Purpose and the Ethical Design of Super Technology: 5 Questions My Research Says Must Precede Every AI Deployment

Everywhere I look right now, someone is asking a version of the same question. Should we build this? Should we scale it? Should we deploy it before we understand what it does? I’ve written about this question at the level of AI safety, AI design, and AI governance. This time, I want to answer it from somewhere no one else has written about AI: my own doctoral research.

My dissertation did not study technology. It studied sixteen people who had dedicated their lives to social change — activists, in the research’s formal language — using Classic Grounded Theory, a method specifically designed to discover what is actually happening in people’s lives rather than to confirm a theory brought in from outside. The original research question was narrow: what is the main concern for people who become activists, and how do they resolve it?

What emerged from the data was something larger than activism. The core category that surfaced, again and again, regardless of which cause someone had devoted their life to, was finding purpose.

That theory describes four stages that every person in the study moved through on the way to real, durable change. I think it also describes, with uncomfortable precision, what large-scale transformation requires — and what happens when that process gets skipped.

The Four Stages

Stage one begins with a transformative event — something significant enough to disrupt the normalcy a person has been living inside. This presents what the theory defines as a call to change: a genuine opportunity for growth.

And here is the detail I think matters most, the one I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else in the AI conversation: the call to change can be answered in one of two ways.

With curiosity and receptivity, which open the path toward real transformation.

Or with rejection and denial, which the theory names directly as apathy — a state of disengaging from life rather than confronting it.

Stage two, adjustment, is where the real work happens. The individual engages in what the theory calls creative inquiry — openly exploring their identity, their ability, and their awareness, testing the boundaries of what they now know versus what they assumed before.

One participant described this stage as a period where old certainties simply fell away before new clarity had fully arrived — a genuinely disorienting, necessary middle.

Stage three, reconciliation, is where personal discovery becomes durable through connection. This is the stage where isolated insight either gets integrated into a person’s life through real relationships and support, or it doesn’t take hold at all.

One participant, describing a men’s circle that helped him heal from disconnection and past trauma, put it simply: without being in community with other people facing the same reckoning, that healing would not have been possible.

Stage four, finding purpose, is not a finish line so much as an alignment — clarity about what one is now motivated to do, followed by actual action.

As one participant described the felt experience of purpose: even facing an exhausting, unpredictable day, “that energy is what gives you the excitement of saying, ‘hey, anything that does come at me is going to be a surprise, and it’s going to be okay.’” That is what real integration feels like from the inside. It is not relief that the disruption is over. It is trust that whatever comes next can be met.

The theory names a choice at the very first stage: respond to disruption with curiosity, or respond with apathy. I think most of our institutions are choosing apathy and calling it adoption.

What Gets Skipped

Here is why I think this theory is relevant to something far larger than the sixteen lives it was built from.

AI is, almost by definition, a transformative event at the civilizational scale — exactly the kind of disruption the theory describes at the individual level, now happening to institutions, industries, and entire societies at once.

And I believe we are watching, in real time, a civilization mostly skipping stages two and three entirely. We are moving from disruption straight to deployment — from the transformative event directly to something that gets called integration, without ever passing through the actual creative inquiry, the actual reconciliation, the actual building of connection and trust that the research suggests integration requires.

This is not a minor procedural shortcut. According to this theory, skipping those stages doesn’t produce faster transformation.

It produces apathy wearing the costume of acceptance — compliance without genuine reconciliation, adoption without anyone having actually done the identity work of understanding what capability, connection, or agency is being gained or lost.

The Questions That Must Precede Scale

If the theory holds at this larger scale, then each stage implies a real question that has to be asked honestly before moving to the next — not retroactively, once harm is visible, but before deployment.

Here is what I believe those questions actually are, translated directly from what the research found:

• Has the call to change actually been named honestly — or is disruption being framed as inevitable so that no real choice ever gets offered?
• Whose identity, ability, and awareness does this expand, and whose does it quietly diminish? Has anyone done the actual creative inquiry, or has that stage been skipped entirely?
• What are the real limitations here – and has anyone been willing to test those boundaries honestly rather than assuming the technology’s capability is also its wisdom?
• Is there room for genuine reconciliation — real relationships, real community, real integration — or is deployment moving faster than trust can actually be built?

What purpose is this actually serving, and whose motivation is being centered? Is there a real answer, or only a business case standing in for one?

These are not softer versions of the technical and governance questions I’ve raised in recent pieces. They are the same questions, translated into the language my own research, suggesting what transformation has always required — at the scale of one life, and, I believe, at the scale of a civilization.

Why This Matters to Me Specifically

I did not set out to study AI. I set out to understand why some people move through disruption into a life of genuine purpose, while others move through the same disruption into apathy, or worse, into harm dressed up as coping.

I think that same fork sits in front of us right now, collectively, and I don’t think it will resolve itself just because the technology keeps improving.

Purpose was never a soft, secondary consideration layered on top of real transformation.

In sixteen lives, it was the thing that determined whether disruption became growth or damage. I don’t see any reason to believe civilizational transformation works differently.

If this research is relevant to a transformation you’re navigating — in your organization, your leadership, or your own life — I’d love to talk.

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Molly Stillwell, PhD

Founder, The Uprising Collective  ·  theuprisingco.com