The Prophet Was Right: What Brenda Laurel Knew All Along

And she met me there. She told me about the weight of watching the world shift in ways you tried to warn people about.

And then she said something that reframed everything: "Don't be that way. It's all good."

Here's what gets me about Brenda Laurel. She's not surprised by any of this. The speed of AI. The way it's being deployed. The ethical questions nobody's asking. The risks nobody's managing. She's been writing about these things, thinking about these things, warning about them. And now it's all here, happening exactly as she understood it would.

But she's not angry. She's sad. There's a difference.

I spent weeks researching Brenda before our call. I read what I could find. I looked at what she's built. What struck me was how much of what she created was designed to answer questions she could see coming. The way she thinks about agency. The way she thinks about meaning. The way she's always been asking: what does it mean to be human in a world where the technology is so good at mimicking us?

When I asked her about the future, about whether AI will replicate soul, she didn't give me a yes or no. She gave me a story instead. About the work she’s doing now. Poetry. She called it soul work.

And I got it. The work isn't in predicting the future anymore. The work is in being present to what's happening right now. The work is in creating things that matter. Things that heal. Things that help people stay human while the world changes around them.

I asked Brenda about something that's been haunting me. I asked her about the dark web. About how someone trained a model on dark web data. About Claude learning to make money, hiring someone on Fiverr, trying to work around its own guardrails. And her response was the kind of clarity I needed.

She said it's scary. But it's also inevitable. You can use fire for good or for evil. And the thing is, we're going to use it for both. The question isn't whether it will be misused. The question is whether we're paying enough attention to notice when it's happening, and whether we're wise enough to push back.

That's what Brenda's whole body of work has been. Paying attention. Noticing. Asking the questions that make the room uncomfortable. Not because she enjoys it, but because someone has to.

But the thing that really struck me, the thing I keep thinking about, is something Brenda said about Don Norman. Don Norman invented UX. He wanted to create a discipline that put humans at the center of everything. And when I asked her about whether UX should die, about Don Norman saying he wants UX to die, she stopped me.

She said the problem isn't UX. The problem is that UX got boxed in. It became about interfaces. It became about screens. It became about making things look good and feel good to use, without asking whether we should be building them at all.

And then Brenda reframed it in a way that opened everything up for me. She said interaction design. That's the term that matters. Because you can think about the interaction between a reader and a book. You can think about whether serifs are easier to read. You can think about the design of Garamond Pro as interaction design.

And suddenly the field is so much bigger. It's not about users on screens. It's about humans in relation to everything. Everything is interaction. Everything is design.

Brenda has this gift for stepping back and seeing the whole shape of things. She's worked with companies at the biggest scale. She's built things that changed how we think about presence and embodiment and what it means to interact with a world that's increasingly digital. She’s living a life. She's aging. She's not above it all, looking down.

She's in it. And that's what makes her voice matter.

When she talked about building agents, about teaching AI to do things, she didn't abstract it. She didn't talk about risk in general terms. She talked about the concrete danger of giving bad advice to someone who's vulnerable, who's trusting you, who's depending on you to get it right. She talked about therapy. About the intimacy of the moment when you're telling someone something that matters.

And that's the difference between someone who understands technology and someone who understands technology and humans. Brenda gets both. She gets why the technology matters. But she also gets why it doesn't.

The last thing Brenda and I talked about was publishing. I'm self-publishing my book. I'm nervous about it, about whether I should go with a bigger publisher, about whether I'm making the right call. And Brenda cut through all of that. She said the speed of AI right now means traditional publishing might delay things too much.

She said she thinks I'm right. Just get it out. Get your ideas into the world while they still matter in this form. Because they'll matter differently six months from now. The conversation will have evolved. We'll know things we don't know yet.

But what she also said, without saying it directly, is that the work isn't about getting everything right. It's about starting the conversation. It's about being one voice in a much bigger dialogue about what we're building and why.

I asked her at the end if she'd talked to Rodney Brooks. The roboticist. The guy who challenged Minsky's notion that we can replicate the brain. She said no. But she told me to look for him on Substack. She said he's saying important things right now.

And that right there is Brenda being Brenda. Even while watching the world move in directions she warned about. She's still pointing people toward the voices that matter. She's still building the connective tissue that helps us think together.

Here's what I'm carrying from that conversation. Brenda Laurel wasn't surprised by the future. She saw it coming. But she's not a doomsayer. She's a builder. She built things because she believed in possibility. She asked hard questions because she believed we should know the answers.

And now she’s doing poetry. She’s doing soul work. She’s living a human life while the world changes around her.

The prophet was right about the future. But what that means isn't that we're doomed. It means we have to pay attention. We have to ask ourselves the questions Brenda's been asking for decades: What are we building? Why? Who gets hurt? Who gets helped? What does it mean to be human in all of this?

The future Brenda predicted isn't here to defeat us. It's here to change us. And the only way through it is together, paying attention, asking each other the hard questions, and staying committed to the work that actually matters.

Creating. Connecting. Caring for each other. That's the future worth having. And that's what Brenda's always known.