
AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske
From Humans On The Loop by Michael Garfield
February 10, 2026 · 1h 22m · Season 2 · Episode 31
About this episode
The episode features a discussion with Alex Komoroske about reimagining technology and AI for a more intentional and decentralized future.
This week go deep with Alex Komoroske , CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked. The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld . Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality. We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it…
People in this episode
Host: Michael Garfield
Guest: Alex Komoroske
Topics covered
- AI
- technology
- decentralization
- software
- privacy
- digital culture
Keywords
- AI
- decentralized ecosystem
- privacy
- software self-assembly
- tech paradigm
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Common Tools, Google, Stripe
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