A few days before we crossed the threshold into the year 2025, Geoffrey Hinton—the godfather of artificial intelligence and a Nobel laureate—publicly predicted that there’s a 10%–20% chance AI could drive humanity to extinction within 30 years.

Extinction.

Whether you think Hinton’s prediction is plausible or not, there is no doubt that while AI has unleashed and will continue to unleash unprecedented productivity, it has already unleashed profound disruptions in humanity:

Job displacement. Bias perpetuation. Data exploitation. Massive energy use. Intellectual property theft. Misinformation at scale. The erosion of trust. Cyber insecurity. Further concentration of power at the top.

Our collective response? Build effective AI governance systems.

But that raises a deeper question:

What kind of leadership can steward these systems wisely—leadership that can confront the existential consequences of what we ourselves have created?

To find the answer, we may not need to look forward.
We may need to look back.

What has enabled humanity to survive and at times flourish, through the great technological disruptions of the past?

My answer: care.

Upholding Care Through Technological Revolutions

Political theorists Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher (1990) defines care broadly as

“a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.” 

Care is embedded in both relationships and systems. And throughout history, care has played a quiet but powerful role in shaping responses to technological upheaval.

It is what helped us resist the full dehumanization of early industrialization revolutions as we marched from traditional societies into modernity.
It’s what reminded us that human beings are not machines.

Without care, we might have ended up permanently in the world portrayed in Modern Times, where Charlie Chaplin’s character is swallowed by the gears of the assembly line—reduced to a cog in a machine. It’s the alienation Karl Marx (1818-1883) warned about: our estrangement from our own human nature—what we produce, how we produce, how we relate to one another, and our human potential as a species—turned into aliens to ourselves.

Without care, we might have ended up locked in the iron cage of rationality where bureaucracy with its emphasis on rules, procedures, and specialization created a system that traps individuals and prioritizes efficiency over human values, meaning, and freedom. It is the disenchantment Max Weber (1864-1920) diagnosed, where people of modernity become “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

But care showed up—imperfectly but persistently—in movements that championed labor protections, public health, education, and workers’ rights. These weren’t merely policy decisions.
They were moral acts, grounded in the belief that production must serve people, not the other way around.

Care also showed up in quieter ways: in mutual aid networks, in the rise of cooperatives, in spiritual and artistic movements that nourished our inner lives. It lived in the hands of community organizers, healers, teachers, and artists who created spaces for connection, expression, and meaning amid systems that treated people as cogs in a machine.

And care showed up in leadership. 

In those who refused to lead through fear, efficiency alone, or profit at any cost. 

Leaders who listened, who protected their people, who saw their teams not as resources but as human beings—with needs, families, hopes, and limits. 

It was the manager who shielded a burnt-out employee. 

The union leader who risked their job for safer conditions. 

The principal who prioritized student well-being over test scores.

These were not just reactions to injustice—they were acts of reconnection. Reconnection to our human nature. To our deep needs for dignity, trust, empathy, belonging, and purpose.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve faced the possibility of our own annihilation.

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., deep in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project carried out the first successful nuclear weapons test. According to UN estimates, more than 2,000 nuclear tests have since been conducted, and around 22,000 nuclear weapons now exist—enough to destroy humanity many times over.

And yet, we have not destroyed ourselves.

Humanity found—again and again—ways to constrain that power.
That, too, was care in action: responsibility, restraint, and the persistent hope for peace.

It is not only during technological upheaval that care has saved us.

A 2023 study by Chinese researchers suggests that around 930,000 years ago, a natural disaster nearly wiped out humanity—leaving only about 1,280 individuals.

If this is accurate. We must ask: How did we survive?

My answer:
We nurtured.
We adapted.
We endured.

We are over 8 billion today.
Because of care–the regenerative species activity we perform to maintain, continue, and repair our shared web of life.

The Ethic of Care as a Leadership Blueprint

Facing the unknown requires knowing oneself deeply.
And the same holds for our species.

In the face of this technological unknown, we must ask:

What is our collective deep self?

My answer: care.

Technologist Kai-Fu Lee, in his vision for a future of Human-AI coexistence, proposes that leadership—especially at higher levels—will not disappear. AI can support leaders, but it cannot replace what makes great leadership truly work—our ability to empathize/love and to create/strategize.

Care is how empathy and love takes form in action, in systems, in service, and through creative strategies. 

Effective Leadership in the 21st century demands deeper self-knowledge, relational intelligence, and ethical courage–What I call Care Intelligence. 

Tronto’s work offers us profound insight into what leadership with high care intelligence looks like. In her visionary book Moral Boundaries (1993) and Caring Democracy (2013), She calls on us to place care at the center of our political lives and gives us a moral framework to cultivate it. 

She identifies five ethical qualities of care that are essential for caring in a truly democratic society. And I argue that these qualities are vital for leadership in complex, high-stakes times like ours:

• Attentiveness (caring about): Recognizing and acknowledging the needs of others

• Responsibility (caring for): Taking on the duty to care and respond to those needs

• Competence (care giving): Possessing the skill and commitment to provide effective care

• Responsiveness (care receiving): Listening and adjusting to how care is experienced by others

• Solidarity (care with): Embracing plurality, communication, trust and respect in shared care. 

These are not “soft skills.” They are moral muscles.
They are not just for family members or professional caregivers. 

They are for CEOs, policymakers, team leads, and board chairs.

They are the building blocks of trust. Of resilience. Of human-centered systems.

What would it mean for organizations to make supporting people to meet their human needs for well-being and growth their core mission?

And we are already seeing examples of this ethic of care emerging in today’s leadership—especially in the domain of AI.

In 2023, leaders from top AI labs—Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), among others—signed an open statement warning that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” 

Meanwhile, Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, stepped down and advocated for greater governance and regulatory frameworks before further scaling AI technologies.

These actions reflect not just caution, but care.
They demonstrate attentiveness to societal needs, responsibility to the public good, competence in anticipating long-term impact, and responsiveness to growing public concern.

This is what care looks like in leadership:

• The willingness to resist the pressures of speed and scale, choosing to slow down in service of something deeper. 

• The courage to pause, to listen, to act with humility.

• To lead not just with vision, but with conscience.

Just because we can build something doesn’t mean we should—not without reflection, responsibility, and wisdom—without care. 

As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution—a time of AI, automation, and accelerating uncertainty—it is this ethic of care, embedded in leadership, that must once again guide us forward.

As we stand at the edge of the AI age, let us remember:

What makes us irreplaceably human is not what we can produce—

but what we can love, repair, and sustain.

Care is our compass.
Care is our legacy.
Care is how we lead.

Care carried us before.
It will carry us again.