What if the technologies transforming our world could do more than make us faster and more connected? What if they could give people greater ownership of their identities, expand opportunity beyond national borders, and even help create a more peaceful world?
In this episode of Landmark Difference Makers, Seamus Ford speaks with visionary technologist and systems thinker Jay Carpenter about a future in which technology, human dignity and global citizenship could intersect in entirely new ways.
It is a conversation that ranges from artificial intelligence and digital privacy to undocumented students, blockchain, global conflict and the extraordinary potential that can emerge when we begin with a simple premise:
Everyone matters.
Technology Is Changing the World. But Can We Trust It?
The conversation begins with something nearly everyone experiences but rarely stops to examine: how much of our lives now takes place inside digital systems we don’t fully understand.
Our phones know where we are. Algorithms learn what holds our attention. Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of taking action on our behalf. And enormous amounts of information about us move through systems largely outside our control.
For Jay, the issue isn’t whether technology is good or bad. Technology has created extraordinary new possibilities.
The deeper question is one of trust and agency.
How do we know who—or what—we are interacting with online? How do we control what information about ourselves is public and what remains private? And as autonomous AI agents become more powerful, how do we verify their identity and actions?
Jay sees an opportunity to create digital systems in which individuals have far greater control over their own identities and information.
He compares privacy to a light switch: when you want something to be public, you turn the light on. When you want it private, you turn it off.
The challenge is making the sophisticated technologies that can provide that protection simple enough for ordinary people to actually use.
What Happens When Human Potential Has No Place to Go?
For Jay, these questions aren’t merely technical.
They are profoundly human.
He shares the remarkable story of a high-school robotics team from Phoenix that entered an underwater robotics competition in 2004.
The students had limited resources and little experience. They built their underwater robot for less than $1,000 and entered at the collegiate level, assuming that losing to university teams might be less embarrassing.
Instead, they won.
Their homemade robot defeated teams from some of the country’s leading engineering schools.
At one point the robot began leaking. Searching for something small and absorbent, the students came up with an unconventional solution: tampons.
It worked.
The judges recognized the solution for exactly what it was—resourceful innovation.
But there was another dimension to the story that deeply affected Jay.
The four students were undocumented.
Here were young people who had demonstrated ingenuity, collaboration and extraordinary potential, yet their immigration status placed severe limitations on the opportunities available to them afterward.
For Jay, their story raises a much larger question.
How much human potential does the world lose because opportunity is determined by where someone happened to be born?
Reimagining Citizenship
That question leads to one of the most provocative possibilities explored in the episode.
What if citizenship did not have to be exclusively connected to geography?
For thousands of years, human beings have organized themselves into nations whose borders determine citizenship, rights and access to opportunity.
Jay invites us to consider whether emerging technologies could someday make another model possible—one in which aspects of identity or citizenship become portable, secure and verifiable.
Rather than replacing nations, the possibility he describes could give individuals greater freedom and agency in how they participate in the world.
And for Jay, the most exciting potential isn’t economic.
It’s peace.
He points to President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 peace speech and Kennedy’s challenge to understand the world from another person’s point of view—even when that person is considered an adversary.
What might become possible, Jay wonders, if people had additional ways of belonging to one another?
What if identity didn’t automatically divide the world into us and them?
Moving From “Or” to “And”
Again and again, Jay returns to a distinction that lies at the heart of his thinking.
Or versus and.
Either I’m right or you’re right.
Either my country wins or yours does.
Either my worldview prevails or yours disappears.
Jay asks what might happen if we could create a different context:
I matter and you matter.
We don’t have to agree.
We don’t have to share the same beliefs, politics or culture.
But if we begin with the premise that the other person matters—that they have a family, aspirations, fears and struggles just as we do—it becomes harder to reduce another human being to an enemy or an abstraction.
The possibility isn’t agreement.
It’s relationship.
And from relationship, entirely new solutions may become available.
Can Technology Help Us Take Back Our Agency?
There is an irony running through the conversation.
The same technologies that connect humanity can also divide us.
Algorithms learn what makes us stop scrolling. Fear, anger and outrage can become extraordinarily effective ways of capturing attention.
Seamus describes noticing that even small changes in what he chooses to watch can begin changing what an algorithm subsequently presents to him.
That realization contains something important:
We still have agency.
Jay believes emerging decentralized and peer-to-peer technologies may eventually give individuals even more of it.
Rather than simply trusting a centralized platform, people could have additional ways to verify information, authenticate sources and decide whom they trust.
Jay uses the evolution of package tracking as a simple analogy.
There was once a time when you mailed something and essentially hoped it arrived. Today, we expect to know where a package is throughout its journey.
That visibility created trust.
Jay imagines bringing that kind of verifiability to other parts of our digital lives.
What Part of Humanity Are We Betting On?
Beneath all the technology in this conversation lies a much older question:
What do we believe about human beings?
Are we ultimately destined to operate from fear, scarcity and self-preservation?
Or can we create systems and societies that call forward something greater?
Jay says he is betting on what he describes as the more divine part of human nature—the part capable of compassion, creativity and recognizing the humanity of another person.
That belief is reinforced by the stories that inspire him.
The undocumented students who defeated elite engineering teams.
The young African innovator portrayed in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
The young men from Appalachian coal country depicted in October Sky who looked beyond the future that seemed predetermined for them and discovered another possibility.
Each story points toward the same idea:
Human beings routinely demonstrate capacities that circumstances suggest they shouldn’t have.
Sometimes what is required is simply a context in which that possibility can emerge.
Seamus connects that idea with the work of Landmark: when people begin distinguishing the meanings and interpretations through which they experience life, they can discover a new degree of choice in what they engage with—and in how they engage with other people.
At our best, we may naturally choose to engage with what is extraordinary in one another.
A Legacy of Love
Near the end of every Landmark Difference Makers conversation, guests are asked to look far beyond their immediate accomplishments.
One hundred years from now, when none of us are here, what would you want people to say about you?
Jay’s answer brings a conversation about AI, blockchain, citizenship, algorithms and global systems back to something profoundly simple.
He would like people to say that he brought forth love in himself—and believed that every person he encountered could bring forth love within themselves.
Perhaps that is ultimately the most important technology for creating a world that works.
Not something we invent.
Something we bring forth in one another.
Landmark Difference Makers explores the stories of people taking a stand to make a difference and the extraordinary possibilities that can emerge when contribution becomes an expression of who we are.
To discover more episodes and stories of people making a difference around the world, visit LandmarkForumNews.com.