What happens when Silicon Valley's AI boom collides with rural America and Indigenous communities? Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, eyeing reopened nuclear plants like Three Mile Island, and pushing for expanded uranium mining on Native lands to feed the machine. The communities bearing the physical cost of AI are the same ones being left out of the conversation about how it gets built.

In this fourth episode of the Life With Machines x @YoungFutures series, Baratunde Thurston travels beyond the coasts to meet two leaders working with youth who refuse to let their communities be raw material for someone else's tech boom.

Charlotte Dungan (Mark Cuban Foundation) is partnering with 4-H National to bring AI agency, not just AI literacy, to rural teens. Her students are using AI for drug discovery, search and rescue, and small business optimization in towns that were supposed to lose their best minds to the coasts.

Tesia Zientek (AISES) is building the AUNTIE Tech Collective, a multi-generational initiative grounding Indigenous youth in tech leadership rooted in Seven Generations thinking, not "move fast and break things." Tribal Nations are now creating their own digital sovereignty frameworks, building Sovereign AI Factories on Native lands, and writing the rules for how their data and culture get used.

This is the AI conversation Silicon Valley doesn't want you to see.

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LINKS MENTIONED

The Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamps

AISES

AUNTIE Tech Collective

Young Futures

Episodes referenced:

Michael Running Wolf on saving Indigenous languages with AI

Episode 1 — How Will AI Impact Gen Z?

Episode 2 — How ChatGPT EXPOSED Our Education System

Episode 3 — AI Is Monetizing Our Mental Health

Big Tech Is Coming for Rural America. Young People Are Ready.