Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo

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.

When Alan Turing imagined artificial intelligence, he didn’t picture a finished adult mind striding out of a lab. He proposed “child machines”—modest systems that learn through experience, guidance, and a bit of luck. It’s a humane idea from the century’s sharpest logician: don’t build a genius; raise one.