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Mother of Disruption

Reshaping the Human Contract in the Age of AI

by Jess Von Bank

AI is rearranging how work happens. That upheaval is also an opening: a rare chance to ask what our systems are actually for, and what they quietly ask people to carry.

Hardcover of Mother of Disruption: Reshaping the Human Contract in the Age of AI, by Jess Von Bank

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About the book

We inherited a story about work long before we were old enough to question it, learning what to give, what to endure, and which costs to carry quietly. Over time, those costs became so familiar that we stopped seeing the systems that created them.

Now AI is giving those same systems extraordinary new power, and with it comes a choice about what we carry forward. We can perpetuate their old harms, or we can ask what work could become if we built it with human beings in mind.

Mother of Disruption is for anyone who has felt the weight of a system that was supposed to serve them, and anyone with the power to change one. It gives language to what we have lived, reckons with what we have come to accept, and offers a covenant for what we owe each other next.

Jess Von Bank, seated

About Jess Von Bank

Jess Von Bank is a technology humanist, future-of-work advisor, and systems thinker. She is the co-founder of Now to Next, a transformation firm specializing in the human dimensions of enterprise AI. Raised in small-town North Dakota with shoulders that know how to lift, Jess has spent over two decades inside talent, technology, and systems design. She is a mother to three daughters, the founder of a nonprofit for girls, and an endurance athlete. Jess measures every system by how well it serves the people inside it, and believes any future of work that fails the humans living inside it is no future at all.