Notes on Transition

These days, I find myself at an intersection that seems to be asking similar questions from wildly different vantage points. I’m sandwiched between young children and aging parents in a world that still lacks language and infrastructure for care work, while also living in San Francisco, in close proximity to an extraordinary investment in intelligent tools and their rapid adoption. It often feels like living in the future with a heavy pocket filled with questions from the past.

But it’s strangely difficult to find people having informed conversations at the intersection of these two worlds. Sometimes, I wonder if moving through both a pandemic and the emergence of intelligent tools in quick succession has obscured our access to hindsight. With more distance, we might recognize that both moments fundamentally reshaped how we think about work: the pandemic by making care work newly visible, and intelligent technology by making many of us question our future as workers. As both a mother and worker, I increasingly find that the questions where care and technology meet are the ones most likely to help me understand the world we are entering.

Increasingly, I think this kind of inquiry is the heart of literacy in the modern age: asking good questions, seeking out answers that invite nuance into our understanding of the world, and applying that understanding directly to caregiving, design, and our own values. It’s rare that I publish my personal rabbit holes, but lately it seems those rabbit holes have grown to encompass most of us at once so I’m reaching back toward my journalism roots to try.

By care, I mean the ordinary work of helping ourselves and one another live: raising children, caring for aging parents, navigating illness, learning, working, making homes, managing ourselves as workers, and finding ways to belong and contribute to the interdependence on which human life depends. By technology, I mean the tools, systems, and infrastructures that shape our ability to give and receive care, as well as understand it.

Some of the thinkers guiding this investigation from different vantage points include Sarah Franklin, whose work on assisted reproductive technologies treats them as a lens for understanding social change; Terry Irwin, whose work on Transition Design explores how societies navigate periods of profound transformation; and Sarah DiGregorio, whose history of nursing has made me curious about how professions become formalized, and what we might learn from that history as both formal and informal work change before our eyes.

Some of the questions I’m currently reporting on include: How do human beings develop bodily literacy, and what will it require to help a child navigate a continuous stream of personalized biological data? What are the minimum conditions for felt biological safety, and how might we evaluate intelligent tools against them? What kinds of investments are occurring in the elder care sector, and can technology overcome the infrastructural and cultural knots that prevent adequate care for large aging populations?

Roughly each month, I’ll follow one question through reading, reporting, and conversation, then share some reflections.

If you’re working on any of these questions—or know someone who is—I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me here. I’m always up for a conversation.

—Jihii, San Francisco, June 2026