The Opened Possibilities

AI has has lowered the barriers, but for whom?

I started “coding” at 12, without knowing it, in a small high school in Guanajuato, México. My first webpage was a static HTML site with banners I made in Paint. I can’t even remember the content, but I remember I was fascinated by it. Since then, I have considered myself a daughter of the internet, an early adopter.

With all my limitations (a low/middle-income family in a small town in central Mexico), I used my limited resources to explore Photoshop using bootlegged license codes I found online, Internet forums, and early YouTube. Everything was in English, and I barely understood it. But I figured things out the way people from places like mine always do, trying, failing, copying, and putting my family computer at risk.

Years later, I started a Bachelor’s in Economics, only equipped with a very old laptop. She was painfully slow, but there I learned to code in R by myself (by copying code from Stack Overflow :p). I remember the happiness of creating my first graph. It was like transforming all the abstract knowledge I had in maths and econometrics into something I could see. I tapped into that fascination again. That opened so many doors for me. I had the opportunity to work as a data analyst and researcher, exploring policy problems that are rooted in our society, such as crime, violence, and human rights. I could work in my dream NGOs and think tanks, move to Mexico City, and build a career in data and policy.

But I can’t tell this story without being honest about the barriers. I didn’t know English well. My programming knowledge was some html that I learned as a teenager and some broken R. We didn’t have sophisticated AI translators, and I didn’t know how to read documentation. I spent years feeling on the edge, close enough to see what was possible, but too far to fully reach it. And I was not alone.

Occupying spaces that don’t exist

During the pandemic, I had to go back to my state and work from home, like everyone else. Luisa, one of my best friends, and I started to have very deep discussions about how technology was transforming our lives. We were connected almost all day, there was a lot of anxiety and misinformation. We wanted to be part of those conversations, specifically about what technology means for young women in Latin America. We wanted to talk about the barriers, the opportunities, and the powerful and disruptive impacts of the internet, even before the AI explosion. We wanted so badly to occupy those spaces of discussion that we created our own, Hijas de Internet.

There is something deeply political about occupying a digital space that doesn’t exist. Building a platform from remote places in the Global South, where technologies reshape our lives every day, but where we are still left out of the discussions about them. Partly because we have other urgent problems to deal with, such as violence, displacement, and institutional failure, and partly because nobody expected us to show up. Hijas de Internet started as a podcast, but soon it became a large community of young women with similar interests and worries who wanted to share and spark new conversations. That project opened some doors again for us to create, learn, and share.

The possibilities are open, but for whom?

Three years later, thanks to a scholarship, I could move to Germany to pursue a Master’s degree in Data Science for Public Policy. For the first time, I was in the room where edge AI technologies were being discussed, not reading about them secondhand, but building and breaking down AI models, applying them to policy questions, and contributing to cutting-edge AI research. I had incredible mentors who questioned the biases and alignment of AI models, their economic impacts, and the infrastructure that supports them.

Then came the agentic era. Tools like Claude Code arrived, and I felt instantly how barriers that had limited me for years, such as language, technical complexity, the gap between the messy ideas in my head and the ability to build them, started to dissolve. AI didn’t just help me work faster. For me, AI came to break those barriers. It has compressed years of learning into weeks. It has made me build things in accessible ways that I couldn’t have imagined when I was copying R code from Stack Overflow on a slow laptop.

But I can’t stop thinking about how the same technology is building new barriers for others. People from the same contexts I come from. People without a scholarship, internet connection, access to a decent computer, money to pay expensive licenses and APIs, or just the time to experiment with tools that change every week (or day). People whose voices are absent from the conversation until the impacts reach them, and by then, the decisions have already been made.

That’s why the existence of spaces like Hijas de Internet, as a sandbox to learn, explore, document, and share knowledge, is so important. Not because we have all the answers, but because the conversation needs more voices like ours, from places like Guanajuato, Latin America, and the Global South. Voices that know what it feels like to be on the other side of the digital divide, and what it takes to cross it.