"You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has spent more time building or obsessing over the online zeitgeist, for better or for worse," Alexis Ohanian introduced himself at the BRIDGE Summit in Abu Dhabi on Monday. Ohanian, a founding partner at venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, is perhaps best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of Reddit. "Being chronically online was part of the job," he said, as part of a conversation with TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar. TIME is a media partner of the BRIDGE Summit, which has gathered a global community of creators, policymakers, investors, technologists, media institutions, and cultural leaders to discuss the landscape and future of media. But the advent of artificial intelligence has made platforms like Reddit, which once served as hubs of connection, less human, Ohanian said.

On June 18, AI image-generation company Midjourney released a tool that lets users create short video clips using their own images as a template. Days later, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian posted on X about how he used the tech to animate a photo of his late mother, which shows him as a child wrapped in her embrace. In the artificial video, she laughs and smiles before rocking him in her arms. "Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel," he wrote. "This is how she hugged me.

As data breaches, misuse of personal information and the spread of disinformation erode the public's trust in Silicon Valley, it can be all too easy to become cynical about technology's impact on the world. But there are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic about tech's role in society moving forward. Below, TIME speaks to 10 innovators, founders, investors and even athletes who remain upbeat about technology's influence despite the many challenges facing the industry today. Moustapha Cisse left Senegal a decade ago to study artificial intelligence, and now he believes the technology can change Africa for the better. Cisse, 34, is leading Google's AI research center in Accra, Ghana, the company's first such venture in Africa. "I built my team here around people who are really committed to make a difference in people's lives," Cisse tells TIME. "[They] bring a fresh perspective in the field by looking at the problems that we have in Africa." Growing up, no one would have expected Cisse to be heading up a multi-billion dollar corporation's research initiative.

We may take the #hashtag for granted today, but it didn't emerge fully formed from Biz Stone's head. The Large Hadron Collider hasn't collapsed (or collapsed the space-time continuum), but that wasn't a given when scientists first turned the thing on. Nobody thought the sweaty geeks who sent their supposedly self-driving cars into concrete barriers instead of across the Mojave Desert would soon threaten to upend the way we move through the world. Oh, and remember the Microsoft trial? When we started planning our 25th birthday party more than a year ago, we knew that not all readers (okay, not even most readers) would have been following us since day one, and they certainly wouldn't recall every story we've told.

Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

NEW YORK, July 6, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thanks to his business acumen, poster boy looks, and relentless activism for freedom of the internet, Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian has become one of the most high-profile residents of Brooklyn. A startup based in Armenia and San Francisco named 1AI Solutions has recently launched a working AI-based version of Alexis Ohanian named Avedis Ohanian. Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."