Phoenix rising: women, AI, and the architecture of a world that cares

The digital battlefield

As physical systems collapse, a parallel crisis is accelerating. The tsunami of AI is hitting our shores and exacerbating the impact of this tech in ways people often don't see until it is too late. We all feel it; people recognize there is a huge change in the world and often fail to see the connection to AI and tech, the impact of AI on social media on countries, cultures, kids, and especially women. Porn and hate have sadly been amplified in exponential ways.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) encompasses online harassment, cyberstalking, doxxing, non-consensual intimate imagery, and AI-generated abuse designed to silence, shame, and eliminate women from public life. Globally, 38 percent of women have experienced some form of TFGBV. As documented by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, it operates on a continuum with physical violence often preceding or amplifying offline harm.

The State Department once funded dedicated TFGBV programs. Despite funds being appropriated by Congress, those programs are now archived history. And as physical clinics close and safe houses lock their doors, women increasingly depend on digital platforms for health information, crisis resources, and economic survival. When those digital spaces are simultaneously weaponized through AI-generated abuse and coordinated harassment, and when the programs designed to counter TFGBV have been defunded, women face a compounding catastrophe with nowhere to turn.

When we look at the data, it's clear that this isn't just a technical glitch or an issue with the underlying infrastructure. This is fundamentally a question of power and who is controlling the information that is shaping this space.

From a policy perspective, you can't solve a structural power problem simply by applying a technological band-aid. It requires a serious, intentional, and systemic power solution that actually addresses the core mechanics of how decisions are being made and we have to demand a seat at that table.

The godfather's warning and the answer he couldn't see

In August 2025, Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate, pioneer of deep learning, and the person most people call the "Godfather of AI," stood before a packed conference in Las Vegas and issued a warning that stopped the room.

Hinton predicted that artificial intelligence will soon be "much smarter than us." He warned that conventional strategies of human control over superintelligent systems would ultimately fail. And then he proposed something radical: the only way to ensure that a more intelligent AI doesn't simply replace or destroy humanity is to give it a maternal instinct.

"The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing," Hinton said, "which is a mother being controlled by her baby." He proposed training AI to have "maternal instincts," programming it to care deeply about people, the way a mother cares for her children's survival. "That's the only good outcome," he said. "If it's not going to parent me, it's going to replace me."

Hinton admitted he did not yet know how to accomplish this technically, but stressed that researchers must prioritize the goal above all else.

This is one of the most consequential observations in the history of technology. And it points directly to the most urgent and overlooked crisis in artificial intelligence: the people who understand maternal instinct best, who have lived it, studied it, fought for it in the hardest places on earth, are almost entirely absent from the rooms where AI is being built.

Hinton's metaphor draws on a deep biological and social reality. Maternal instinct is not just kindness or patriarchal box-building; it is the product of complex systems that foster the protection of the vulnerable, long-term nurturing, the teaching of survival skills, social bonding, self-sacrifice, and care for the abandoned. These are not abstract values; it's the best of the protective and empathetic nature of both women and men. They are precisely the values that have been stripped from the US aid and now AI architecture. They are the values that women's organizations, practitioners, and survivors have embodied for decades, the very women in networks we have partnered with around the world for decades to promote peace, prosperity, and combat violence. And they are the values that must be encoded, deliberately, urgently, and by people who truly understand them, into the AI systems that, whether one agrees or not, already are being used to govern the world.

Professor Hinton identified the destination. Women who have spent their lives doing the work of protection, care, and inclusion know the road.