The Builder-Parent Paradox
What it feels like to build AI systems while raising the humans who will inherit them.
TL;DR: I’m what you’d call an AI insider, and I have two kids. I call the situation I’m in the Builder-Parent Paradox: I’m one of the people best positioned to protect my children against the negative effects of AI precisely because I help build it, and I still do not know enough to confidently say what the future will look like. Inside access gives me responsibility, not certainty. Here is how I study the machine while using it, what I am betting on, and what I refuse to write.
I spend a lot of time inside AI systems.
For the last several years, I’ve worked at the edge of AI product development, ethical AI, and AI-assisted building.
I manage AI products alongside brilliant researchers and engineers, and I see the full product chain up close: research decisions, engineering tradeoffs, ethical tradeoffs, and security risks. The product choices that tell you what a company thinks people are for.
I build indie products on the side.
I’ve read every frontier model release note since 2022. Four years of it. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI, Perplexity, Qwen, the long tail.
And I also have two children.
Some nights I don’t know whether the world I’m helping build will let them have a job, a craft, a sense of slow attention, or the kind of boredom that turned me into an ambitious adult.
But I keep building anyway. I haven’t figured out how to stop doing both of those things in the same evening.
Hey, I’m Karo Zieminski 🤗.
I’ve been smuggling ethics into tech since 2019 and spent the last several years working at the edge of AI product development, ethical AI, and AI-assisted building.
I also build with AI myself and write Product with Attitude, an AI newsletter for tens of thousands of readers across 146 countries, helping them develop critical AI literacy the only way it sticks: through practice.
If you’re new here, welcome! Here’s what you might have missed:
The Builder-Parent Paradox
Inside access gives me responsibility, not certainty.
There isn’t a name for the thing I live inside, so I’m going to give it one.
The Builder-Parent Paradox: the realisation that I’m one of the people best positioned to protect my kids from AI precisely because I help build it, yet I still don’t know enough to confidently say what the future will look like. The paradox is that inside access gives me responsibility, not certainty.