The People-First Approach
Haitham Al-Beik · 2026
"Technology should be built around the Human as an irreducible constant — a 'driver' separate from mind and body who retains the right to keep changing — rather than treating people as optimization targets a system can fully model and predict."
Al-Beik argues most modern systems are built for a person who is not allowed to change their mind — and that this, not any technical failure, is the actual design flaw.
He proposes a three-layer stack: body, mind, and 'soul' (the driver, the thing noticing your own thoughts). AI, in his framing, is a sophisticated one-layer or two-layer system — mind and sometimes body — but has no access to the third layer, and no amount of scaling closes that gap, because it's a difference in kind, not degree. He also argues no one can fully know another person's interior — we only ever interact with each other's 'vehicles' — which should make systems more humble about profiling, scoring, or predicting people. His alternative to zero-sum and positive-sum economics is what he calls 'creative-sum': interactions that bring something into being rather than redistributing or growing an existing pie.
What operational test does Al-Beik propose for judging whether a technology or system is genuinely 'people-first'?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- The People-First ApproachX (Twitter) Article, reproduced from albeik.com/pfa/human
The Overview Effect
"Seeing the Earth from orbit triggers a profound cognitive shift, revealing the fragility of the planet and the artificiality of human borders."