Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo

We don’t mint new human rights lightly. But we should add one now: the right to access capable, safe AI. Around the world, language is the gateway to opportunity; AI is a universal language machine that translates, tutors, summarizes, designs, and reasons across barriers of literacy, disability, and geography. When a technology is this general and transformative, withholding it isn’t neutral—it sorts people into those who can participate fully in education, the economy, civic life, and those...

AI promises to “know” everything—but who decides what can be known, and by whom? As a young leader, I am honored to be part of One Young World’s Indigenous Advisory Circle and to work alongside thousands of Indigenous youth who are advancing data sovereignty in our communities. For us, data is not raw material. It carries story, ceremony, and responsibility. When algorithms scrape the internet and call it “open,” they often ingest our culture without consent. The fastest way to make AI safer...

We are racing to teach machines to understand human language. But what if the data we're feeding them represents only a tiny fraction of human expression? Our AI future, often portrayed as a pinnacle of intelligence, risks being culturally impoverished and fundamentally biased if we don't act now. The fight to preserve the world’s endangered languages is not a nostalgic look backward; it is an urgent, forward-looking necessity to build a truly intelligent and equitable technological world.