Yes, Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter
My wife and I live in Saint Louis with four young kids and three small businesses. That’s the argument underneath this letter.
The AI reckoning has begun, and we don’t need more evidence to know where we stand. Every week brings a new tool, a new panic, and a new think piece about the end of something.
Schools are banning it.
Workforces are quietly pretending it isn’t happening.
And I keep resharing the same finding from client study after client study: low trust, high fear, resistance on principle.
Here’s the thing about a reckoning. Sitting it out is a choice, and it’s the one with the worst track record.
Hear us out.
Artificial is the most expensive word in technology
Start with the title. Yes — we’re for it. But we’re going to stop calling it artificial, and here’s why.
This is a branding quarrel, which was my profession for twenty years, and I believe that one word is costing us years. Worse, every year we spend flinching at the name is a year the thing keeps moving without us, so the catch-up gets harder, not easier.
The word puts every science fiction film you’ve ever seen between a person and a tool. It buys a decade of fear before anyone demands the safeguards that would let us take control.
So imagine a rebrand, one with some respect for the intelligence already between our ears. AI is really IA. Intelligence Assist. Sit with that.
Flip the letters and the whole posture changes. Artificial intelligence is something that happens to you. It’s a rival. It’s a replacement. It’s a thing in the corner of the room. Intelligence Assist is something you pick up and add to your own. It sits on your shoulder. It makes the person holding it more capable, and it stays exactly as good as the judgment of whoever’s holding it.
That’s not a softer name. It’s a more accurate one. And you can’t take responsibility for a thing you’ve mislabeled as a monster.
The worries are real
I won’t wave them off. People will lose work. I forecast exactly that for a living, then watched it happen to the industry I left. Maybe you’ve read our bios, maybe not, but the company I walked away from four years ago and the colossal agency network it belonged to are both gone now. I’d like to say I saw it coming. I did. That’s not the same as being paid for it.
The energy and water these systems consume is a real problem, not a talking point. The pace is faster than the institutions built to absorb it. And as I write this, people who helped build these systems are leaving the companies that make them and warning that the race is being run recklessly. I’m not in those rooms. I can’t tell you how right they are.
But I can tell you where the danger lives, and it isn’t where the movies put it. There is no motive in the box — not today, anyway. What’s in the box is a reflection of the people who built it. The motive is in the room: a race to own the platform, a second race to make sure the platform is American and not Chinese, and a system that rewards whoever ships first. If something in this goes wrong, it will go wrong the way things always have. Humans, incentives, nobody checking.
Every “what is the AI doing” question is really “what is the person behind it doing, and who’s watching.” Which is why every one of these worries is an argument for more people who understand it, not fewer. Fear that refuses to learn isn’t caution. It’s abdication.
A generation and a responsibility
Between Audrey and me, our living parents are nearing or well into their seventies. They learned math on paper and a slide rule, and they were young adults before they saw a digital calculator. I’m writing this on a device in my pocket that holds a conversation with a machine in a building somewhere else, and none of us finds that remarkable anymore. One generation. Slide rule to this. And by every measure, this is the slow part.
In those decades there were three shifts worth naming: personal computing, the internet, and now Intelligence Assist. Audrey and I got walked into the first one by teachers who could barely contain themselves — computer labs, typing drills, a Macintosh in the corner that somebody had fought the district for. The argument against those machines is the one being made now. In 1981 a Nightline interviewer told Steve Jobs that computers would stifle children’s creativity and their ability to think for themselves. Jobs said: go watch some kids using them. What you see is the creative part of themselves being expressed, and knowing they’ll have these tools for the rest of their lives, it’s very hard to call that harmful. It’s actually something quite democratic.
Our teachers had picked his side, whether they knew it or not. That was mentorship. It worked.
Then the internet came, faster and stranger and far more disruptive, and the mentorship wasn’t there. I was in eighth grade the first time I got into a chat room, at a friend’s house, on America Online. I came home levitating. My parents were kind about it and completely unmoved. The universities got the internet; parents still unmoved. Then it became my entire career.
I don’t hold it against them. But a generation of kids — Mark Zuckerberg is about our age — was handed the most powerful communication tool in history with few adults beside them who understood it well enough to teach judgment alongside access. Some of what grew in that vacuum was very dark. Some of us built the things everyone is now worried about.
So the generational shrug has a pattern, and it’s thinning. Strong for the PC. Thin for the internet. Thinner still for this. Last time the adults didn’t engage because they didn’t understand it. This time they won’t engage because they’re afraid of it.
We can see the pattern because we were born at the seam. We fixed the dial-up ourselves, usually by unplugging it and apologizing to whoever was on the phone. From college on, our lives were digital. We’re the last people fluent in both halves, the world before this and the world after. That’s not nostalgia. It’s a qualification. Every generation gets handed one of these to mentor the next through. We know this is ours.
Audrey’s version of the seam is different from mine, and better.
Audrey’s lens
I didn’t have a calling. I had a father who coached and a mother who spent her career in a hospital lab analyzing blood, and sports medicine looked like where those two things met. It took one semester at Saint Louis University to discover I can’t look at an injury without going gray. I transferred to Indiana, to the business school, mostly because people I knew were going there.
Which is how timing works. Mark Cuban had just made his money on the internet and given a great deal of it back to the university, and what he bought was cable. High-speed everything, the business school especially. I didn’t choose to study business computing the moment it became the whole game. I walked into a building somebody else had wired.
What I’m actually good at is people — organizing them, working out what they need, pointing them the same direction. That turns out to be operations. And operations is where you see what technology really does, because you’re the one absorbing it.
I ended up in New York running operations at Thomson Reuters, watching the money side of the story Ryan was watching from the creative side. Markets pricing in tools that barely existed. Valuations that made no sense to anyone who had to reconcile them. In 2008 I watched friends carry boxes out of Lehman Brothers, across Times Square, from my office window.
So when people ask whether we’re being naive about this — no. He saw what it does to the workforce. I saw what it does to the money. Neither of us is romantic about it.
What it makes possible
This isn’t abstract for us. We bet our house on it.
In 2022 we left corporate careers and bought a stone fabrication business in Imperial, Missouri, knowing nothing about stone. The only reason two people with spreadsheet skills survived is Intelligence Assist. It let a small shop quote and schedule and run like a company ten times its size. It let us build an app that connects homeowners to local fabricators, a thing that had no business coming out of a countertop shop. It let a two-person consultancy sit in rooms with global companies.
We call it scale small: bringing the tools big corporations take for granted down to the overlooked end of the market. Four years ago that was a nice, unproven idea. Now it works, because a good idea, hard work, and the nerve to take a risk are suddenly enough. What used to require a floor of specialists fits in a pocket.
That’s what the resistance is missing. This doesn’t only threaten the big players. It arms the small ones. The local shop, the first-time founder, the kid with an idea — the people who’ve waited longest for a fair fight just got one.
And one honest thing. We could lean in because we had room to: two careers behind us, a house to borrow against, a village of people who’d catch us, and the option to try. Most people don’t get those options. A technology that only assists the people who already had a head start is a failure by our own definition. Fixing that is our work too.
What we see at home
Our four walk up to the voice assistant and ask it things. Not just the capital of Morocco. Real questions, the way you’d ask a person who happens to know a lot.
The fear we hear from other parents and teachers is that this is a cheating machine. It can be. Absolutely it can be, if we hand it over without teaching what’s underneath — the basics, how it works, where it’s wrong, why creativity means making something that didn’t exist rather than tracing something that did. Our job is to walk them past the lazy shortcuts and toward a bar they set for themselves.
That’s an argument for mentorship, not prohibition. Nobody ever learned judgment from a ban.
Because the intelligence in this story was never the machine. It’s the biological supercomputer in a child’s head — running on a sandwich, reading a room, making a hundred judgments a second about empathy and risk and what a friend’s face just did.
That’s the intelligence. Everything else is assist.
Where we stand
Audrey and I compare this moment to the one when people took up agriculture. When we stopped running from the weather and could count on eating, the brain got room it had never had, and what filled that room was culture, community, law, art. Everything we mean by civilization is downstream of not being hungry and afraid. We think we’re at another one of those. Time will tell whether we’re right.
But there’s no time to wait for the dust to settle. We’re building with it, in public, in a small town in Missouri, and writing down what happens. We’re teaching our four to carry it well. And we’ll help anyone who wants to do the same — the shop owner, the corporation, the teacher, the parent who’s more scared than curious right now. That’s what Fourfold is for.
Yes, artificial intelligence. Just not on its terms. On ours.
Written by Ryan and Audrey. Edited with intelligence assist.
This is the first of these, not the last.