Closing the Chapter, Opening the Next
Interviews with the authors of AI Everywhere, Volume 1 are now completed. Here's what's next.
Welcome back to the She Writes AI interview series, where we talk with the authors behind the AI Everywhere books, exploring their personal journeys and professional expertise to understand how we can build a future for ourselves with AI that is truly ethical, responsible, and human-centered.
Closing the Chapter, Opening the Next
With the Anonymous interview on June 11, we completed the AI Everywhere interview series for Volume 1.
Over the past 23 conversations, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with contributors across five continents, each one approaching artificial intelligence from a different discipline, lived reality, and intellectual tradition.
And yet, something unexpected happened. Across education, governance, business, creativity, ethics, and African epistemologies, the questions kept converging. Not on what AI can do, but on what humans must not lose in the process.
Trust. Judgment. Context. Responsibility. Presence. Meaning.
The more technical the conversation became, the more human it turned. That, in many ways, is the most important pattern from Volume 1.
We began this series to explore how AI is changing the world we live in. But what emerged was something more foundational: AI is not just reshaping systems, it is revealing the assumptions we’ve always made about people, power, and progress.
And in that reflection, a harder truth appears. We are not just building technology that thinks. We are building systems that implicitly define what counts as thinking at all.
That is why this project exists.
Twenty-six women and nonbinary authors contributed to AI Everywhere, Volume 1, bringing expertise that spans continents, industries, and disciplines. Together, they challenge the idea that there is a single way to understand intelligence, innovation, or impact.
Before we move forward, I want to pause and honor the breadth of what they’ve built together.
Explore the AI Everywhere, Volume 1 Interview Series
Karen Smiley - Introduction and Afterword (with Dr. Hollie C. White)
Society – Reshaping the Global Narrative
Celeste Garcia - The Hidden Architects: Challenging the Male Narrative and Building Accountable AI
Rebecca Mbaya - AI and African Epistemologies: When Philosophy Meets Practice
Sydnor Hain - Wonder Bread AI: Why Relational Ethics Matter More Than Rules
Sarah Ennett - The Ikigai-Risk of AI
Elettra Fiumi - AI Cinema: Between Craft, Collapse, and the Possibility of a New Language
Karen Spinner - AI Writing is Basically Undetectable. So Now What?
Home & Personal – Reclaiming Human Presence
Andrea Hiott - More Love, Less Manipulated by Language: How LLMs Can Lead Us To Care Beyond Either/Or
Midhat Tilawat - AI in Decision-Making: A Helper, Not a Hand to Hold Forever
Brie-Anna Willey - AI, Burnout, and the Compassion Reset
Dhani Ramadhani - Raising a Family in an AI-Filled World
Learning – Empowering the Current and Next Generations
Cassandra Jens & Whitney Whealdon - AI and the Heart of Learning for Young Children
Jennifer W. Shewmaker - Flourishing Through Change: Leading Higher Education with Purpose in the Age of AI
Cheyenne Dominguez - Why Women Must Get AI Savvy Now
Business – Leveling the Playing Field
Anonymous - AI for Solopreneurs: Rethinking What Help Looks Like
Elizabeth Eagle-Simbeye - Who Holds the Wheel: Power, Cost, and Care in Automotive AI
Farida Khalaf - AI and Agriculture: Feeding the Future Through Intelligent Farming
Lisa Raehsler - AI in Advertising and Marketing
Katrina Watson - AI in Retail and e-Commerce
How-To – Coding with a Conscience
Farida Khalaf - AI and Cybersecurity: Transforming Digital Defense in the Modern Era
Soribel Feliz - From Privacy and Cybersecurity to AI Governance
Blessing Okpala - Empathy by Design: How AI and UX Shape a More Inclusive Digital World
Elena Calvillo - Rapid AI Prototyping Without Technical Debt
Lakshmi Veeramani - The Agentic AI Systems
Iwette Rapoport - AI-Human Collaboration: Governance-in-Thread
Each interview is a distinct lens on the same unfolding reality: technology does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives inside cultures, institutions, histories, and relationships, and it behaves differently depending on what it finds there.
Book2 Is Underway
Volume 1 showed how women are changing the world with AI. The next volumes of AI Everywhere will bring together new cohorts of contributors working at the frontiers of artificial intelligence, education, governance, business, and human-centered design.
The next volumes from our second book collaboration will showcase additional domains and application areas with a new cohort of 31 writers from new countries, including our first co-authors from South America and China. Volumes 2 and beyond will continue to explore not only how AI is changing us, but how we are changing AI, and what kind of world we are becoming while we build AI. Volunteer opportunities are now open for beta reviewers (ARC) and for contributing to book production.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll begin a new interview series featuring these 31 authors, continuing this exploration of not just what AI is, but what it is doing to the conditions of human thought, work, and relationship. Like for Volume 1, some of these interviews will be Substack Live video events; look for the notifications and join if you can!
Thank you for reading these conversations, for engaging with these authors, and for helping build a space where AI is discussed not only as innovation, but as responsibility.
Volume 1 is complete. The questions are not. See you in the book2 interviews!
References
Where To Buy, How To Read
Buy Volume 1 (now on Amazon, Gumroad, Lulu, Ingram Spark, and many ebook platforms). Look for our upcoming abridged audiobook edition in July!
Tips from our publisher on how to buy an Amazon ebook from a non-KDP-marketplace country, and how to read it without a Kindle device (free)
Review links (we’re on Amazon, Goodreads, and Storygraph)
For more insights on the book, see aiEverywhereBooks.com - our beautiful book series website created by Blessing Okpala, PhD:
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Great insights here! Thanks for sharing