Collaborating
with Life
Re-awakening human creativity and innovation in the age of AI
In Collaborating with Life, innovation expert Mia Jafari invites us to see AI as a mirror learning from how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the living world.
Through seven guiding principles for approaching innovation as an inner journey, she shows how to shape technology that serves life rather than replaces it.
Drawing on conversations across continents with Indigenous elders, innovators, startup founders, AI pioneers, and systems thinkers, Jafari offers a life-centered framework for flourishing in the age of AI.
Becoming Creators of Our Shared Technological Future
We stand at a crossroads with three possible paths ahead of us:
Path 1: Collective Flourishing - AI enables ecological and human regeneration and wellbeing.
Path 2: Business as Usual - Nothing fundamentally changes and AI optimises our current broken systems.
Path 3: Accelerated Crisis - AI amplifies our crises through weaponization, environmental collapse, disconnection, and widening inequality.
The difference between these paths isn't what technology can do, but how quickly we can awaken to our unique human creative and innovative potential. As AI masters the work of doing, we're invited to reclaim what makes us irreplaceable: our capacity to feel, relate, imagine, and create.
This book charts Path 1 through seven guiding principles, stories from innovators, startups, and creators, and practices for reawakening the creative intelligence that lives not in what we produce, but in who we truly are.
Your Practical Companion for Flourishing Through Change
Collaborating with Life is a companion for adapting to change in an era of uncertainty - offering seven principles to reorient how we relate to intelligence, creation, and life itself, guiding us toward collective flourishing.
You'll discover how to:
Reclaim creativity as a distinctly human technology
Lead innovation that regenerates rather than extracts
Transform fear of AI into curiosity and co-creation
Align business, design, and ecology into living systems
For readers of Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer), Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein), and The Age of AI (Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher), this is a field guide for conscious participation in humanity's most important collaboration yet.
The Book’s Transformational Journey
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Reframes AI as a collective responsibility and explores six planetary dilemmas—from ecological collapse to the loss of meaning—through the lens of shared consequence and regenerative potential.
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Presents seven guiding principles for navigating these challenges—each corresponding to a stage in AI’s evolution, from current tools to multi-agent systems and the emerging horizon of superintelligence:
Awakening Our Potential as Architects
Honouring Our Unique Essence
Embracing Creativity as a Way of Being
Deepening Presence
Loving Life with Gratitude
Receiving Wisdom from Nature
Trusting the Journey
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Through dialogue with Lola, this section explores how we can engage with AI as our potential co-creative companions. It offers practices for navigating this relationship as AI systems become more intelligent, nuanced, and omnipresent.
About
Mia Jafari
Born in Iran and raised in the UK, Mia's career spans continents and industries - from first launching a fashion brand in London to developing innovation projects across Dubai, Riyadh, and beyond.
Mia is an entrepreneur and innovation strategist who bridges technology, creativity, and inner transformation. With over fifteen years' experience guiding global organisations through transformative design and collaboration, she helps reimagine how we create—and who we become—when we collaborate with life itself.
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