THE VISION
MACHINE SCALE, HUMAN DEPTH
What It's Like is a collection of essays exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and human behavior.
Each essay pairs an operational challenge in machine intelligence including intent, attention, discernment, and character, with a foundational framework that has wrestled with it for centuries. Nietzsche, Plato, Freud, and other classical thinkers appear here, alongside academic research, art, and literature as diagnostic frameworks.
The premise is straightforward: the existential and moral questions surfaced by machine cognition are not entirely new. Humans have been asking what a self is, what a desire really means, and what character requires for a long time. We are simply meeting the oldest questions of human consciousness through an unprecedented medium.
THE WRITER
Deniz Ozkaraoglu is a Director of Product Management at Microsoft AI.
Prior to Microsoft, she spent over a decade at Google, leading product initiatives across Google Cloud, Chrome, and Google Gemini. At Gemini, she defined the vision for desktop and browser automation, including the launch of Gemini in Chrome and foundational work reflected in a pending U.S. patent in conversational computing. Previously, she directed AI-first platform capabilities for Chrome, including on-device speech models for Live Caption and Translate.
Deniz holds an Executive MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a degree in Psychology and French literature from the University of Washington, and is currently pursuing graduate studies in Philosophy and Ethics at Harvard University. Her essays are written from the vantage point where frontline AI systems engineering meets classical philosophy of mind.