It’s easy to forget how quiet 2020 was in the tech world before the explosion of generative AI.
It was the heart of the pandemic with offices empty, economies staggering, and people anxious about survival and stability. The world was holding its collective breath, unsure what the next months would bring. Yet even in that climate of uncertainty, the engines of technology kept humming beneath the surface. And the concept of mindful AI was a mere a blip on the horizon.
In October of that year, amid that global unease, a post appeared on a small site called The Mindful AI Manifesto. The author, Nathalie Heynderickx, a former tech executive turned leadership coach, urged AI creators to look inward before they built outward.
“We believe AI must have humanity’s best interests at heart in order to secure a safe and peaceful world,” she wrote. Today, that sentiment sounds as obvious as the need for trust, but at the time it seemed more like an afterthought.
Henyderickx’s post was a reminder that intelligence, no matter how artificial, still reflects the intentions of its makers, whether those intentions are for altruistic good, bottom-line advantage, or both. Yes, those two goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In an ideal world, all AI-related intentions and actions would include both. But we don’t live in such a world.
Perhaps what made Nathalie’s message all the more striking was its call for moral clarity and conscience at a time when the world was in the fog of a pandemic.
Five years later, her story still shows a lonely “0 comments.” No debate, no follow-up. Just an open letter to anyone willing to pause and reflect.
The mindful AI call that came too soon
Heynderickx’s manifesto wasn’t another ethics checklist. It was a plea for awareness in the act of creation. For slowing down long enough to ask what kind of consciousness we were encoding into our machines.
She warned that AI sophistication and complexity were accelerating at warp speed while governance was falling behind, and of the risks ungoverned AI could pose to humanity in the not-too-distant future.
Her words read differently today. In 2020, most people were still imagining AI as a distant horizon, not a force recalibrating industries and reshaping economies. Her manifesto landed in the midst of a global crisis that prioritized survival—not reflection. Few at the time had the bandwidth for moral philosophy when the world itself felt fragile.
Yet in hindsight, her timing seems uncanny. While society was trying to hold itself together, she was pointing quietly toward a deeper fracture: one between our capacity to build and our capacity to understand what we’re building.
When acceleration drowned reflection
Within a year of her post, the world turned upside down… again.
OpenAI’s generative AI breakthrough with Chat GPT attracted hundreds of millions. Google, Microsoft, and countless startups raced to keep up. In the rush to compete, the introspective language of “mindfulness” vanished beneath the noise of “training runs” and “product launches.”
Researchers later confirmed what many suspected: most corporate ethics programs were symbolic at best. A 2023 arXiv study found that AI ethics teams inside tech companies were often isolated from the people building the AI models. Creating and implementing guardrails became a side project; acceleration became job number one.
Heynderickx’s post didn’t trend because it didn’t belong in that race. While mindfulness moves at the speed of careful reflection, AI rockets ahead to capture market share.
The quiet power of clear seeing
Still, her argument was radical in its simplicity.
She proposed that mindful awareness is not soft spirituality. Rather, it’s clear seeing. In an age when machines increasingly imitate human judgment, developers need inner clarity more than ever. “Programming is never value-neutral,” she later told CIO Magazine in an essay on emotional intelligence and AI leadership. “Code reflects the consciousness of the developer, just as art reflects the mindset of the artist.” To state it simply, every design decision embeds a worldview.
That insight has aged well. The leading edge of AI safety now circles back to what she intuited: the AI builder’s mindset shapes the machine’s behavior.
For example, Anthropic’s Constitutional AI and DeepMind’s Amplified Oversight each, in their own way, try to codify ethical presence into system design.
The silence that still speaks
So why revisit a largely forgotten post? Because its silence tells us something.
Maybe people didn’t comment because they simply didn’t know how to respond. You can argue with policy; you can’t easily argue with presence.
It could be argued that The Mindful AI Manifesto was written as a mirror. Five years later, when we look into that mirror, we might see what we’ve lost in the AI frenzy, and what we still need to do if AI is to reflect humanity’s higher, aspirational nature, and not its darker opposite.
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