From Indentured Roots to Designing the Future of AI

My name is Jayshree Mallaya and I write from Cape Town, South Africa.

My story begins long before my work in technology. It begins generations earlier, when my ancestors arrived in Durban from Andhra Pradesh, India as indentured labourers during the colonial era. Like many families brought through this system, they were not known first by their names or dreams but by the categories assigned to them.

They were tagged, classified and placed within a hierarchy designed to control labour and identity.

Four generations later, I often reflect on how powerful it is that history can transform.

A lineage that once arrived under colonial tags has now produced an inventor exploring how the technologies shaping our future can remain accountable to human beings.

I grew up in South Africa during apartheid, in a society shaped by deep divisions of race, opportunity and gender. For many young girls growing up within those systems, becoming an inventor or technology founder did not appear as an obvious path.

Yet curiosity has a way of finding its own direction.

Over time I began exploring how emerging technologies could interact with the real world in ways that strengthen human presence rather than replace it. That journey eventually led me to found Third Vision AI, where my work focuses on something I believe the next era of artificial intelligence will require: governance and human authority built directly into technological systems.

Today I am the inventor of technologies such as the Anchor Band, Civic Cube and Pattern Orbit. These ideas explore how intelligent systems can operate responsibly by ensuring that human presence, accountability and decision-making remain part of the technological loop.

The symbolism of one invention often feels deeply personal to me.

More than a century ago, my ancestors were identified through colonial tags that reduced human beings to labour units within an economic system.

Today, I have invented the Anchor Band, a wearable execution authority layer designed to ensure that intelligent systems cannot act without verified human presence and consent.

Where one system once used tags to control people, this new technology uses presence to restore human authority.

For me, that transformation carries a profound meaning.

Coming from a lineage shaped by colonial classification, and growing up in a society that limited opportunity for many, I understand how systems can shape people’s lives. Technology now gives us a chance to design systems differently.

Systems that recognise dignity.

Systems that empower rather than exclude.

This is one of the reasons I recently began developing an initiative called Women + AI: The New Currency.

Through workshops and learning sessions, I explore how women can transform decades of lived experience into intelligent systems that solve real problems in their communities. Many women already hold extraordinary knowledge developed through careers, families and community leadership. When we recognise that experience as a form of pattern intelligence, it becomes a powerful foundation for innovation.

My hope is that more women begin to see themselves not only as users of technology, but as designers of the systems shaping our future.

Four generations ago my ancestors arrived on these shores identified by numbers and labour contracts rather than possibility.

Today I stand in a very different moment in history, where technology is beginning to shape the future of humanity itself.

My hope is that more women step forward into this space, bringing their wisdom, their lived experience and their courage to help design the systems that will guide the next era.

When women recognize that their lives already hold powerful forms of intelligence, something extraordinary becomes possible. We move from being defined by systems to becoming the ones who shape them.

And perhaps the greatest transformation of all is this: that stories once marked by limitation can become stories that inspire a new generation of women to imagine, invent and lead.