Why I created one to eight and the Afterschool Agent.
I changed my mind about a lot of things in my late 50s. This is the story of what changed, and where it led.
I spent most of my career in technology, mental health, community work, social media and marketing. I was an early adopter of everything: electronic music in the 80s, the internet, e-learning, data analytics, and eventually AI. By the time ChatGPT 3 landed, I was already deep in the AI space.
But somewhere in early 2022, something shifted. I started watching how technology, especially the always-on, algorithm-driven kind, was affecting my own children and the greater community.
The same tools I'd spent years championing were quietly reshaping their minds, their relationships, their attention, and their sense of what matters. And I wasn't sure the benefits outweighed the damage anymore. More and more, they were being drawn away from the natural, from what it means to be human.
The more I watched, the more I saw it everywhere. Young people who couldn't sit in silence for five minutes. Young people with thousands of followers and not one friend who'd show up at 2am. Graduates with degrees who couldn't cook a meal, fix a tap, or name what they actually believed. A generation swimming in information and starving for wisdom learned in the real world.
The darkness I couldn't ignore.
I don't say this lightly, but the closer I looked at the direction of things, the darker it felt. Not in a dramatic way... in a quiet, creeping way. The surveillance, the manipulation, the addiction-by-design, the loneliness masquerading as connection. The feeling that we'd built a world that was optimised for everything except human flourishing.
Who is the AI serving?
This is a question I keep coming back to. This year, in May 2026, I really noticed a shift. More opportunities with local AI models, smaller agentic models, and options for using agent harnesses were accelerating to the point where even the novice can use AI agents to be more productive. Now the latest frontier models are getting very good at mimicking the work of humans at work, and with the impending ramping up of Recursive self-improvement (RSI) I'm really concerned for the future of the human race.
I'm going to focus on sharing the multitudes of life skills and knowledge I have accumulated over my lifetime with young people, in the hope that they will enjoy a balanced blend of digital and real world in their future endeavours.
This is one to eight. A guide, a weekly meetup, and a community for anyone who wants more for the next generation than what the screens are selling them. By nurturing and helping young people grow in a rapidly changing world, we're seeding them with the core skills for life, not just to get ahead, but to hold steady online and offline activities promoted daily.
If you've read this far, you're probably feeling some of the same things I feel.
That's okay. That's a start.
onetoeight.org