I was fortunate to attend SXSW Sydney with my colleagues Matt Harrop (Design Director) and Kieron Norfield (Development Director) in October.
Among dozens of keynotes, one stood out: The Human Advantage by Mo Gawdat (former Chief Business Officer for Google X). His session wasn’t about algorithms or automation, but about something far more human. Gawdat made a simple but powerful comparison that I have been thinking about ever since.
Gawdat said “When Superman landed on Earth, he was raised by kind, ethical parents, and because of that, he became a superhero. But what if Lex Luthor had raised him? He would have become a supervillain. That is artificial intelligence”. The technology itself is neutral, but the values we feed it determine whether it becomes a force for good or harm. I have repeated that analogy to several people since because it captures the ethical tension around AI so perfectly.
What struck me most is that this moment we are in feels exactly like Superman’s childhood. AI is still learning from us, absorbing our biases, ambitions, and values. Every design decision, dataset, and deployment is a form of education. If we feed AI with fairness, creativity, and empathy, it will amplify our strengths. If we feed it with greed, bias, and misinformation, it will reflect those too.
So what can you do as an individual? Be intentional. Choose the tools you use, question the outputs they give you, and think about the ripple effect of what you create with them. Every prompt, every piece of data, every design decision contributes to the kind of AI we’re raising. If we each approach it with curiosity and care, we give the technology a better set of values to learn from.
At Alphero, that message hits close to home. Our work sits at the intersection of technology and humanity. The challenge ahead is not just to build intelligent systems, but to build ethical ones. The human advantage that Gawdat spoke of is not speed or precision; it is consciousness. The ability to choose what kind of world we want to create. Superman’s story is a reminder that power itself isn’t the issue. The real story is who raises it.
