narrow their focus. Speed becomes the dominant value. Power concentrates. And the frameworks we painstakingly built to think about fairness, responsibility and inclusion can suddenly be treated as optional extras.

They are not. That would be a mistake.

One of the truths of the feminist movement, and the broader social justice movements that grew alongside it, is that they were never only about representation. They were about learning to see and recognise power more clearly, often when it was hidden in plain sight.

Feminism asked questions many institutions had long avoided.

Who benefits?
Who carries the cost?
Who is missing from the room where decisions are made?

Intersectionality asks us to deepen that lens, reminding us that systems do not distribute opportunity or harm evenly. Without conscious design, they amplify existing inequalities.

What these movements also taught us is that responsibility does not end with awareness, it extends to what we are willing to question, protect and govern when others are not in the room.

Neutrality inside unequal systems is rarely neutral.

These ideas were not theoretical exercises. They were tools for understanding how systems actually behave.

As a systems thinker and designer, these ideas weigh heavily on how I see and navigate the world, and on my praxis. Which is why I find myself thinking about them more, not less, as we move deeper into the age of AI.

Which is also why they matter profoundly right now.

Artificial intelligence will not magically transcend the structures that build it. Like every powerful technology before it, it will reflect the priorities, incentives and assumptions of the systems creating it.

If we forget the intellectual labour that generations of women and others historically excluded from power invested in understanding how systems behave, we risk designing the next era of technology with the same blind spots that shaped the last. At worst, artificial intelligence will, as we are already seeing, amplify them at a rate even Moore’s Law could not have imagined.

History gives us many reminders of that labour.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper helped pioneer modern computing and the development of programming languages that made software accessible to generations of engineers.

Katherine Johnson, working within NASA’s early space programme, performed the orbital calculations that made human spaceflight possible.

Their work was foundational. Yet recognition arrived much later.

Today, women like Fei-Fei Li, whose work has shaped the field of computer vision and responsible AI, and Meredith Whittaker, who continues to challenge the industry to confront questions of power, surveillance and accountability, are carrying forward that tradition of intellectual leadership.

Different eras. Different domains. A shared commitment to leading and asking deeper questions about technology and society, even when, at times, being in the room, or asking the difficult questions, is uncomfortable or not what is expected of them.

I find myself thinking about this when I am sitting in conversations about AI and emerging technologies. The technical sophistication in those rooms can be extraordinary.

But the important questions are rarely technical.

It is whether we are willing to remember the lessons previous generations fought hard to articulate about power, dignity and design.

It is whether I, too, am willing to be the uncomfortable voice in the room, asking questions about others, about access, fairness, observability, governance and, most importantly, equity.

International Women’s Day is often framed as a celebration of progress. And it should be.

But perhaps it is also something else.

A reminder that the intellectual traditions shaped by women and others whose thinking has too often been pushed to the margins have given us some of the most powerful tools we have for navigating complexity.

As we move deeper into an era defined by artificial intelligence and technological competition, those lessons should not be left behind.

They should be our north star.