At the height of Henry Ford’s influence, the American industrialist used the media, exhibitions, and became the world’s largest film distributor to mold the United States into a car-loving country. Influential figures shaped societies long before Ford, but as the latest generation of elites moves to shape today’s cutting-edge technologies, a new movement seeks to put everyday people back in the driving seat.

A former researcher at Google's DeepMind AI team, Saffron Huang co-founded the Collective Intelligence Project in 2022 to direct technological development towards the collective good. With support from luminaries like former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, plus researchers from the world’s leading universities, AI firms, civic groups, and governments, the organisation has big plans to give society the ability to shape transformative technologies for the better.

In conversation with Leo Nasskau, we explore why collective control of transformative technologies is so critical, the types of changes society needs to make, and how our cultural narratives and incentives could help us make those changes, but currently lead us in the opposite direction.