The voices we learn from.
We name our sources because reciprocity is the practice. This is one list, kept in one place, with a line on what each voice gives us and a link you can follow. It is a living record: we add, we correct, we never quietly erase.
70 voices as of November 2026. The Lineage at the end of the Field Guide is drawn from this same list.
The lineage
The thinkers and traditions the shape of this work comes from.
- adrienne maree brown — The shape of this work: cyclical, fractal, small is all. Emergent Strategy. Opening · Lineage
- Octavia Butler — The Earthseed verses that seed Emergent Strategy: God is change, shape change. Opening · Lineage
- Robin Wall Kimmerer — Reciprocity, gratitude and the grammar of animacy. Braiding Sweetgrass. Opening · Lineage
- Kieran Egan — Imaginative Education: learning begins in imagination, not information. Nicki's graduate lineage at Simon Fraser University. Opening · Lineage
- Dr. Gillian Judson — Carries Egan's imagination-first pedagogy into ecological, place-based understanding. A bridge to imagining a livable future. Lineage
- Dr. Natalia Gajdamaschko — Brought Vygotsky on imagination into the North American conversation. The scholar Nicki worked recapitulation theory through with. Lineage
- Lev Vygotsky — The zone of proximal development. Learning is social before it is individual. Opening · Lineage
- The IERG and CIRCE circle — The intellectual home Nicki studied inside: the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education at SFU. Lineage
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz — A founding voice for women's right to learn and think. Seventeenth-century Mexico. Lineage
- Inés Suárez — A woman who refused the edge of the story assigned to her. Sixteenth-century Chile. Lineage
- Isabel Allende — Memory, women's interior lives, magical realism. Lineage
- Gabriel García Márquez — Magical realism as a way of telling the truth. Lineage
- Octavio Paz — Solitude, identity, the labyrinth of culture. Lineage
- Gabriela Mistral — Poet and educator. The first Latin American woman to win the Nobel in Literature. Lineage
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés — Myth, story and the wild feminine as a way of knowing. Women Who Run With the Wolves. Lineage
- Folk tales and oral tradition — The anonymous, communal storytellers whose tales carry wisdom across generations. Lineage
- La Malinche (Malintzin, Doña Marina) — Held with complexity: interpreter, bridge, contested symbol at the meeting of worlds. Lineage
- Madeline Miller — Retelling myth from the margins. Circe, The Song of Achilles. Lineage
- Emily Wilson — How the translator's lens reshapes what we inherit. The first woman to publish an English Odyssey. Lineage
- Homer and the Odyssey tradition — The deep well the retellings draw from. Lineage
- Rosalía — Reinventing flamenco through a modern lens. Lineage
- Shakira — Global crossover, bilingual identity, reinvention. Lineage
- Karol G — Contemporary Latina self-authorship. Lineage
- Nick Foster — The four mindsets, Could, Should, Might and Don't, that organize Part One of the Field Guide. Part One · the frame
- Daniel Stern — Affect attunement: how a caregiver senses and matches a child's inner state. The root of our name. The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1985. Glossary · Attunement
Teachers and mentors
People who taught us directly.
- Michelle of Holisticism — Taught Nicki to live in her zone of proximal development, and to iterate, iterate, iterate. Lineage
- Monica DeSimone — A teacher of Nicki's. Lineage
- Marshan Snyder — Kathryn's mother. A published thinker in a family of them. Lineage
Voices we follow on AI
Builders, critics, ethicists and practitioners. Rigorous, not tied to one political aisle, revisited as the field moves. We say plainly when we disagree.
- Women in AI Ethics — The annual 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list. A first stop for voices the mainstream misses. Founded by Mia Shah-Dand. Part Three · Voices we follow
- Dr. Timnit Gebru — Naming harm early. Founder of DAIR; co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper and the landmark bias study. Part One · Don't · Part Three
- Dr. Joy Buolamwini — Refusal as design input. Gender Shades exposed face-analysis bias; the Algorithmic Justice League shows what safe looks like. Part One · Don't · Part Three
- Dr. Brandeis Marshall — If you don't see it, you won't be it. Teaches BIPOC communities to work in and shape AI. Part Three · Voices we follow
- Abundant Intelligences — The Indigenous-led research program we cite throughout: intelligence living in many forms, relationship before extraction. Part One · Should · Part Three
- Gary Marcus — A steady skeptic and a useful counterweight to hype. Where we push back: he can under-credit real progress. Part Three · Voices we follow
- Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell — With Gebru, the Stochastic Parrots paper: training data encodes stereotypes and amplifies harm at scale. Part One · Don't
- Yoshua Bengio — Chaired the International AI Safety Report: an AI that agrees with you makes vulnerable people more suggestible. Sycophancy, named. Part One · Should
- Balaraman Ravindran — Legally mandated guardrails for chatbots released for general use. IIT Madras. Part One · Should
Voices in the Field Guide
People quoted or drawn on inside the four mindsets, named here so none is missed.
- Sebastian Musslick — A computational neuroscientist who called AI in science hype a year earlier, then changed his mind on evidence. Could, grounded. Part One · Could
- Hugo Aerts — Mass General Brigham's forecast that many medical AI tools will fall short. Not failure, the iteration loop working. Part One · Could
- Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng — The MOSFET transistor, Bell Labs, 1959. Two people, trillions of transistors a second. Part One · Could
- Astro Teller — Moonshot thinking at Google X: refuse the 10 percent improvement, chase the 10x. Could as disciplined audacity. Part One · Could
- Fredy Vargas Lama — Imagining a positive future is itself what mobilizes the creativity to build it. Hope as infrastructure. World Economic Forum. Part One · Could
- Dominique Broadway, Ruby Asabor and Claudia Elliott — Three women who built real businesses on a course platform, one as a complete novice. The bright, grounded Could. Part One · Could
- Ashley Gordon — The hardest part was breaking her own social construct of what is possible for women to create. Could as inner permission. Part One · Could
- Kenneth Tankersley — Maya water filtration led the world; Western histories only recently corrected the bias that said otherwise. Who gets credited as the standard-setter. Part One · Should
- Suzanne Kite (Oglala Lakota) — Asks why we would even want to make a human-like intelligence. The desire itself is rooted in a Western ontology. Part One · Should
- Keoni Mahelona (Te Hiku Media) — Data is the last frontier of colonization. CARE and OCAP principles protect Indigenous data sovereignty. Part One · Should
- Carol Anne Hilton — Indigenomics: economies where everyone succeeds and all life thrives. A line we love and are still sourcing verbatim. Part One · Should
- Edwina McKennon — Small businesses are the bloodlines of our communities; when they embrace AI the ripple effects transform lives. Part One · Should
- Sophie Musumeci — Ethical AI and transparency as the coming era: use it responsibly and openly to build trust. Real Entrepreneur Women. Part One · Should
- Ben Affleck — Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop. AI can do the craftsman work. Part One · Should
- Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell — The AI Doc, or how to become an apocaloptimist: international coordination, transparency, accountability, adaptive regulation. Part One · Should
- Pierre Wack — Scenario planning at Shell: refuse the single forecast, build several internally consistent stories, and be ready when one arrives. Part One · Might
- Herman Kahn — Pioneered the scenario method at RAND in the 1950s; Wack carried it into business. Part One · Might
- Alisha Bhagat — Looks backward in time to imagine brighter, regenerative futures. Forum for the Future. Part One · Might
- Angela Wilkinson — The foresight practitioner as futures midwife, storytelling coach, window cleaner, map maker. Welcome diversity; challenge your own filters. Part One · Might
- Bill Kovarik — The history of leaded gasoline: what happens when the precautionary principle is ignored for eighty years. Part One · Don't
- Cass Sunstein — The strongest critic of the precautionary principle: it can be literally paralyzing. We hold the critique alongside the principle. Part One · Don't
- John Graham — Calls the precautionary principle subjective and susceptible to abuse. Both true. Part One · Don't
- Peter Montague — Risk assessment asks how much harm is acceptable; the precautionary principle asks how much harm is avoidable. The Wingspread Statement. Part One · Don't
- Thomas Lim — Assumed AI would cut his workload; trying to automate everything did the opposite. Don'ts protect success. Part One · Don't
- Denise Russo — Authenticity is the strategy. Part One · Don't
- The Wright brothers, Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison — Could that built human flourishing: faith through failure, and a world that could not picture night without darkness. Part One · Could
- Daphne Magna — Opening ChatGPT is not a strategy. Random AI use doesn't scale a company. Should, made concrete. Part One · Should
- Sam Altman — His June 2025 figures for the energy and water of one query. We cite him as the claim's source and hold the contested numbers next to it. Part One · the cost to the world
- Andrej Karpathy — Popularized vibe coding in early 2025: let the AI handle the code while you steer by feel. Glossary
- Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler — The techno-optimist Abundance: exponential technology driving the cost of human needs toward zero. We hold it in tension with the ancestral meaning. Glossary · Abundance
- The Gabrielino-Tongva Nation — Abundance as trade networks that reached the Colorado River and beyond. In their own words. Part Three · Honoring abundance
- Guna women of Guna Yala, Panama — The mola: what looks like one image is many stitched layers of pattern. Our metaphor for what AI is. Part Three · Glossary
- Yolŋu women of northeast Arnhem Land — Songspirals: real knowing circles rather than moving in one direction. Our metaphor for training data and for the cyclical way we learn. Part Three · Glossary
Widening the circle, a commitment: we want this ancestry to be eclectic and honest. Not only women, not only one canon. Strong male voices; queer, trans and nonbinary voices; voices from underrepresented communities; elders and the young alike. We especially honor the crone: the elder-woman stage as a seat of authority, not invisibility.