The Micro-Circle Launch Kit: Finding Others to Navigate AI With
One of the most important insights in the book — and one I keep coming back to in my own work — is that navigating AI alone isn’t enough. Individual tools and practices matter, but they need community to sustain them.
Diana, a Denver consultant, discovered this during a power outage. With screens dark and neighbors outside for once, a driveway conversation about smart doorbells turned into something deeper — a collective reckoning with how technology was reshaping their neighborhood. She started what she called “porch circles”: gatherings where people navigate change through shared bewilderment rather than individual expertise. She called these “fourth spaces” — distinct from home, work, and commercial third places. Spaces that resist optimization in favor of presence.
Amara, a developer in Toronto, arrived at the same insight from the other direction. After a debugging session revealed something deeper than code — a need for others who were grappling with the same questions — she built the FluxLabs network, with meetings that required every AI demo to be paired with a genuine concern.
The Micro-Circle Launch Kit distills what made both of these efforts work into five components: a charter, rotating roles, consistent rituals (including a three-question check-in), minimal tools, and a regular feedback loop. It’s deliberately minimal. The constraint helps focus on connection over infrastructure.
Download the Micro-Circle Launch Kit from the book’s website, or explore it in full in AI and the Art of Being Human.
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The Micro-Circle Launch Kit is one of 21 practical tools from AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. The characters and narratives in the book are fictional — designed to reveal truths about AI and being human that only stories can capture.