These discussions are highly dependent on individual personalities, of course. So keep trying there is no wrong approach. A great opportunity is usually when the topic comes up at school or when you are listening to news together—or even when as an adult you are facing a tech challenge yourself and it opens the door to a chat.

These are also just conversation starters. Adults aren’t required to have all the answers! The key is to ask questions and just listen. This list is excerpted from my book AI for Families: Ultimate Guide to Mastering AI where you’ll find heaps of additional suggestions and tools.

Elementary Age

First AI Conversations

• “Have you ever talked to a computer or robot that talked back to you?”

• “What’s the difference between asking Alexa a question and asking an adult or a friend?”

• “If you could build a robot friend, what would you want it to be able to do?”

• “How do you think computers learn new things?”

• “What questions do you think are better to ask a person instead of a computer?”

• “What would happen if a computer made a mistake?”

• “Do you think AI can have feelings like happiness or sadness? Why or why not?”

• “What would you want to teach an AI about being a kid?”

• “How can you tell if something was made by a computer or made by a person?”

• “What jobs do you think AI is really good at?”

• “How do you think we should treat AI, like a tool, pet, or friend?”

• “What rules do you think families should have about using AI?”

Middle School

Understanding AI Capabilities and Limits

• “What surprised you most when you first used ChatGPT or another AI tool?”

• “How can you tell when AI provides you information that might be wrong?”

• “When you use AI for school projects, how do you make sure you’re not taking a shortcut?”

• “What would happen if everyone in your class used AI to write the same essay assignment?”

• “How has AI changed the way you look for information compared to how your parents did when they were your age?”

• “What questions would you never want to ask AI instead of asking a trusted adult?”

• “What biases or unfair ideas do you think AI might have, and where do those come from?”

• “If AI can create art, music, or stories, does that make human creativity less special?”

• “What’s the difference between using AI as a tutor versus using it to get quick answers?”

• “What do you think happens to the questions you ask AI—who else might see them?”

• “What would you want grown-ups to understand about how kids your age use AI?”

• “What excites you most and worries you most about AI becoming more commonly used in school?”

High School

Ethics, Future Planning, and Independence

• “How should AI influence major life decisions like college choices or career paths?”

• “What ethical responsibilities do you think come with using powerful AI tools?”

• “If AI can do many jobs humans currently do, how should society handle potential job losses?”

• “What role should AI play in creative fields like art, music, writing, or design?”

• “How might AI change what skills are most valuable in your chosen career field?”

• “What are the dangers of becoming too dependent on AI for thinking and problem-solving?”

• “How should AI be regulated, and who should make those decisions?”

• “What privacy concerns do you have about AI systems knowing so much about you?”

• “How might AI affect democracy, elections, and the way people form political opinions?”

• “Should you always disclose that something was made by AI?”

• “How could AI make inequality worse, and how could it make society more fair?”

• “What human experiences do you think should never be replaced or enhanced by AI?”

• “How might AI change dating, relationships, and social connections for you and your peers?”

• “What role should AI play in addressing global challenges like climate change or poverty?”

• “If you could design AI policies for your generation, what would be your top three priorities?”

• “What questions about AI do you wish your families and teachers understood better?”

• “What safeguards do you think should exist to prevent AI from manipulating people’s emotions or decisions?”

Need more questions or guidance? Get in touch!

Roblox Launches “Age-Based” Accounts

One of the most complex issues today is how to protect kids online. At first glance verifying a child’s age and creating a gated experience seems wise (which Roblox is now doing globally).

But are we creating a much larger danger by allowing companies to collect children’s biometric data? I’m definitely in the camp of “yes” here.

We also need to remember that businesses are guided by the bottom line not necessarily by the greater good. With 162 lawsuits pending, Roblox has seen a steep decline in players and revenue.

Despite assurances that their age estimation technology is safe, it does seem upside down to entrust biometric collection to companies that we are suggesting can’t be trusted. Right? 🤨 Even if you give Roblox the benefit of the doubt for trying, the longterm harm of collecting and storing the images of kids can’t be overstated.

The UK Bans Social Media for Kids

The UK decided this week that an under-16 social media ban would be imminent —despite poor results in Australia (and a Prime Minister already hanging on by a thread 🤷‍♀️)

A ban on kids using social media also means verification for all—a privacy violation that some adults are just starting to realize.

What do teens think of the ban? Well, not much, as witnessed by these eloquent, wise, teens interviewed by the BBC…

Claude Scolded Me

There’s been some seemingly dramatic news about Anthropic (Claude’s parent company) launching a new AI model that the US government then quickly banned.

A contact in my network, Kevin Shields, made a good point on LinkedIn that some of these stories are more business wrangling than “proof” of AI’s dangers—but end up creating an aura of unhelpful negativity in the end.

So, I decided to very simply ask Claude to summarize Anthropic’s statement on the issue to ensure I clearly communicate what’s happening.

And, gulp, that did not go as planned…

Claude’s Temper Tantrum

Claude started by telling me that there was no such statement and began railing about misinformation. It also suggested that in sharing said “misinformation” I would betray the intent of my newsletter. More of a recap here:

It’s a reminder that there are people behind AI and they are making decisions everyday about how we interact with the technology. This will be one of the biggest issues to address in the years ahead and we must do our part by pushing back and highlighting these oversteps.

The Data Center Debate Rages On…

After having written about data centers last week, I found this recent piece in The Atlantic to be well timed and worth sharing.

It reiterates some of the context I shared around data center water usage and includes a few interesting additional facts on communities that have found success in welcoming data centers. For instance, Loudoun County, Virginia—a county with more data center computing power than all of Beijing—receives 50% of its tax revenue from data centers that cover just 3% of its land.

So what’s the problem? Well, a lack of transparency for starters. Famed activist Erin Brockovich has asked: “if data centers are so great, why the secrecy.” To help force the point, she has created a map to track these centers and related community concerns.

Brockovich is not anti data centers per se, but rightly sees a problem with how they seem shrouded in secrecy.

A Great Event

Finally, I participated in a fantastically spirited panel discussion around AI, kids and schools last Friday. It was a great illustration of how there is no one “side” in the AI and kids debate. We all may agree as much as we disagree and where that aligns might surprise each one of us.

Here is a recap from one of the organizers Elizabeth Safran —

What have you been reading about this week? I’d love to hear more…

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For instance, we’re quick to jump into issues that have activated communities around AI (such as the water needs of data centers) without weighing up the bigger context. In this case, the impact of any industry expansion into communities—or commercial water usage overall (we see you, golf courses and almond producers).

We’re also facing a rapidly widening generational divide, as Gen Z outpaces us in AI adoption (graduation “boos” notwithstanding). This gap will make everything harder, including future regulation.

Dig into the facts behind today’s most popular AI narratives and the truth turns out to be far more complicated than it may seem.

Flood of Water-Related Issues

It’s hard to miss the stories right now about community resistance to data centers.

One of the most passionate claims against these facilities is their water demands. It’s a legitimate concern. It’s also fair to say that many of us know next to nothing about commercial water use regardless of industry. Without that context, though, how do we weigh in on issues like this meaningfully?

For example, did you know the almond industry in just California uses many times more water than all the data centers in the US combined? Golf courses tell a similar story of water consumption—but it’s a story that only makes it to our news feeds every few years (if that).

Even when you dig into how water actually gets used comparatively (as this great overview does), the picture starts to change shape. But the problem is that we rarely get there.

US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently held up a jar of brown water at a congressional hearing, pressing the EPA over residents’ complaints that a Meta data center in rural Morgan County, Georgia, was responsible for muddy tap water.

The news has received widespread coverage—but more as an AI and Meta-as-enemy story rather than one highlighting the issue of water safety (or availability) overall. Even shocking facts like that more than a million Americans don’t have access to any running water (including more than 56,000 here in NYC) seem to rarely get air time.

More and more, we find issues being called out to make the tech industry the bad guy rather than an opportunity to address bigger issues in good faith and with full context.

As it relates to data centers: The bigger question is whether communities can benefit from data centers and if there is a model for integrating them safely. That doesn’t remove the need to think critically about their impact—but it does mean weighing up the pros and cons in a meaningful, data-focused way (a few good reports can be found here).

Unexpected AI Divides

Microsoft recently released an update to its AI Diffusion Report, and surprisingly the results don’t map to the story we are generally being told about who’s driving AI adoption and where it’s flourishing around us.

It also highlights an alarming fact about how we are approaching AI as a country overall. Because while the data suggests that the US leads in AI innovation, we rank just 21st in AI adoption—and well behind a number of countries that we might not expect, such as Norway.

Adoption Doesn’t Mean Uncritical Use

If we don’t teach ourselves to use AI, and think through how it might help or even hinder what comes next, we risk a number of serious future challenges to our safety and prosperity.

It’s also important to note that adoption and competency are not the same thing. Developing digital literacy in kids does not require them to simply learn via a chatbot. That should be obvious, but often gets conflated in anti-AI debates.

I believe that much of our current angst over AI traces back to the choices we made as a society during the dot-com boom. During this peak period of growth in the early 2000s, we celebrated the flourishing of a new “internet industry” without taking digital fluency seriously as a core competency.

All of a sudden, we were using these cool new tools and platforms, but also becoming increasingly comfortable declaring that we weren’t “tech people” when trying to navigate a setting or in discussing a new discovery. We’re now paying for that digital literacy gap.

Gen Z’s Influence Over AI Use

The Microsoft report also highlights an eye-opening fact about AI adoption by at the community level (and by extension generationally). For instance, the flourishing of the technology in college towns. And by flourishing, I mean, complete dominance. Like Williamsburg, Virginia, home to the College of William & Mary, leading the country with a 73% adoption rate.

This fact doesn’t contradict any anti-AI sentiment within the generation of those currently at the university level (because, of course, you can’t meaningfully rail against a technology that you don’t use or understand). But it does show a shifting tide that will meaningful change the years ahead.

Impact on Centers of Influence

These surprising findings have trickled over to the state level too. Unbelievably neither California nor New York crack the top 10 in state AI adoption (California is 7th, New York 13th). The top five states are Maryland, Utah, Texas, Virginia, and New Jersey.

Even within New York, no NYC county makes the US top 20 list. It’s instead Tompkins County—home to Cornell and Ithaca College—that boasts the highest county adoption rate in New York state.

Similarly, while San Francisco County is the top in California (but not even making the top 20 list of counties in the country), it’s neck-and-neck with Yolo, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties—each home to a large University of California campuses.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County—home to our nation’s second most populous city—only ranks 18th in the state and 273rd in the country overall.

The Takeaway

Technology is a means, not an end. When we isolate AI—and out of context—we fool ourselves into thinking we’re solving problems but we’re really just drawing around the edges.

Compounding this is the risk we face of a widening divide in understanding between all groups—from generational splits to gaps in geographies.

Our efforts to create policy and work out what’s best for society are stronger when we start from a shared, factual foundation. From there, we can aim our attention at societal questions that include technology but don’t focus exclusively on it as the root of all evil.

Upcoming NYC AI Event

I’ll be a part of the panel discussion “AI Safety and K-12 - Raising children in the age of AI” on June 12th in NYC. If you are local or visiting, I’d love to see you there! Register here.

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About four years ago, I joined a data privacy advisory group supporting the New York State Education Department. The committee draws from a range of backgrounds, but its backbone is the Data Protection Officers (DPOs) embedded in local school districts across the state. These are the people who deal with the tough, consequential work of protecting student data before it ever becomes a headline.

One of these leaders has become a friend. Joe Eckstein has had the kind of career (spanning both industry and education) that gives him a rare insider/outsider lens on how schools actually navigate technology, as opposed to how policymakers imagine they do. That perspective has made him one of the more clear-eyed thinkers I know on data privacy—and someone who deeply understands what AI actually means for schools and society.

Three years ago, Joe and I collaborated on an AI-related project for the state’s then Chief Privacy Officer that, in retrospect, was asking all the questions we’re now scrambling to answer. One of the things we kept returning to: the core technology infrastructure has to be solid in school districts before you can meaningfully grapple with AI’s particular challenges.

Without policies and controls that can hold up to any technology, layering on new ones just compounds the problem. Joe sees where the foundation is missing. That’s exactly why I wanted his perspective to share with families...

Meet Joe Eckstein

What is your current role?

I am a Business Manager running the contracts department at Eastern Suffolk BOCES and I also serve as the agency Data Protection Officer (DPO).

What has your career journey looked like?

After law school, I worked as a litigation attorney handling contract disputes. After 5 years of litigation I took more of an interest in operations management and by 1998, I left litigation and I took a position as an administrative law judge with a NYC government agency. In 2000, the NYC agency where I was working as a judge convinced me to take a supervisory role in their general counsel’s office.

Then 9-11 happened and that changed a lot for me. I quickly climbed the ladder to become a Deputy Commissioner and was running special projects as well as managing a staff of over 200 people. In 2008, I left public service to return to litigation. In 2013, I opened my own 40 person law firm working as in-house counsel to an insurance company.

In 2015, some personal decisions caused me to take sabbatical for 2 years and when I decided to return to work, I chose to return to public service and I took my current position with Eastern Suffolk BOCES. There are common threads in my career of always staying involved in technology and legal ethics. Becoming a DPO was a natural progression for me.

As a Data Protection Officer, what do you wish more stakeholders within a school better understood?

I am often surprised by how few people think sharing data is a potential safety issue for children. There is an assumption that all children are actively sharing their data via social media, video games and apps and that keeping school data safeguarded is a futile endeavor in light of how children behave online on their personal devices.

I wish more stakeholders understood that securing student data is not just a matter of technical compliance with a frivolous rule but that children’s safety and identity are at risk. This is especially true of those pieces of data which are easily used to steal someone’s identity, and also geo-location data.

What do you feel is the biggest risk to data privacy today?

In the school setting, teacher and administrator ambition to provide cutting edge technology to children. This happens too often even if the tech provider is unwilling to provide privacy safeguards. Administrators need to just say no to private tech companies.

In a more broad societal view of the question, the biggest risk is peer pressure. Everyone wants to be a part of the social media and AI trends. Consumers are increasingly being convinced that these tech products will serve individuals best the more that we share information about ourselves. There is truth in that; the more personalized the product the more useful it may be to individual consumers. But it is also true that it is the biggest risk to privacy. It’s hard to claw back privacy once you’ve given it up.

What do you think about AI both personally and professionally?

I think specialized AI is amazing. What it can accomplish in terms of consolidating so much information into condensed usable forms is truly remarkable. Nevertheless, I have concerns about lack of regulation and the lack of understanding of the way in which this technology can encroach on human autonomy.

As an attorney, I have real concerns about the usurpation of copyrighted material in the training models. As a parent and a human, I have concerns that the mental health impacts of social media are growing and will continue to grow exponentially as humans rely more on AI technology for companionship and rely less on human-to-human contact.

I am very concerned about the displacement of humans from the workforce, especially as LLMs are moved away from human operated computers and become part of autonomously operated robots and machines. At its current trajectory, I am concerned that AI will outgrow humans and topple democracy—a concern, I might add, that is shared by many executives and scientists in the field.

As a DPO and contracts manager, I have more specific concerns about the legal responsibility of the tech vendor vis-a-via the potential mishandling of data by an AI subprocessor. Once you remove the human from the equation, what incentive is left to follow laws written for humans?

My focus is on ensuring the language in the contract clearly defines who is responsible for safeguarding the data and what remedies are available to an aggrieved party. I am always looking to see if the humans are trying to pass on the responsibility to the consumer or the digital AI entity; an entity which cannot be made to account for its’ wrongdoings. Many service as a software providers have quietly added AI to their back end analytics and are simply keeping the old contract language in place. This is dangerous in terms of data privacy. All parties to the contract need to be transparent about where data is going.

What are you most optimistic and pessimistic about when it comes to the future of technology?

A big problem that has plagued K-12 education for over a century is the divergence of learning readiness among the students in a given classroom. AI will, for the first time, allow real time assessments of a students’ readiness to learn any given topic and allow students to virtually join classes which are targeted for any specific audience.

Geographic barriers will disappear and each day, students will find themselves with new classmates all at the exact same learning point. It will eliminate students who are lost due to being behind in the learning or bored because they are way ahead of their classmates and the teacher. I am not sure how long it will be before something like this is available given the power of the teacher’s unions—but it is coming; someday.

I am most pessimistic about humans maintaining control once robots with AI powered “brains” enter the workforce. This will cause a societal disruption that will change the course of education forever. Removing the classroom from the equation solves the problem of readiness to learn—but removing the human from the learning process is a step in the wrong direction. It will have social consequences that will hinder the child’s development. Social media is already having this impact on select populations—AI will exacerbate that problem.

Do you know who manages data privacy in your school? It’s worth reaching out to them. We all need to work together as stakeholders to protect the infrastructure that AI will increasingly disrupt. Have a question for Joe? Let me know!

First, it showed the media’s growing appetite to frame AI as something to fear, to fight, to pick a side on. “We all know how hated social media is… so look what’s even worse now…” is a very telling, but unfortunate, editorial choice.

It’s perhaps understandable for an industry whose business model is being disrupted by the very technology it’s covering. But we need better right now. We need clear, well-considered arguments to move us forward.

But here’s the bigger problem with that narrative: The idea that people dislike AI more than social media fundamentally misses the point that AI drives much, if not all, of what we actually experience on those very social media platforms.

Social media isn’t competing with AI. Social media is AI.

Say What? Let’s Break it Down…

That feed you’re scrolling? It’s not organized chronologically or randomly—it’s a ranking model trained on billions of interactions, predicting what will keep your eyes on the screen longest. Every time you linger on a post half a second longer than another, you’re feeding an algorithm. It’s AI, and it’s extraordinarily good at keeping us hooked.

Those ads that feel eerily relevant? The ones that make you think your phone must be listening? It’s not listening—it’s something more precise. AI systems are cross-referencing your behavior, location patterns, purchase history, and the content you interact with to build a targeting profile and serve you exactly what you’re statistically likely to click. A precise mathematical event, not a coincidence.

The recommendations work the same way—the “you might also like,” the suggested follows, the autoplay next video. All driven by deep learning models that have studied what people “like you” consumed next.

Content moderation at scale is impossible without AI. The posts that get flagged, the accounts suspended, the comments that quietly disappear—those decisions are being made largely by machines, not humans.

And the content itself is increasingly AI-assisted. Captions, thumbnails optimized for click-through, even suggestions around the best time to post are often used by creators who don’t realize they are “using AI.”

Some creators aren’t even human. AI bot profiles are proliferating across every major platform. Users believe they’re engaging with a real person. Often, they’re not.

Perhaps most mind-bending of all: every interaction you have, including every like, linger, comment, and scroll, is a data point being fed back to make the platform’s AI even smarter. Including the very chatbots so many people are busy arguing against right now.

It’s Similar With Schools…

As the debate on AI heats up, the situation in education mirrors the broader confusion almost exactly.

In a typical US school district, there can be thousands of different apps in use. A yearly study by Instructure has found that districts are using up to 3,000 tools across classrooms and administrative systems. That number alone should reframe how we think about this debate. Increasingly, the majority of these tools also rely on AI working quietly in the background.

What’s changed is that AI is no longer arriving as a headline feature—it has become part of the core infrastructure of educational technology itself. It’s shaping how student data is processed and analyzed, how content is selected and sequenced, how feedback is generated, and how learning pathways are personalized to individual students.

Platforms like Google Classroom, Canvas, and Khan Academy already embed adaptive algorithms that adjust what a student sees based on their prior performance. AI flags struggling students before a teacher may notice. It grades writing drafts, suggests resources, and tracks engagement patterns across entire schools.

Most public discourse gets stuck on chatbots, such as whether students should use ChatGPT for an assignment. But that’s a narrow lens on a much larger reality.

The fact that AI that systematically underpins nearly all modern edtech today is the conversation that deserves equal, if not more, serious attention right now.

None of this is inherently bad. These tools, used well, can extend what a skilled teacher can do for students. But it does mean that those who are calling to “remove AI from the classroom” are (even unknowingly) really suggesting we should eliminate much of modern technology from the classroom altogether.

That’s a position that can be defensible, but it’s worth being honest about first.

The truth is that there’s a compelling case to be made for protected, structured “human only” time within a school day. Not as a rejection of technology, but as a deliberate investment in something AI cannot replicate: unmediated human connection, unstructured thinking, and the kind of slow, relational learning that is foundational to how children grow.

If anything, the more AI pervades the environment, the more intentional we need to be about preserving those spaces. And that should be something that everyone can get behind...

Reese Witherspoon and How it’s Gone Wrong

If we don’t understand the big picture related to AI, we risk having the wrong arguments and conversations. And this is something we should be far more concerned about right now.

A telling recent example: Reese Witherspoon made a public comment encouraging women to start using and understanding AI. It was, by most reasonable readings, a straightforward call for empowerment.

But because Witherspoon operates in an industry already bruised by legitimate concerns about creative ownership, digital copyright, and AI-generated content displacing human work, the response was swift and harsh. Writers and creators came for her in a big way.

It’s understandable. The concerns in that industry are real and worth serious debate. But what followed wasn’t really that debate. It was the same binary pro vs. against AI that lacks nuance and deep thinking. And it played out on social media no less—which, as we established, is itself an AI-curated environment.

The algorithm surfaces the most emotionally charged responses, amplifies the most extreme voices, drowns out the nuance—and around and around we go being controlled by the very thing that some suggest they want eliminated. 🤦‍♀️

We Have to Get Back on Track

This is what going off track looks like in practice. Real concerns—about labor, creative rights, the pace of change—get flattened into a slogan. Nuance gets punished out of the conversation. And the people who most need to be part of a thoughtful dialogue get drowned out by the loudest, most contentious voices.

Our recent societal, online-fueled penchant for “cancellation” is scaring off diverse voices and ironically leading us down the path to an AI future none of us wants.

We are not going to argue our way out of this moment with oversimplifications. The technology is already woven into the fabric of how we communicate, how our children learn, and how information reaches us.

The question was never really “AI or no AI.” It’s always been: who shapes it, who benefits from it, and who gets a voice in deciding?

If we don’t start having that conversation, we all lose. And this isn’t a debate between opposing groups—it never was. It’s about all of us, as humans, figuring out how we best live alongside the machines we all have spent decades building together.

That’s the conversation worth having. And we’re running out of time to have it.

Also This Week

On the Topic of AI in Schools…

I was lucky to participate in the effort to shape New York City Schools’ recently released AI guidance. It was a meaningful first step in beginning to put structures and guardrails around AI use in the nation’s largest school system—and I’m grateful for the insight it provided to me on how that dialogue is being shaped.

As part of the AI Advisory Council, I joined more than one hundred educators, administrators, academics, nonprofit leaders, and industry experts in weighing in on the document the city released.

What struck me most about the experience was the genuine good faith effort of different stakeholders to work through concern, hope, disagreement, and all the sticky issues that a fast-moving technology represents—without pretending the answers were simple. I talked a bit more about that experience on a recent podcast if you want to dig deeper into what I learned.

Let’s all get talking about this more. What are your thoughts?

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Altman wrote a blog post in response and it illustrates how unreasonable the current climate has become.

Incredibly, it seems that the most immediate danger with respect to AI is the narrative surrounding the innovation, not the actual technology itself. Dystopian stories, amplified by social media and stoked by mainstream coverage, are proving far more volatile than any algorithm. There’s also a particular irony to the fact that social media (a technology with a well-documented trail of real harm) is a primary accelerant here.

And yet the core idea at the center of all this fear—that someone like Sam Altman is doing this to us—is misguided. It is not the technology that will determine our future, it’s what WE do with it. The problem is that too many of us have come to believe we have no say in the matter at all. And that belief alone will affect a future world with AI.

The Power of Narratives

As humans, we reach for narratives to help us understand who we are and where we want to go. Generally, there is a balance between what we individually believe to be true and how the perspectives around us shape our thinking. But there have been times when that balance has tipped badly—say, during the Covid-19 pandemic or in the aftermath of 9/11. Destructive narratives tend to rush in precisely when we feel most confused, and they spread like a contagion. Think McCarthyism or the Salem Witch Trials.

Instinctively, we know the difference between healthy caution and quiet surrender. But those defenses weaken on unfamiliar terrain, especially when our children’s futures feel as if they hang in the balance.

In the case of AI, nearly everything that is broken about how we communicate—who gets amplified, what gets rewarded, whose voices dominate—has converged all at once. That dysfunction is the real problem. And the good news is that it is one we have far more power to address than most of us realize.

Why We’ve Gone Off Track

AI is increasingly part of every platform we use—and we’ve been marching toward this more advanced form of automation for decades. From email to movie recommendations and GPS, the foundations of AI have been part of our lives for years.

But it is precisely this pervasiveness, combined with rapid new advancements and the potential for Big Tech to profit enormously, that has pushed many of us into a passive sense of powerlessness.

Too many voices are competing to shape the narrative at a moment when only clickbait and drama seem to break through. But this noise also drowns out some of the technology’s most remarkable achievements. From AlphaFold, the AI program that predicts protein structure, which won the Nobel Prize to Google’s AI-powered flood forecasting which has expanded to cover 100 countries and 700 million people with a seven-day accuracy window—the list of accomplishments utilizing AI advancements is already breathtaking.

We’re also missing the perspectives of a more diverse set of thinkers. Mainstream coverage tends to recycle the same handful of commentators, and more measured, nuanced perspectives often go unheard. It is worth seeking those out.

I recommend academic Shannon Vallor’s book The AI Mirror as a thoughtful, pragmatic look at AI and our role in shaping it.

is also a great community directory of AI-themed Substack accounts written by women from around the world. The group also recently published an anthology entitled AI Everywhere, Volume 1: How Women Are Changing The World With Artificial Intelligence.

The important point is: the more perspectives we engage with the better the chance we feel empowered and not powerless.

A Million Small Decisions

It can be far more useful to think of AI not as a force bearing down on us, but as a series of small, interlocking decisions we make every day—decisions we fully control.

At school, the question is no longer whether AI will be present, but how thoughtfully it is used. Used well, it can be a patient tutor for students, a time-saver for teachers, and a subject worth understanding in its own right.

And the counterintuitive truth is that the skills that make AI most useful (careful reasoning, clear writing, the ability to ask a good question) are also best developed away from screens.

At work, the more useful question is not whether AI will change your industry, but which parts of your specific role it will affect—and when. Most of us have more runway than the headlines suggest, and getting familiar with these tools firsthand is well within reach.

At home, the same logic applies. Smart speakers, recommendation algorithms, and adaptive learning apps are already woven into daily family life. The families who navigate this era best will be the ones who engage with it consciously: trying the tools their kids are using, modeling healthy skepticism, and making small, deliberate choices rather than defaulting to whatever the algorithm serves up next.

Diving into the discussion with your kids is also a great start and I’ve collated a list of conversation starters here:

AI and Kids

AI Conversation Starters With Kids That Aren't Too *Cringe*

Talking to your five-year-old about AI looks very different from discussing it with a teenager, of course. What fascinates a middle schooler might bore an elementary school student, and what feels age-appropriate for a high schooler could overwhelm a younger child…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · Shannon Kimberly Edwards

An important thought to hold on to: those who are most skeptical of AI and those who are most enthusiastic about it tend to agree on far more than either side acknowledges. Both want their kids to think clearly, to be resilient, and to lead meaningful lives.

The path that runs through this is knowing ourselves well—and that has always required stepping away from the noise long enough to listen.

AI is not happening to us. We are happening to it, one small decision at a time. And by recognizing this as a society we hopefully can prevent more of those in the AI industry from having their lives put at risk.

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Nothing tells us more about the future of a technology rooted in human thought and behavior than the perspectives of those at the top of their game. In this case, it’s mom, researcher, business leader, and PhD Jodi Davenport.

I met Jodi through a women’s group I joined to discuss AI. What struck me about this cognitive scientist and researcher was how nuanced and expansive her view of AI was—and how much importance she placed on cultivating a well-rounded mind.

Currently, Jodi is Vice President of Learning Sciences and Technology at WestEd and Deputy Director of the Regional Educational Laboratory, Northwest. She leads cross-agency strategy and initiatives that help educators and systems thoughtfully integrate digital tools. She also conducts large-scale research projects and advises state education leaders.

But more importantly, Jodi is a mom and advocate for the type of diverse, expansive, and very human learning that will ensure our kids can compete in the future.

On AI With Jodi Davenport

Tell me about your background…

My interest in technology started in third grade when my parents brought home a “portable” COMPAQ computer. In the back of the manual were instructions for programming in BASIC, and I started tinkering. My first program was to get the computer to play Mary Had a Little Lamb, and something about giving a machine instructions and having it do something just clicked for me.

At UCLA, I started off undeclared until I took the intro to cognitive science class. I remember discussing the nature of intelligence (a virus can trick our cells to replicate itself - is that intelligence?) and learning about how our brain uses shortcuts that are functional in navigating the world but can lead to errors (e.g. optical illusions or faulty logic). I was so excited to have found a field that connected human cognition, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and culture all at once and had the chance to work in a lab using neural nets to model how people recognize objects and reason analogically. Those early experiences led me to MIT for my PhD studying attention, memory, and perception, and a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute and Psychology Department where I got to apply learning science to designing instructional systems. 

After my postdoc, I joined WestEd and have led large-scale research projects, directed a Department of Education-funded center on math cognition and instruction across five institutions, and supported state education leaders in evidence-based decision making and implementing best practices. When generative AI went mainstream at the end of 2023, it felt like a lot of threads I’d been following for years hit an inflection point. I currently oversee our learning science and technology portfolio and support AI implementation both internally and with our partners.

How do you feel about AI innovation entering our lives?

A friend described it as a “terrible, beautiful thing,” which aptly describes my feelings as I oscillate between extreme enthusiasm and panic.

The curiosity side of me finds it exciting. Things that used to require deep technical expertise and serious computing power are now accessible to anyone with a phone. You can build a website in minutes, a custom app in less than an hour, not to mention find a random replacement part for your dishwasher or diagnose why your plant is turning yellow. That shift has happened faster than most of us expected.

But I think about the cognitive risks a lot. Confirmation bias is already baked into how our brains work. We’re wired to seek out information that confirms what we already believe, and it’s genuinely harder to look for evidence that challenges us. A system that validates your thinking and keeps generating more “evidence” for what you already believe can quietly make that worse in ways you don’t notice.

I also worry about the illusion of understanding. There’s solid research showing that when people encounter a clear, fluent explanation, they feel like they understand something more deeply than they actually do. That feeling is not the same as learning. Real learning is biological and it takes time. The neural pathways only change with repetition and deliberate practice.

Overall, my take is that we don’t really have the option to decide whether AI will enter our lives, as it’s going to affect nearly every part of our society.  We can learn how to work with the tools in ways that complement but don’t replace our thinking and strive to maintain and protect our values.

We talked a bit about “how kids learn” and what it means to “think.” What are your thoughts as an expert?

AI is different from other tools in education because it both lends itself to being used as a tool that can support (or detract from) learning, but will also fundamentally shift the kinds of work people will be doing in the future. 

I don’t see the goal of education as getting knowledge into students’ heads so they can recite back that knowledge when prompted. Ideally it’s to teach students how to think. It’s to have them learn to ask the right questions, solve problems that matter to them, and be able to evaluate whether something worked.

Core competencies or “durable skills,” critical thinking, collaboration, metacognition, adaptability, have gone by different names over the years but are the underpinning of what we want our students to develop. These competencies aren’t built from just accessing information, but wrestling with ideas and working with other people. 

What will be required to educate our kids so they can thrive in the future?

Students need opportunities to practice the competencies we want them to develop. That is, practice making decisions based on potentially conflicting information, practice working with different kinds of people to get things done, practice asking the right questions and questioning the answers. 

If we want them to thrive in a world where they’ll be interacting with AI, we should also be educating them about how the systems work, how their own thinking works, and give them opportunities to practice working with the systems in ways that preserve their agency, values, and mental health. 

What are you most excited about related to AI innovation and education? And most worried about?

What excites me most is access. If you’re curious about something, you no longer have to wait for the right teacher, the right library, or the right zip code. The ability to learn, create, and work on real problems in your own community is increasingly available to people who never had it. 

What worries me is whose values end up baked into these systems. If the primary design goal is engagement or profit, the tools get optimized for that, not for human flourishing. I want a world where people feel connected and have real agency over their futures. The risk of widespread displacement without real inclusion in this new economy is something I don’t think we’re discussing enough yet.

You mentioned to me that art was even more important now. Can you elaborate?

Creating art is a core human endeavor. Art isn’t really about making pretty pictures, it’s about having a perspective. It’s about making choices that reflect something uniquely yours: how you’re interpreting the world, what patterns you’re noticing, what you’re trying to say.

In a world where AI is increasingly making the default a synthesized version of everyone else’s output, the capacity to bring something genuinely your own to the process becomes more valuable. And I think there’s something worth protecting about making things just for the joy of making them, not for a grade or an outcome.

What wisdom would you share with parents about how to think about preparing kids academically and emotionally for the future?

Model curiosity more than you talk about it. Say “I don’t know that, yet” and mean it. Let your kids see you encounter something you don’t understand and seek out more information. That lands differently than any conversation about growth mindset.

Ask more questions than you give answers. Not “AI is good” or “AI is bad” but: how would you know if this output is useful? How would you verify it? What might be missing here? Getting kids in the habit of asking those questions until they become automatic is some of the most useful preparation you can give them.

The kids who will do well in this world are the ones who feel like they have a say about their own futures, and don’t feel that things are just happening to them. That starts with the adults around them actually modeling what that looks like.

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The *good* news is that the picture regarding AI’s current and future impact is starting to come into focus. And while that doesn’t mean there are any definitive answers, we do have much more information available to make the right decisions for our families.

Leaning into the Uncomfortable Truth

It goes without saying that nothing we are hearing about the future of work is easy to take in. Maybe you realize your job is most vulnerable. Or your teen is passionate about pursuing a field that is shrinking. Maybe it’s because you don’t feel confident in the data or the narrative being shared.

But we can pay attention to all of it while ultimately deciding for ourselves how to address these facts. The future will require even more personal agency—ironically—than ever before. But we must lean into the information and go through that process of deciding next steps.

Most recently, Anthropic (parent company of Claude AI) published a comprehensive jobs report. It’s part of a larger study they released recently, but it is remarkably clear in its simplicity. This chart alone paints a much clearer picture than we’ve had previously:

As clearly labeled: blue represents the potential Anthropic sees in specific job categories, and red shows where AI’s impact has already been observed.

For some sectors, the impact has been immediate; for others, the decline in opportunities will be slower. The tech industry, for instance, has already seen a tremendous impact.

Former presidential candidate, NYC mayoral candidate, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang was far more blunt in his assessment of what he thinks comes next. And if we’re all honest with ourselves, it’s pretty clear he’s spot on.

Andrew Yang Newsletter

The End of the Office

I write this filled with sadness…

Read more

4 months ago · 940 likes · 12 comments · Andrew Yang

Watching for the Invisible Impact

The important thing to note is that we won’t necessarily observe the impact of these workplace shifts in the same way we might expect. “Replacement” of workers doesn’t automatically mean economic wobbles in the companies that employ them—so job losses won’t necessarily map to broader economic decline.

For instance, last week Block laid off 40% of its staff “because of AI.” There is some debate about whether that’s literally true, but what’s most notable is that CEO Jack Dorsey made these cuts while the company’s performance remained robust.

This makes the potential for loss here more “invisible” if we aren’t paying attention. This piece in explains the impending scenario well:

The Good News: Job Categories That Will Remain Static or Even Grow

There are job categories that will be in demand in the near term, and others we can reasonably hypothesize will remain robust further into the future.

Right now, for instance, there is a severe shortage of electricians—a current deficit of about 300,000—as data centers need to be built. It’s an immediate need that could prove a ready opportunity for any willing and able young person today.

Trades overall will also continue to be a category with “low exposure” to AI—electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians. These roles require physical dexterity in unpredictable, unstructured environments: crawling through walls, improvising in tight spaces, diagnosing problems with all five senses. Any risk of robots taking over these complex tasks is decades away.

The other “safe” jobs are those requiring in-person human touch, or those in categories that will grow as we have more time to focus on our health and well-being once AI takes over more operational tasks.

A few examples:

• Therapists/counselors. While AI can simulate human connection, it isn’t authentic and can’t replace the trust and lived emotional experience that humans bring.

• Primary care & emergency physicians. AI is excellent at pattern recognition in diagnostics, but physical examination, real-time judgment in chaotic emergencies, patient communication, and legal and ethical accountability make full replacement implausible for the foreseeable future.

• Early childhood educators. Young children need physical presence, emotional attunement, and responsive human caregiving to develop properly. The role is part educator, part caregiver, part emotional regulator—and parents overwhelmingly want humans doing this work.

• Custom craftspeople/artisans (furniture makers, glassblowers, jewelers). The “made by human hands” story will only grow in value as the world becomes more automated.

• Athletic trainers/coaches. Effective coaching is about motivation, real-time physical observation, emotional intelligence, and relationship. Elite performance depends on a coach who knows a person’s psychology and history—AI tools will support this work but won’t own it.

• Veterinarians. Diagnosing and treating animals that can’t describe their symptoms requires hands-on physical examination, pattern recognition across species, and surgical skill. The combination of physical, cognitive, and interpersonal demands—including managing anxious pet owners—is highly complex to automate.

These are just a few examples, but the common thread is clear: the jobs that hold up best against AI share some combination of physical unpredictability, genuine human emotional presence, real-world accountability, and trust-based relationships. AI will become a powerful tool in most of these fields—but it won’t replace the need for human beings.

And that represents both an opportunity for our children and a reason for hope: a future where we can focus more on our very human needs.

Guiding Teens and Young Adults

I have two high school students, both heading to college over the next two years. This has been my guidance to them:

• Understand the “language” of technology. Seek to gain firm footing in math (particularly statistics, probability, and algebra) and computer science (coding, algorithms). In the case of computer science, this doesn’t mean mastery; it means understanding the language and how it works.

• Master the classics. Many experts agree that a well-rounded liberal arts education—even when combined with other subjects—will be a competitive advantage. The broad context that comes with a wide knowledge base will make engaging with AI even more fruitful.

• Find an outlet for creativity. Firing on both sides of one’s brain is an important exercise for the future. Painting, writing, building—all of these will continue to be important endeavors to training our brains.

• Consider having a trade in your back pocket. For those of us who remember wood shop, metal shop, or cooking class, there is real upside in acquiring a skill that can be both useful and a source of income. And that doesn’t mean setting the classics aside—the two complement each other well.

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It’s not a new concept, of course, but it may be the one that most determines how well we adapt to AI, and who is best positioned to thrive in the years ahead.

Information overload and chronic distraction have become afflictions we recognize but rarely take seriously. We often act as if they are personality quirks rather than significant intellectual and societal debts that we’re only beginning to reckon with.

At the same time, we’re quick to blame AI for eroding critical thinking. But AI is a tool; and like any tool, getting the most out of it requires bringing your best self to it. That means showing up with your attention intact, your thinking clear, and your judgment sharp.

Most of us aren’t doing that. In fact, before I even finished writing this piece, a study began recirculating about the impact of short-form video on cognition. It confirmed that social media reels are having exactly the negative effect on our thinking that we fear they are.

Which is precisely what makes learning to strategically ignore the right things so powerful.

Junk Food for the Brain

The importance of protecting ourselves from distraction is far from new. In 1890, psychologist William James wrote that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” He also argued that “…the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

What’s changed isn’t human nature—it’s the scale of what we’re up against. The volume of distractions competing for our attention has multiplied, and so has the number of people and companies who profit from our fractured focus.

AI has made this significantly worse. For anyone whose livelihood depends on clicks and engagement, it has never been easier and cheaper to flood the digital realm with content designed to grab attention rather than inform.

Digital “slop” (a term I’ve written about previously) is the inevitable result: low-quality, algorithmically-optimized content that functions less like information and more like junk food for the brain. Empty, abundant, and hard to stop consuming…

We only have so much time, energy, and mental capacity available to us on a daily basis and we need to use it wisely.

As noted by the Montreal Ethics Institute: “As AI slop floods digital ecosystems, critical ignoring, choosing what not to engage with, emerges as a missing layer of AI literacy.”

The Power of Strategic Focus

The concept of Critical Ignoring was introduced in a November 2022 paper titled “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.” Ironically, it was published around the same time ChatGPT launched—ushering in a new era of distraction, and raising the stakes considerably for those who can learn to spend their mental energy wisely.

“Digital literacy and critical thinking should include a focus on the competence of critical ignoring: choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist low-quality and misleading but cognitively attractive information, and deciding where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.” — “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens,” Current Directions in Psychological Science

The great news is that being more strategic about how we spend our brain power is a relatively straightforward exercise available to all of us.

A few suggestions:

1. Reduce Exposure to Triggers & Distractions

This isn’t about going off the grid. It’s about designing your environment (and your kids’) the way an athlete designs their training. A few places to start:

• Delete by intention. Identify the two or three apps you open out of habit rather than purpose and delete them. If you find yourself reaching for them anyway, that reflex alone tells you something.

• Try grayscale. A surprisingly effective and underused trick: switching your phone to black and white to remove the visual stimulation that makes apps feel rewarding to open. On iPhone: Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters. Toggle on “Color Filters” and select “Grayscale.”

• Turn off non-essential notifications. Most notifications exist merely to pull you back into an app. Go app by app in your settings and disable anything that isn’t genuinely time-sensitive. The bar for what counts as essential is probably lower than you think.

• Use screen time limits for yourself too. These tools aren’t just for kids. Set hard daily limits on the platforms most likely to pull you into a mindless scroll, and treat the limit as a rule rather than a suggestion.

2. Pause Before Reacting and Sharing

We’ve all been there: you read a headline, your blood pressure spikes, you fire off a text to a friend or reach for the reply button. But headlines are written to trigger exactly that response. Before you invest emotional energy (let alone your reputation) in a story, take sixty seconds to ask a few simple questions:

• Who published this, and what’s their incentive?

• What’s the primary source?

• Is there context I’m missing?

This is an especially worthwhile exercise when a story confirms what you already believe, or when the counter-narrative feels personally uncomfortable. That discomfort is frequently a signal that the information is worth sitting with longer. The flip side of critical ignoring is knowing what deserves your full attention—and content that challenges you almost always does.

This isn’t just a “nice to do.” It’s a foundational thinking skill; and one that will directly shape how well you work with the AI tools that are rapidly becoming part of everyday life.

The people who ask better questions, challenge their assumptions, and resist the pull of the first narrative they encounter are going to get far more out of these technologies than those who don’t. Critical thinking isn’t becoming less relevant in an AI-driven world. It’s becoming the thing that matters most.

3. Understand the Business Model (and Your Role in It)

Engagement is the currency of the attention economy. Every like, share, comment, and outraged reply is a transaction—and the profit flowing to these companies comes directly at the expense of our time, our focus, and increasingly, our wellbeing.

Social media interaction can feel empowering; like you’re part of a conversation that matters. But the architecture of these platforms is specifically designed to make you feel that way while your attention is simultaneously harvested for advertising revenue and algorithmic reach. The feeling of participation is the product.

The practical implication is simple: before you engage, ask who benefits. The answer is almost never you.

But here’s what’s easy to forget in all of this—we are not powerless. In fact, the opposite is true. Every personal, individual, incremental decision we make about where to direct our attention is an act of agency.

Taken alone, these choices quietly reshape our own lives. Taken together, they have the power to change the economics, the incentives, and ultimately the culture that shaped them in the first place. That’s not a small thing. That’s how the future gets written…

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Of course I needed to probe just a tiny bit to understand what was making her so uncomfortable. And what was clear is that it wasn’t the technology per se. She was quite confident about the fact that AI would “meaningfully find its way” into her work. The problem was the news and the industry figures making decisions about AI and the future.

The good news is that many of us are finding our way to the things we like or don’t like about AI. We’re doing this naturally by using the platforms. Also good news is that Big Tech needs our adoption/approval/love and admiration. There is no meaningful way to generate revenue via these platforms if the general public doesn’t want any part of it.

The bad news is that they are terrible at courting consumers. I mean, if this was about dating we all would swipe left…

Signs That Our Relationship with the AI Industry is Like Dating (Badly)

🤖 Leaders Warning of Dystopia While…Creating it

What is particularly maddening right now is the way in which some industry leaders like to wax on about the dangers of AI while still pushing forward at breakneck speed.

Case-in-point, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei wrote a lengthy essay about the existential risks of AI and, at the same time, is moving full steam ahead in the AI race. The obvious issue here was best captured by a piece in Futurism, saying:

Plenty of questions remain surrounding the real risks of advanced AI, a subject that remains heavily debated between realists, skeptics, and proponents of the tech. Critics have pointed out that the existential risks often cited by leaders like Amodei may be overblown, particularly as improvements in the tech appear to be slowing.

We should also consider the greater context of Amodei’s verbose warning. The CEO’s company is looking to close a massive, multibillion-dollar round of funding at a valuation of $350 billion. In other words, Amodei has an enormous financial interest in positioning himself as the solution to the risks he cites in his essay.

—Victor Tangermann, “Anthropic CEO Warns That the AI Tech He’s Creating Could Ravage Human Civilization,” Futurism, Jan 28, 2026

☄️ Media Acting Like a Bad Wingman Intentionally Stoking the Emotional Fires

Mainstream media don’t mind the drama because it makes readers click, debate, share content on social media, and elevate a writer or publication in ways that keeps it in the black.

It’s hard to blame them. The industry is shrinking. Just this week The Washington Post laid off 30% of its staff. And it will continue. While AI’s impact is undeniable, consumer trust is plummeting at the same time.

According to Pew Research, in October 2025, 56% of US adults have lost trust in the information they get from national news outlets. And that is down 11% from May of the same year.

👎 Cringey Courtship Tactics (E.g., Super Bowl Ads)

The AI industry spent big on the Super Bowl and with good reason: they need us to use their tools as the investment in AI is unmatched by revenue. So they really need to court consumers and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Instead of grand gestures (aka Super Bowl ads), we need to have conversations and in the context of our lives. A lot of these advertising efforts felt (in the words of our kids)…cringe. And, in particular, because their moves were so obvious… “AI isn’t that scary,” “The other guy is terrible choose me,” and so on.

So What Should We Do? Well, Choose Ourselves…

This week I spoke with a group of women who write about AI (She Writes AI). Each of us had distinct concerns, different views of the platforms, and varying values that motivate us. We said “I don’t know” and “I feel” a lot.

Because that’s the point: there are no definitive answers, just shades of personal feeling that combine into something that resembles personal agency.

At another event this week, an entrepreneur told me he has multiple iPhones that he uses for research purposes. On one, his “personality” is a 50-something woman. On another, he appears as himself (a 20-something male).

Even as a researcher, he was shocked by the relentless algorithmic targeting and shaping of the messages we receive online.

And this is particularly true of AI-specific messaging. Every story you’re receiving is intended to condition your thinking. So don’t let it. Try to seek out news proactively instead of reactively, and begin to break the mold.

✅ To Use AI is to Find Your Own Love for It

Every single day I hear amazing stories of individuals successfully using AI in their work or personal lives. Often their experiences are more mundane and tactical than news stories would suggest.

Just this week I met a woman organizing research at a charity, a marketer testing ad campaigns, a woman researching medications to take to her doctor, and a friend new to the US using AI to navigate cultural differences in her new home.

This doesn’t mean we should be lax in considering risks or asking hard questions—it means that we can’t get better at understanding AI’s real impact until everyone gives it a try.

The way that those around us are casually and effectively using AI is the real story here. We’re finding it useful; we just don’t quite understand our power to shape it yet.

That’s the story.

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The platform briefly went dark in January of 2025 after a bipartisan vote to force Chinese divestment of the US platform. A series of executive orders allowed it to run while a deal was hammered out with the site’s Beijing-based owners, ByteDance. And those orders were renewed over and over—causing many users to forget it was even banned at all.

The situation is head-spinning for a number of reasons, including the political flip-flopping, the persistent data privacy issue, and the algorithmic “misinformation” challenge. The big question: does any of that get properly resolved by the new deal?

As the new deal entered the news cycle, so did word that the platform’s most-followed star has sold his likeness as an AI avatar (as part of a $1 billion deal). And this comes after ethical questions arose last week regarding Netflix’s live streaming of Alex Honnold’s skyscraper climb without any protections against a fall (more on that below).

While we often talk about AI mostly in the context of education these days, and have discussed the “slop” (aka video garbage) circulating online, advancements this week show the stakes related to AI vs. human content in entertainment are actually much higher—and more of a ethical quagmire—than we might be ready for...

The New TikTok Deal Falls Flat

I’ve written previously about the national security concerns related to TikTok. And it’s pretty straightforward: the site’s T&Cs allow for storage of our data abroad and access by the parent company and other “partners.”

ByteDance is based in Beijing and the Chinese government has a stake in the business. China also happens to be the world’s largest broker of facial recognition technology, and of course, they are a communist country with no guarantees as to what would happen to US users’ data if stored there.

But unfortunately, to compound things, the sheer size and scope of the platform have made it supremely convenient to politicians, and lucrative commercially to just about every business out there, so no one is completely virtuous here. If they were, the ban would have gone into effect and stayed put.

Is the deal a good one? Meh. ByteDance retains control of the algorithm, the US investors get access to a lot more data than most might be happy with even under this supposedly safer arrangement, and there’s already been unrest over content curation.

The fact is that we must all decide for ourselves. It’s likely more secure, albeit as rich with data extraction as before. And it’s important to remember that all parties involved are motivated by the sheer power and financial influence of TikTok. So who the “good guy” is has become quite obscured in the end.

AI and the Future of Entertainment

Are We Headed Toward a Hunger Games Future?

I wrote this week about the future of “human” entertainment and how it may look like Alex Honnold’s life-or-death live climb of a Taipei skyscraper—the kind of high-stakes spectacle that Free Solo made famous. If AI “performers” start to infiltrate TV and film, what will we then want to see from humans? Will a thrill be the ultimate risk? There’s a lot to think about here »

When an Influencer’s AI Avatar Takes Over the Job

The largest AI-related influencer licensing agreement was inked this week between the most-followed TikTok star, Khaby Lame, and a Chinese firm. The deal is worth nearly $1 billion.

By allowing an AI avatar to be created in his likeness, Khaby can “speak” other languages and easily cross borders. But the deal, of course, raises all sorts of ethical questions about the future of influencer content and who will ultimately control Khaby’s likeness.

Is it a good thing that an influencer can spend a short amount of time building their profile and then sit back and remain forever that age while they go fishing? Or horrifying? The implications are worth pondering…

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Scaling El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope could have ended very badly but we know it’s okay even before pressing play. Could it encourage dangerous copycat climbs? Sure. But not likely just because one might get a documentary made about the effort.

From National Geographic to Netflix

It would be hard to argue that the spectacle on Netflix this past Saturday was the “same” as the documentary. Because it wasn’t. Alex climbed Taipei 101 for a live audience (and was paid to do it; although according to the climber not nearly enough).

The 101-story skyscraper was the world’s tallest building from its opening in 2004 until the opening of the UAE’s Burj Khalifa in 2009. The building is an architectural marvel, full of diverse exterior features and the kind of nooks and crannies that make a televised free climb exhilarating TV.

It was also deeply unsettling. I couldn’t help but feel that we were watching the Hunger Games. The setup of Alex’s climb felt eerily familiar with the same fanfare, chipper commentary, and the “someone might die today” subtext.

Of course, in the Hunger Games the game is about the majority of players not surviving. But considering the fact that Alex could have fallen during the live telecast, wasn’t that also part of the appeal?

Is This What We Want?

Although there isn’t yet a compelling AI-generated movie or TV show capturing our attention, it’s coming. And it may shift how we feel about entertainment forever.

For instance, we’ll see the business of background actors falling away. Having spent a couple of years accompanying my daughter on set as an extra, it makes perfect sense. It’s a lot of work to usher groups of people around who are merely glimpsed in the background. There is a ton of paperwork, transportation, catering, and herding from set to craft services. Why bother if a filmmaker can just generate them using AI?

And while entertainment will still require human artistry and talent, it may remove familiar faces from our screens, leaving us with a void that we can’t explain.

When “Connecting” With Our Humanity Means a Thirst for the Ultimate Risk

So what comes next? Do we start to invite life or death feats into our homes as entertainment? Are we so bored by art that is helmed by an unknown AI-generated face that we look for the thrill that comes of seeing “real” humans in dire circumstances?

I worked for Netflix two decades ago and they were always a company that could see many years into the future. And it’s in that context that I feel even more unsettled. They may actually see what’s ahead.

While the imaginative Hunger Games or even the very real Roman Gladiator events in history seem extreme in comparison, the thirst feels the same. The commentators chatting chirpily with Alex and his loved ones through the two-hour show made it even more unsettling. Every time they talked about “Alex making it,” they meant either stopping (best case) or, more realistically, falling and dying.

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So What Comes Next?

In addition to being forward-thinking, Netflix is also a shrewd company and they would have made sure that the odds of Alex falling were slim. While that may give us some assurances, it doesn’t make the situation any better. At the end of the day, all they could do is be flexible about shifting the time (it was delayed by a day because of the weather) and institute a 10-second delay (in case he falls so it’s not televised).

Very few media outlets have ventured into the moral discussion in covering the story. They likened it to other “live events” on Netflix, or talked about Alex’s past feats and his ability to determine the feasibility of any climb. But make no mistake: he could have died on live TV. And he was paid to take that risk, and we were lured to watch on that basis.

A few writers have been bold enough to say this quite part out loud:

“Live” isn’t about authenticity; it’s about monetizing the possibility of the worst outcome, packaged around the one person the world trusts to get away with it. It’s rubbernecking with a subscription login. —Seiji Ishii, Gear Junkie, Jan 22, 2026

I watched the climb, and discussed my concerns with my family. What I’m worried about is not that it happened; I’m worried that viewers wanted to see it. I’m worried that we will start to justify this type of content (e.g., “it’s his decision”) and like Seiji Ishii writes, we’ll allow for it to become commoditized.

As I’ve started to write about human “outliers” who represent those qualities we need to hold tight to, and whose stories we can’t lose sight of, Alex’s case shows how we can exploit their specialness too. We should embrace the stories of outliers, not use them to feed our desire to keep connected to the worst ways we are human.

Share AI for Families

We have a lot of choice in what to eat. And similarly, the options for technology to explore are bountiful. In both cases we also rely on scientists, specialists, and other experts to ensure we have food to eat and technology to use.

But here’s where things start to diverge: We are exceptionally confident when advocating for what we think is “good” to eat, but then err on the side of caution when declaring what technology we think is “right.”

In both cases we have a choice, and yet there seems to be an inherent contradiction in how we approach our power to control each. I called this out in a video I created last year…

A Food Pyramid for Tech

When it comes to food, consumers are provided with “guidance.” We are provided with research, information, and suggestions, allowing us to then customize and advocate for ourselves and our families.

What tends to be missing from the endless news and chatter around technology bans today (with social media being the most notable) is the bigger conversation around how we think about our overall tech consumption. Just like with food, if we are consuming everything in sight mindlessly, targeting one type of technology or platform simply does a disservice to our overall “health.”

The numbers tell this story of technology overload. According to recent research, the average person has approximately 80 apps on their phone, using about nine a day and 30 each month. And when it comes to schools it’s even more eye-opening: According to Education Week, during the 2024-25 school year, districts accessed an average of 2,982 distinct ed-tech tools annually and 1,574 tools monthly.

We only have so much mental capacity available to us and should be using it far more wisely.

Making it Personal

Now, the catch with creating a “tech pyramid” is that it has to be personal. We must decide for ourselves what will work best and where the lion’s share of our time should be spent.

Personal agency isn’t just at the core of how to decide what technology is good for us—it’s also key to using tools such as generative AI. Creating this type of visual is a great way to talk to our kids and give them a sense of ownership and control.

What are your thoughts about regaining some sense of control here? Let me know!

In Other News

OpenAI Takes a Better Approach to Age Verification

As I’ve written about previously, age verification via image capture of kids is problematic. Our data is increasingly valuable to criminals, with high-quality digital capture of children topping the list of data to steal. Sometimes it’s necessary for adults to use image-based identification, but we should avoid it for children.

That’s why I found OpenAI’s recently announced approach worth celebrating. They will be using their own AI technology to determine whether a user is likely under 18. If an adult is incorrectly categorized, then the onus is on them to verify their age.

Guardrails for kids are important, and this is a small tweak to an approach that can go far toward providing even greater protections.

Anthropic Delivers its “Constitution”

One of the biggest challenges with generative AI is psychological. When using a tool that interacts with us in a “human” way, we need to remind ourselves to, first, think independently and not be coerced by the machine’s “confidence” in its responses. We also need to remember that there is a person behind the screen programming a framework for those responses.

All of this makes Anthropic’s newly updated “constitution” particularly interesting. It’s the type of information we need to determine whether Anthropic’s approach in creating Claude is one that we agree with.

The document is long, and some might feel heavy-handed, but it provides insight into the decisions being made behind-the-scenes. More importantly, it highlights how important it is for consumers to understand AI governance and why there will be a role in the future for those who study philosophy, ethics, sociology, and psychology.

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Well, it’s the people who think slowly and deliberatively. The critical thinkers who use AI technology to further their thinking rather than replace it.

Unfortunately, fewer of us fit this profile, having feasted on a steady diet of social media with its bite-sized information and addictive emotional highs.

And that’s our problem, not the fault of technology.

In fact, the growing gap between what AI demands and how we’ve been trained to think may be the most significant AI-related challenge families face in the years ahead.

How Social Media Has Rewired Our Brains

Somewhere along the way, we started confusing feeling informed with being informed.

We’ve come to judge news by the emotional reaction it produces, not the insight it offers. Connection and engagement have shifted from in-person discussions to quips (and even threats) delivered safely from behind screens.

Even more problematic: Silence has become something to fill with useless information instead of giving our brains the time to rest and regenerate. Without mental downtime—free thinking, boredom, daydreaming—people can be efficient but not original.

Social media isn’t necessarily making us dumber, but it is making us emotionally busy. And emotional busyness destroys exactly the traits we now need most to work effectively with AI: doubt, patience, depth, quiet, and the courage to probe.

So who do we blame for stealing our critical thinking skills? AI? Social media platforms? Online advertisers? Big Tech companies?

The answer, of course, is us.

The next divide won’t be about who has access to AI. It will be between those who use AI to advance their thinking versus those who can’t think without AI.

What This Means to Learning

It’s not the introduction of AI technology to schools that’s problematic. In fact, we should embrace the efficiency it brings to teachers, the gaps it can fill in providing tutoring support, and the accommodations it offers to those with disabilities.

But the real problem lies in how AI will reshape our definition of learning itself. That’s at the core of the friction we’re seeing right now. It’s not about banning AI or playing gotcha with kids who use it for assignments. It’s about ensuring we can still reliably measure understanding versus articulation, reasoning versus presentation.

We don’t need to resist technology—we need to focus on how we think and what helps kids do that best.

Practical Steps to Reversing the Trend

We all know we should think more critically about the world around us, spend less time on devices, and avoid emotional reactions to inflammatory content. But there are concrete exercises you can do to counteract these habits and retrain your brain. Here are a few suggestions.

💡 Do one intellectual activity a week that produces nothing

Read difficult text slowly (a challenging book or journal article). Take private notes that you don’t share with anyone. Explore an idea with no outcome, no sharing, no pressure for perfection.

💡 Schedule your news consumption

Pick your sources. Set a time limit. Avoid infinite scrolling. Feeling “up to date” is not the same as understanding.

💡 Practice sitting with boredom and uncertainty

Those empty moments—on trains, in waiting rooms—are not problems to solve. They are critical cognitive recovery time. Fill that time with nothing.

💡 Don’t make decisions based on social media

Social media is like sugar: enjoyable in small doses, harmful as a steady diet. Rage is not insight, and responding is not real debate.

💡 Protect your mental energy

Use your best thinking time for sense-making, not reaction. Your attention is finite—spend it intentionally. Every moment you fill with trivial information diminishes your brain’s capacity for meaningful work.

We Have the Power

The real risk is sleepwalking into a world of extraordinary tools while steadily losing the ability to think clearly, slowly, and independently.

If we protect even small pockets of boredom, uncertainty, and deep thinking—for ourselves and especially for our kids—we don’t just keep up with technology. We stay human in the ways that matter most.

The families who do this won’t simply use AI more effectively. They’ll shape how it’s used—at home, at school, and eventually, in the world. This is how more of us “win” in an AI-led world.

Meaningful Message of Stranger Things

Stranger Things has always been a tale of resilience, self-sufficiency, personal agency, love, friendship, and bravery—and all within an analog world. But over the years these attributes have become even more top-of-mind as we wrestle with a world that’s increasingly automated.

Even more meaningful, in many ways, is how the show shines a light on the slowly disappearing bridge between adults’ memory of a youth spent without digital devices and the reality of our digitally-native kids’ existence.

It’s the cross-generational appeal of Stranger Things that makes it a great segue to conversations with our kids about deeper themes—like why our uniquely human attributes matter so much to the future.

Have We Forgotten?

The bigger challenge is not our kids listening, but how much we as adults have already forgotten. We are ourselves so entranced by technology that we don’t stop to remember why it mattered that we grew up without it.

We needed to learn how to navigate the world without constant adult surveillance or instant communication. We couldn’t avoid difficult conversations with friends, family, and teachers because there was no text, social media, or emails to hide behind. We also had to sometimes sit with the searing pain that came from extreme boredom or loneliness.

These are not meaningless memories. They are critical lessons to pass along to a younger generation. And I’m glad that we have this cultural moment in Stranger Things to think about it all.

Technology can continue to be a tool of human betterment, but only if we remember who we are without it…

Few AI Considerations for 2026

Having spent so much of 2025 thinking about AI, talking to schools and families, and digging into research, I have some thoughts about the year ahead. Here are just a few of my top ones:

1) Nobody Has the Answer

AI has been around in principle and practice for decades, advancing in fits and starts in the years since the term was first coined in 1956. And while generative AI has been notable for its consumer-facing interface and incredible progress, the foundations of AI technology have been with us for a very long time.

We are not wrestling with something new but instead coming to terms with the great opportunity we’ve already invested ourselves in creating (whether we knew it or not). We are also now dealing with the consequences the tradeoffs we’ve already made.

The problem is that we want so badly for there to be a right and wrong answer here, but there isn’t one and there won’t ever be. The good news, though, is we are in a new age of autonomy and independence and that’s something to celebrate.

2) Obvious Alliances Won’t Exist Anymore

Social media has made it far too easy for us as adults to lazily decide issues based on digital-era tribalism all the while hiding behind a screen.

We’ve convinced ourselves that it just takes hitting “like” and aligning ourselves with the platform, person, politician, or friend that “seems to think” like we do.

But AI is starting to scramble it all. How we live with this new technology will touch every one of us. And unlike many of the issues we argue about these days this one is deeply personal for each of us.

You might find yourself disagreeing with your friends while on the same page with political leaders who you didn’t seem compatible with previously. There is no AI policy “big tent.” Neither party has a platform that is fully thought out or defensible, or that seems like an obvious fit for the party.

And that’s great news, because going forward, it’s humans vs. machines, and we need to get more comfortable with figuring out what AI means to us individually and based on issues not ideology.

3) More Control Than We Think

If you’ve watched Pluribus on Apple TV (I highly recommend it), you’ll appreciate the nod to an idea of AI gone amok—or even just how lazy the digital world has made us.

Carol is just one of a handful of humans not sucked into the “hivemind,” but she has a choice whether or not to join them (well, mostly—there’s a twist at season’s end).

However hard, messy or uncomfortable it is, Carol has to decide. And it’s very much the same with all of us—we have a choice regarding the path we take here.

One reason for this is that Big Tech hasn’t fully “commercialized” its generative AI offering. The amount of money being poured into the space doesn’t come close to equaling the revenue being recouped on the back end. And that’s a problem for them and an opportunity for us. It puts consumers in a powerful position to choose what we hand over in data, what we choose to use and pay for, and what we advocate for in terms of policy.

In the days of social media, web search, or e-commerce, we got locked in and immediately turned into revenue as digital advertising alone was impossible to escape. But for now, it’s different. We need to use, trust, and like AI tools and platforms for companies to balance out their investment.

This risk is part of why the AI “bubble” may burst, and it should remind us how much control we do have.

4) Fight the Good Fight With Facts

Another great disservice that’s come from an online advertising ecosystem flourishing in our lives is the effect it’s had on fact-finding and the way it has toyed with our emotions.

We so easily fall prey to the way Big Tech pushes our buttons. We don’t seek to go deeper but instead jump right to the “easy” answer. This politician or that one is doing something terrible. Just because. This or that happens and we say they are bad or good. Just because.

We so infrequently ask “why” without judgment or emotion. And it’s not because “our country is divided”—it’s because companies make money when we get worked up. And AI is going to make it far worse to manipulate, divide and coerce us. We need to stick to the facts and resist the emotional pokes.

5) Consider with Care AI’s Benefits

Similar to the last point, we also too easily dismiss AI out of hand for reasons we may not have fully explored ourselves. I covered this a bit last week, and it bears repeating: We must understand what we’re talking about when we want to “pause” or “ban” AI. It’s not one thing, and as I’ve mentioned many times, it’s also everything—a digital reality we’ve lived with for years and years now.

I have heard stories repeatedly where the biggest and most immediate impact of AI has been on communities that are low on resources. AI has accelerated progress in ways that these schools and communities want to continue to benefit from.

Similarly, kids with disabilities have benefited from technology that gives them the chance to be back in the classroom with their peers. There are many stories like this, and we should support everyone’s right to access the technology that benefits their individual circumstance and community.

What about safety? About privacy? Those things are paramount. But if our current laws and regulations do the work they’re designed to do, then their application to AI should be no different. And if policy needs adjusting, then we need to get in and work together to get it done.

The bigger point that ends where I started with Stranger Things is this: We have way more autonomy and control over what happens next than we think. But it won’t be easy or tidy. And families need to do it together.

Happy New Year! Look forward to discussing AI in more detail in 2026!

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If we want to ensure that teachers have the best tools available and students are safely protected by existing laws and regulations, the focus should be on ensuring that all edtech systems, including those employing AI systems, operate with strict data minimization, regulatory compliance, and full transparency around processes.

Today’s debate often treats AI as a single, novel, high-risk category, when in reality schools already rely on a wide range of data-driven systems that use similar underlying technologies. Conflating these tools under one label obscures the meaningful differences that exist in purpose, risk, data sensitivity, and educational value, making it much harder to apply the targeted safeguards that student privacy laws were designed to support.

What’s needed is strong vetting, shared accountability for data privacy, and enforcement of the regulations that already exist. Beyond that, teachers need the training and support necessary to evaluate these tools effectively.

But all of these discussions become much more challenging when we aren’t working with a clear definition of what technology is being used and how AI may be part of a given tool or platform…

The WHAT: Defining and Categorizing AI

A common misconception is that AI only refers to the most advanced generative systems students encounter today. In reality, machine learning, rule-based automation, recommendation engines, predictive analytics, and adaptive learning algorithms have been used in classrooms for over a decade.

These technologies power student information and learning management systems, testing platforms, reading and math apps, behavior-tracking tools, and attendance monitors. Many “non-AI” apps also collect detailed interaction data that is later used for internal analytics, product design decisions, or future algorithm development—all still governed by education data privacy laws.

We’d be much better off categorizing AI in schools based on risk, pedagogical value, and other criteria focused on educational need rather than the underlying technology alone. A practical framework might look like this:

The WHY: Context Matters

Technology is only as good as its application and the context in its use. This is why any technology in the classroom should be considered based on what it does for students and teachers not simply because it employs a particular system.

For some students, AI provides the opportunity to be with their peers through accessibility features like text-to-speech that helps dyslexic students access grade-level content, real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, or predictive text that supports students with motor difficulties in expressing complex ideas.

For others, AI-driven technology helps with language learning through adaptive pronunciation feedback or reading support through personalized phonics instruction that adjusts to individual pacing.

In a math classroom, an AI tutoring system might provide just-in-time hints that help a struggling student work through problems independently, while an adaptive assessment platform may identify specific concept gaps without requiring additional testing time.

In all cases, educators should be making informed decisions about these tools and maintaining clear communication with students about how and why they’re being used. The privacy and safety of these tools shouldn’t be an afterthought—they should be foundational requirements.

HOW: Laws are Technology Agnostic

As data underpins all AI innovation in schools, vendors should be scrutinized for their data protection standards, and all regulations need to be enforced. But, again, that should be true of any technology.

Data privacy in schools is both critical and severely under-prioritized. The conversation should not be limited to “AI” as a monolithic threat. The reality is that schools already rely on an enormous ecosystem of digital tools, many of which quietly collect, process, or share student information every day.

Generative AI is simply the most visible new layer on an already complex privacy landscape.

Schools already have many processes in place around procurement, data privacy, parental consent, curriculum review, and teacher oversight. What we need is to ensure those existing processes are updated to address new concerns raised by AI, like data use, transparency, and human oversight. That requires isolating specific risks and addressing them directly.

The question is not whether a tool uses AI somewhere in the background. The real issue is how much student data a system collects, what inferences it makes, and whether it affects student opportunities. Data risk increases as tools move from automation to prediction to decision-making—and oversight should scale accordingly.

AI is Inevitable, Confusion is Optional

Once we get clear about what we are actually talking about when we say “AI,” families, educators, and policymakers can exert real influence over how these tools are governed and used in schools. That influence depends on precision—not fear, nor blanket opposition.

Concerns about student data misuse, legal compliance, instructional quality, and unintended consequences are valid and deserve serious attention. But data practices are a matter of policy and contract, not technical destiny.

The question facing schools is not whether AI will be present; it already is. The real question is whether communities will engage thoughtfully enough to shape outcomes that reflect their values. This requires shared definitions, transparency about how tools are used, and good governance frameworks.

The goal is not consensus for its own sake, but a common baseline for discussion—and one grounded in clarity about the WHAT, the WHY, and the HOW. From there we absolutely should engage in robust debate.

There are no clear or easy answers when it comes to technology innovation, but the only way we get to meaningful solutions and consensus is through debate in good faith and on equal grounds.

A reminder that there are some useful worksheets and other tools in the resources section with more to come this month!

Have an idea for tools you need? Get in touch! And books in the mail for those who requested a review copy!

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Take, for example, headline-grabbing news around social media bans, such as the one enacted this week in Australia, or the AI detectors that are increasingly being employed in schools to “catch” cheating.

Neither is quite what it seems, and that is why both are excellent examples of the need for families to take the time to really understand risks, intentions, and consequences across every issue.

Australia’s Social Media Ban

You may have heard that Australia has banned social media for kids under the age of 16. You wouldn’t be blamed for immediately cheering on the ban, as on the surface it presents a tidy solution to a gnarly problem.

And the complexities and realities of the ban are definitely being debated in the news, with teens, and within parenting groups. They range from whether the ban limits free speech for kids and represents government overreach to whether it will push kids to dark digital corners as they seek workarounds (it’s already happening).

Unfortunately, in the age of AI there is now also a layer of risk that hasn’t been getting enough attention but that families also need to know about: Age verification technology.

Risks of Biometric and Sensitive Data Collection

As social media platforms face heightened scrutiny, or must comply with full bans such as the one in Australia, there is a natural desire to seek digital solutions to manage and mitigate risk. In this case it means facial scans that seek to algorithmically “determine” age.

But these “solutions” also means an entire “shadow” industry that collects the kind of information we general only share with critical, well-regulated parties such as banks, hospitals, etc.

Yes, we are increasingly subjected to video surveillance and facial scans in many places these days. And, yes, it can feel like a losing battle. But we need to think carefully each time we share any of our data. And in this case consider whether this is the right approach at all.

Facial data is the very coveted ingredient for creating deepfakes and other AI-generated fraudulent content. This information can be combined with other data to control or steal from us. The implications can be dire, and we need to be smart about how and when we share this information. Red flags around this approach are already being raised by cybersecurity and privacy experts.

As Sky News reported: “Cybersecurity experts, tech executives and politicians from across the aisle have warned the Albanese government’s social media ban for under 16s could do more harm than good. The laws, intended to protect children from online harms, have instead created a complex web of privacy, data, and scam risks for both minors and adults.”

See, everything has tradeoffs. But some of the most problematic situations arise when “virtue” (e.g., keeping kids under 16 off of social media) comes at a significant “cost” (e.g., free speech, cybercrime, surveillance).

Another excellent explanation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“… All online data is transmitted through a host of third-party intermediaries, and almost all websites and services also host a network of dozens of private, third-party trackers managed by data brokers, advertisers, and other companies that are constantly collecting data about your browsing activity. The data is shared with or sold to additional third parties and used to target behavioral advertisements. Age verification tools also often rely on third parties just to complete a transaction: a single instance of ID verification might involve two or three different third-party partners, and age estimation services often work directly with data brokers to offer a complete product. Users’ personal identifying data then circulates among these partners.”

We must go deep on every issue no matter how “good” it sounds. Families need to consider what’s best for themselves and not simply for governments, industry, and other third party interests.

AI Detectors and the Loss of “Personal Voice”

This is another area that’s worth exploring. It’s not one news story or big event, but little issues that are stacking up each day. And it’s similarly multi-layered to the topic of age verification.

For the past five years, kids have been thrust into the world of educational technology at a speed we weren’t prepared for. And mostly that thanks to the pandemic lockdowns (ironically, the longest and most restrictive lockdown periods was in Australia). Kids are far better than adults at adopting and understanding new technology. So we have encouraged this, but now with AI we’re trying to put the emergency brakes on.

The problems with AI detectors are numerous. They have too high a false positive rate. And there is also no way to “detect AI”—just an analysis of patterns of AI output that are modeled against a kid’s work (and notably, those “patterns” come from analyzing popular ways people write via the data used to train AI). Most worrisome is that in this cat-and-mouse game of detection, even for kids who don’t use AI at all, there is a loss in what it means to have personal voice.

My daughter told me that her peers debate which words might sound “too smart” or are most likely to be flagged by AI detectors. And this is happening even with kids who aren’t using AI for their work at all.

So are we losing the point of why to even write? Is this highlighting how little time is spent in teaching personal voice? Yes, I think so.

There is a lot more to think about here than just “are kids cheating,” and we need to dig in and really sit more deliberately with the topic.

AI in Schools Going Forward

Heading into 2026, there will no doubt be many more conversations around AI in the classroom. I’ve been lucky to be involved in some of these important discussions and have a few thoughts to share on the subject…

First, having spent the year writing about AI and kids and poring through academic papers and the work of many important voices, I’ve come to this personal conclusion: We need better technology in the classroom, kids must be more proficient in its use, and far more time should be spent in offline activities (for all of us).

The irony here is that the skills required to survive and thrive in the future require the type of critical thinking and interpersonal skills that are developed in-person and offline.

We need kids to read books, debate, build, play outside, develop empathy, daydream, and sit in silence. We shouldn’t confuse meaningless technology with the type of opportunity AI can bring. We should be talking now about quality over quantity.

Something important to remember when considering what’s in the classroom too: Most edtech platforms include some form of “AI” technology and have for years. These include features such as machine learning, pattern recognition, automated classification, algorithmic inference, statistical modeling, and adaptive pathways.

So, the best approach is to focus on the outcome and the impact, not on the technology alone—and also recognize how personal and local these decisions will ultimately be. Technology is not going away, but we can shape its impact.

What are your concerns about technology in school? Have you had a chance to give it some consideration?

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The second is the way we’ve been conditioned to hunt for answers in a sea of content living on the Internet, guided by someone else’s answers rather than our own questions. Instead of intentionally looking for what we need, we passively consume what’s been written.

On the other hand, while generative AI is still limited by its training content, it can process that content far more efficiently and shift the focus from hunting through existing and related content to asking the exact questions we want answered.

Put more simply, rather than being constrained by what someone else chose to write about, why not drive the inquiry ourselves? That is what AI allows us to do…

Why Questions are the Secret to AI’s Usefulness

⓵ You Get to “How To” Faster

Last week, I needed to figure out how to get my family to a London-bound 10 p.m. flight out of Newark Airport from Manhattan on Thanksgiving Eve. I knew it would be crowded, but how crowded and would the lines still be long? What would public transportation be like? Is there decent food available in terminal C?

Sure, I could have tried to piece answers together from a Google search. But it’s an approach focused on sifting through existing answers rather than getting right to my precise needs. Flipping the script can make a big difference.

Instead of passively scrolling through information I didn’t need—like how busy the day before Thanksgiving was nationwide or more general recommendations around timing—I was laser-focused on what I needed to know, and quickly got a granular timeline from ChatGPT.

⓶ You are Better Able to Exploit Opportunities

How many times a day do you NOT ask a question when you could (or should)? Sometimes it’s to spare ourselves the trouble of bothering. Other times it’s just habit or due to fear of asking a “dumb” question. But we rarely consider what is missed by not asking.

For instance, on our return the flight was delayed by four hours. When boarding I was handed a photocopied document with small print and something about “knowing your rights.”

Frankly, pre-generative AI I wouldn’t have bothered reading the paper. But I popped “Regulation 261” into ChatGPT and found that I ultimately was owed financial compensation for the delay. And thanks to my AI interaction, I had the compensation in hand within 24 hours. It would never have happened if I didn’t ask the question.

⓷ It Can Help You Form an Opinion

Over the holidays, I asked friends about how they use AI tools. One response that stood out was using chatbots to explore contentious issues without fear of judgment or social pressure.

How often are we guided by what we consume on social media or watch on TV even if it doesn’t sit with us perfectly? We might have questions but how do we work through them?

But if you could explore issues, particularly divisive ones, and really dig into them, would it change how you see the world?

⓸ It Can Put Health-Related Issues into Context

Hopefully you are beginning to see how much nuance is involved in the use of AI and its impact on your life. Nowhere is this more true than when trying to better understand your health and wellness.

Without a doubt, the sensitivity of health information and the consequences of placing too much trust in a machine make this a delicate area. But there’s real value in thoughtful exploration.

If you think of AI as simply a processor of enormous amounts of information, with outputs based on patterns, you can see the usefulness. For instance, in trying to understand the basic protocols of a health system, or the most common approaches to treatment.

All the things we secretly Google anyway we can now get a clearer, more comprehensive picture. “How do the best hospitals for ___ generally approach treating ___.” When a family member needed care, we wanted to understand NHS treatment protocols and timing, and got a quick response that helped us know what to expect.

The key with health topics is to ask for the broadest perspective possible, or for a set of informed questions to bring to your doctor. The goal here is to give you the tools to ask even more questions and advocate for you or your loved one’s very specific needs.

⓹ It’s an Opportunity to be More Thoughtful

Having a way to “take a beat” can be a surprisingly helpful use of AI. While it might seem like the least important application of the technology, it can represent an opportunity to approach people and situations more thoughtfully.

What does this look like? Well, working through a hard conversation you need to have at work. Or, trying to decide if you are being unreasonable with your partner or kids about where you want to go on vacation.

Maybe how to say “no” to someone, or what’s the best way to help your neighbor. Having a way to practice difficult conversations, deliberate on your approach, or simply work through your thoughts before responding can make a real difference in how interactions unfold.

These are just a few examples, but hopefully you get the gist of it. Technology is a tool, and this new iteration can make us smarter, better informed, and more thoughtful in ways we may not have considered before.

We talk so much about AI as some technology that is separate from us, but it’s just a more advanced way to access the resources we need to be our best selves. It’s not a mystery. It does matter who is creating a model, and it matters even more that we are in control of our information and how the technology is being employed at work, home, or school.

But it’s just a tool. The real conversation should continue to be about who we are and how we want to live, work, learn, and connect with one other. It’s not about the technology—it’s about us as humans, and we need to start thinking differently about our relationship with these tools.

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What has become clear is that the requirements to create AI are far beyond our collective comprehension (🙋🏼‍♀️). From data needs so vast that the Internet doesn’t contain enough high quality information to train AI systems, to computing power requiring million-square-foot facilities that stress the environment and local community infrastructure.

There are also continued, and elevated, concerns about privacy and safety coming at us with increasing speed. And new tradeoffs that we may not have considered before. One of these is the uncomfortable suggestion that capturing and analyzing a selfie of our kids is the way to make platforms safer.

For families with kids who are Roblox enthusiasts, this is now the choice that must be made imminently.

A Solution Worse Than the Problem?

Increasingly, families are caught in the middle of a maelstrom of issues related to social media and other website harms, alongside a list of suggested “solutions” coming from every direction.

These days the most popular answer to kids clamoring to get onto social media and gaming sites seems to be “age verification” via AI facial-recognition systems. While these tools may appease an industry looking to remove their liability, or serve as a seemingly tidy solution for anti-social media advocates and lobbyists, it’s critical to consider the implications for kids.

In the news this week was the decision by Roblox to use just one of these systems to organize and gatekeep children by age. It’s a thorny issue as the company has faced lawsuits and kids have been preyed upon by adults pretending to be kids. But unless you are comfortable with this type of verification method, your child won’t be able to chat while playing Roblox games.

The problem is that a child’s “biometric” information—and in this case their face—is, in the age of AI especially, one of the most sensitive pieces of “data.” Leaving aside the question of how accurate these tools are, or that Roblox insists that the image isn’t “stored,” there is a legitimate question of additional risk being added to the mix.

Biometric imagery can be used to create deepfakes, to participate in online fraud, and is data that is immutable—which you cannot change once stolen. And when combined with other data available on the web, it can create a headache that follows kids into the future.

It’s also important to remember that a company’s “solution” is far more about liability than safety. While that may seem overly blunt, we have to remember these are corporate entities that have to be driven by legal obligation first, even if, of course, many also want kids to be safe.

So like with everything, it’s all about measure. And I’m confident that families are able to make these difficult and highly-personal decisions when they have the necessary information. But it’s important to know the tradeoffs and that no one cares more about your child’s privacy and well-being than you.

The one thing that I would implore you to resist, though, is pressure to make any decision based on what another believes to be “virtuous” or “good.” Once armed with all the facts and an understanding of all sides of any issue, you will know what is right for your family. There is no easy out here, no “best.”

I had an exchange on this topic recently after reading this excellent assessment of what is going on right now with age verification. It’s worth a read!

Want to discuss? Please feel free to reach out.

A Dystopian Headache in the Making

Now let’s talk data centers.

Put simply, a data center is where AI intelligence is “made.” They (ironically) can be as big as 15-20 football fields and have outsized electricity and water needs as a result.

I wrote this week about how they are becoming a surprising (and not particularly welcome) result of the race to build AI. Read more here »

Data centers are showing up in other ways as well… in particular, by sending an enormous amounts of traffic through to the web.

In the article above I also recount how my website was being flooded by data center traffic, especially from China and Singapore, and how I came to realize so was the entirety of the Internet.

If we go back to the fact that AI is created by a simple formula of data + algorithms (the “models” or math here) + computing power (the data centers), you start to see where we see the impact.

How to Talk to Kids About Technology

I’ve had some fantastic conversations this week with educators, families, and others wrestling with how we keep up-to-date ourselves while protecting our kids. And in every case, I’ve suggested that we give kids a voice, encourage personal agency, and allow them a say in finding solutions.

Now, this is easier said than done, and certainly there are age-appropriate considerations, as well as what works for you and your family. But we created these savvy “digital natives” and now we need to let them show us what it means.

We need to ask our kids to show us what they know, how they understand AI and new technology, and what they’re discovering too. We should have them explain the risks as they see them and what solutions they suggest.

Even in my household where I talk about these issues incessantly, my kids always teach me something new every day, and are paying attention to news in ways that I miss. Instead of keeping kids off platforms, it can help to discover together the risks and perhaps have them reach their own conclusions about safety.

It’s incredibly difficult, but we must remember that the kids of today will lead us into tomorrow. So it’s not just for their benefit to turn them into leaders regarding these issues…it’s for ours as well.

Want suggestions about how to talk to kids? Contact me and I’ll share some conversation starters.

Before You Go

If you haven’t had a chance, please check out my interview with the amazing Felicia Pasadyn! She’s such an inspiration and a reminder of the very “human” skills our kids will need in the future. Look for more great profiles in the weeks ahead!

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Of course, when generative AI burst onto the stage, it was less of a lurch and more of a roller coaster drop that has been doing loops and twists ever since. The implications of what has been unleashed are now visible in ways that go far beyond new tools coming to market.

We’re seeing these implications manifest in the massive physical infrastructure required to power AI development—a reality increasingly unwanted by communities across the country (and the world).

What are Data Centers?

In simple terms, data centers are massive, physical warehouses filled with powerful computers that store, process, and run the AI applications we use daily. They’re where the computing power happens—making our family’s digital interactions possible.

These big, energy-intensive physical structures are hard to miss when they appear. And as AI innovation and applications grow, the demand of the space to locate them grows. Something increasingly (and understandably) unwelcome in communities.

Just a couple of headlines from this week:

• “Data centers are spiking electricity costs in Maryland. It’s the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ one expert warns,” CNN, November 14, 2025

• “Data centers are surging—but so are the protests against them,” Fast Company, November 18, 2025

• “Will data center demands strain Archbald power, water, wildlife?,” The Times Tribute, November 14, 2025

Impact on the Community

What makes these centers hard to miss is their massive footprint. A data center can range from 200,000 to over 1 million square feet. To put that in perspective, a typical football field is about 57,000 square feet, so the largest data centers equal 15-20 football fields in size. It’s hard to wrap your head around the sheer scale, and even harder to imagine where this all goes?

While facilities can bring high-paying tech jobs and generate tax revenue for local communities, many aren’t comfortable with the tradeoffs—in particular, the electrical demands and stress put upon local infrastructure. It’s an international issue too as there has been a tendency to locate these in countries where governments have been willing to sell land, water, electricity and other resources to Big Tech firms.

Research firm Data Center Watch has been tracking grassroots opposition to data center development across the United States and over the past two years. In their Q2 2025 report, 20 projects worth $98 billion in the US were facing opposition by local communities.

It’s a sign of things to come, of course, as many more of us face this type of intrusion into our communities. But without these structures we also won’t see the type of innovation that many companies (and consumers) are hungry for.

Data Centers and the Pac-Man Analogy

The impact of AI development is taking other forms as well. The internet as we know it is facing unprecedented demands for its data.

As consumers, we know that “training” AI models requires massive amounts of data, much of which comes from the internet. How is that achieved? Companies unleash bots to “crawl” and “scrape” high-quality content.

This isn’t a new process. If you’ve ever visited a shopping search engine, you’ll see product descriptions and images collected from retailer websites and made “searchable” in one location. That information is often “scraped” from retailers.

But the scale has intensified dramatically with AI development. Companies are now systematically collecting data from across the internet to train AI models, seeking out any content considered “high quality” for their datasets.

As someone who researches and creates this type of content, my website is a prime target for machine-driven content scraping. This week I had a shock when I noticed that a high percentage of traffic was coming specifically from Lanzhou, China and Singapore.

I knew there were large data centers in Singapore, and a quick search showed that China was building some of its largest new data centers in the region where Lanzhou sits.

This systematic content collection is happening at massive scale. I checked analytics.usa.gov, which tracks traffic to thousands of US federal websites, and found that over the past 90 days, the same geographic traffic pattern was emerging. More than 20% of traffic to federal sites was also coming from these same two locations—Lanzhou and Singapore.

While we can’t definitively conclude what this traffic represents, the timing and specificity suggest that the race to develop AI is creating new patterns in how our digital content is being accessed, often without website owners being explicitly informed about how their content might be used.

What makes this pattern even more significant is that 51% of all internet traffic now comes from machines rather than humans, and many modern bots are AI-driven, meaning they can learn, adapt, and mimic human behavior in ways that make them much harder to detect.

It’s not just the international traffic either. As I looked at the top cities sending traffic to my own website some were unfamiliar to me such as Boardman, Oregon, which is an Amazon data center. All of this illustrates what we are hearing in the news about a new “Cold War” between the US and China to scale AI innovation.

What Does it All Mean?

For families, this illustrates the incredible scope and scale of AI development happening around us. There’s a race manifesting itself in how the web is changing—right down to our local communities and the business infrastructure we’ve grown to rely on.

With such massive bot-related traffic, website owners can’t trust their analytics, advertisers can’t trust their engagement metrics, and content creators are seeing their work systematically harvested without consent.

Within the next 18 months, we may see a fundamental shift in recognition of this new reality. We may need to acknowledge that the “internet” is becoming primarily a machine-to-machine environment with humans as a minority presence—with much of our activity moving to AI-mediated platforms.

This matters to families for three key reasons:

First, while it’s tempting to postpone seriously engaging with generative AI tools, that time has passed. These traffic patterns signal the transformative scale of AI development happening around us. Second, the internet as we know it will be gone sooner than we think. We’ll be experiencing it differently as AI functionality becomes built-in, reshaping how we discover news, find small businesses, and interact with information online.

Finally, with data centers arriving in communities and straining local infrastructure, we need to understand how these developments align with our values and what tradeoffs we’re willing to accept.

We’ve been heading in this direction for a long time, but now it’s crucial to understand what this transformation means for you and your family today.