WHY are we? The story of Human Future Hub
It all started with information overload about AI developments and a couple of lay-offs.
As a product manager in Data and AI, Dario had to read news and articles on artificial intelligence developments every single day. He loved the job he was doing, building an educational assistant to help university students get ready for their exams. It was a meaningful use of AI. Still, industry pressure was immense, and the pressure within the company only added to it. In an (un)expected turn of events, his team has been dismantled, and who knows what happened to the promising project. It was December 2024, and Dario decided to use the winter for a longer break. Along with him, sharing the bitter reality of tech layoffs, was Samarth, a close teammate and chessmate.
After long months of unstructured vacation, long sleep-ins and general home indulgence, on one day in April, Dario suddenly sat down at his laptop and typed away for the whole day. He came to tell something important to Kata, who was struggling with yet another inefficient and inapt digital agency as her employer. Her time there was definitely coming to an end as well.
Dario said: “I woke up and had this idea that there must be so many people feeling anxiety about AI, and that we could build a community of support. I laid out all the ideas in a PRD! What do you think?”
So what did I think? ;) “That is an awesome idea, and we should do it!”
We needed another five (!) months to settle life things down. Kata “agreed” to leave her job, take some rest, and collectively, the three of us decided to start building the community on September 1st 2025. We’ve set up our Asana and a Monday morning meeting to get things going. Within two weeks, we felt that we’re onto something, and it felt so good after long months of tiresome search for meaning.
But before that, we stumbled upon a first hurdle - the naming agony! We’ve all heard about the importance of a brand, a name and a logo. Yes, it was no different for us. The original idea was to name the organisation HumanAI Hub. Today, as of December 16th, I guess you’ll agree that it was a bad idea, given the purpose of our organisation. Thankfully, we understood it in time, and as product people, we did proper market research and visual research and after roughly three weeks, the baby was born: Human Future Hub. All domain names available, social media available. It was the right step to suffer for a tiny bit. The way we thought about it was that our work will be about the future. It might encompass AI, but it might as well be something else. Who knows what’s going to happen in 5 years?
Our decision-making is fast. We started with meetups in Berlin, again, as product people, we just prototype and see what happens. Two meetups happened in September, not without disagreements, fear, drama and facepalms. But we did it! And it turned out to be a really good idea to push so hard at the very beginning. Meetups are perfect for growth when nobody knows you. The people who came were mostly curious, curious about the topic of AI’s impact on our lives. We’ve discovered that there are four particular areas that move human emotions: education, future of work, human value and AI ethics. Those became the core of our focus. This year, specifically, we started actual projects in education and the future of work. More on that in the upcoming posts.
In the last three months, we’ve already pivoted. We started with the idea of a community of support tackling AI anxiety, but we realised we want to do impact work and actually cause even the slightest change. Building an NGO was the first path towards our goals that we saw. But after three months of in-person events and starting online sessions and collaborations, we’ve met new people, got new contacts recommended, gained incredible team mates and understood that there are many options of doing what we want to do. We got together to put down the new vision and mission, and after many hours, it became clear that it was there in front of us from the beginning:
Humans together. Nobody is left behind.
We’ve been putting these lines literally after every LinkedIn post and in every meetup description. That’s it. This is our vision. And the mission, you might ask?
Empower Humans to thrive in the AI era by raising awareness, providing education and guidance.
So what has changed since the beginning? We don’t just want to “know the wolf”, talk about the problem, we want to create actionable programs in education and recruiting areas, raise awareness in responsible use of AI, guide and support the community with mental health sessions, and collaborate with fantastic organisations and individuals on future topics that are relevant to society.
We CAN do it, mostly because through our events, we’ve met so many supportive people who also happen to be experts in various fields. It is incredible what can be achieved by will and honest engagement.
If you feel like this would be something you’d love to contribute to, contact us! We’re constantly looking for experts in psychology, sociology, social media (yes!), recruiting, education and much more.
Thanks for reading, and see you in the next one!
Kata, Dario and Samarth