First, a bit of context: there’s a bigger story unfolding around Gray right now, and this recent Atlantic piece is an excellent primer on the academic’s work and the ways he’s diverged from former allies in the “free learning” space. Initially aligned with fellow play advocate Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, Gray came to a different view regarding how much digital play contributes to the healthy development of kids and teens. He’s since turned that perspective into a new book, Restoring Childhood, out in September (you can pre-order it now).

It’s Gray’s core premise about play in his first book, though, that got me thinking about how his philosophy might actually help kids engage positively with AI.

It’s the Journey Not the Destination

My excitement about Gray’s work comes from my own belief that children are smart, resilient, independent beings who need our support to explore, learn, experiment, and “roam free”—a belief that can extend naturally to how kids engage with technology.

As Gray explains it, “play” begins with curiosity (a thirst humans never fully quench) and then moves to playfulness and sociability. Playfulness is the way one explores and practices skills and sociability serves as the way that ideas are spread. It’s a process that doesn’t need to end in a test or any prescribed outcome to be effective—and Gray makes a powerful argument for how this natural instinct is in conflict with modern education.

Overall, though, the point is that we learn the most along the way, not just for the sake of accomplishing a single task. And it’s in this analogy that I see a path to AI literacy—for kids and adults alike.

Forget the Outcome

We talk about AI usage a lot in terms of outcomes: the project it makes easier to pull together, the paper it might help write, the work it can do in an office setting. These are meaningful examples as to why AI can work for us as a society, but they’re not how we get to a better future. So it’s interesting to consider how “play” might unlock AI’s full potential for all of us.

What play does is let us explore ideas without expectations or a specific outcome in mind. You are free to explore questions or ideas without the fear of “sounding stupid.” We can also work through problems or ideas that simply need some challenging discussion to come to fruition. The point is to ponder, ask, think, and push with no expectation for the outcome—and no fear of judgement.

Kids are already great at asking questions. So it can be as easy as encouraging them to be more freely curious (and “play around”) with AI rather than simply seeing the technology as a means to finishing an assignment. This is important for adults too. In my book, I share insight into how the number of questions humans ask nosedives from childhood into adulthood. But if we could maintain this skill, we might all get much more out of AI.

Kids Should be Free to Roam

An extension to this theory, and one that will be central to Gray’s new book out in September, is that we need kids to explore the online realm as freely as they are encouraged to do outdoors.

This doesn’t mean we ignore the specific needs of our kids by age, sensibility, or individual family comfort level, but it does mean that loosening the reins will be important to the future. It’s also the way that Gray diverges in his thoughts from Haidt—the digital world is one that our little natives need to explore to learn resilience and personal agency not be banned from using.

We’ve sort of trapped kids in this place where they’re less free outdoors, but now we want to also restrict their indoor digital play too. Gray believes that this is what is causing anxiety—not the screens specifically. And by giving kids more freedom to explore online he illustrates that kids are not deterred from going outside (nor should they be).

Ultimately it’s not about the balance of time spent indoors versus outdoors—it’s about a philosophy of exploration that that encourages independence, imagination, and exploration, and ultimately builds confidence and personal agency regardless of the venue.

Ideas for Playing Together Using AI

In some ways, providing a list of ideas for how to play is breaking the rules (!), but I think it will help you understand where to start and what free exploration together might look like. Here are some examples:

For Younger Kids (~5–10 years old) With a Parent

• Pick a favorite book character and ask the AI to answer questions as that character. For instance, maybe the AI is the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and you ask him why he skipped vegetables. Or maybe a conversation with Charlotte the spider from Charlotte’s Web.

• Ask silly questions and have fun with the responses. For instance, “If our house were alive, what would it think about us?” Or “if our dog could talk what would he say?” This provides an imaginative, low-stakes way to explore perspective-taking together.

For Older Kids and Parents

• Pick a book or TV show that you’ve both finished and engage with AI on different perspectives and theories related to characters, themes, etc. For instance, a sci-fi show that’s open to interpretation or a book where you could try to argue an alternative viewpoint.

• Ask the AI to role-play a historical figure who’s time-travelled to today, then interview them about what confuses them most about the world today. This is a good one, as it can show some of the gaps in an AI’s knowledge and may allow for some exploration of AI hallucinations.

• Play together by arguing the other side of a hot-button issue. This can be particularly powerful as teens often hold strong beliefs. Take something they feel passionate about and let the AI make a convincing counter-argument. Do this yourself as well and show kids our openness to debate.

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Curiosity and Freedom are the Keys to Future Flourishing

These are just a few ideas, but the point is that free exploration and play with AI can be powerful for all of us as we seek to master its value to society.

The biggest fear I have (and it’s one shared by many) is that instead of using AI to flourish we will be cowed into silence by it—either by our reticence to use AI, or our embarrassment in admitting that we do.

In fact, it’s been something many writers on Substack have debated this week as the platform recently added an “AI checker” to writers’ posts (fellow AI writer frames the issue well here).

There are many reasons people use AI within their work. I like to use Claude as an editor to help me review for flow, clarity, and accuracy. Often those with communication challenges find AI has given them a voice (such as a writer with dyslexia, for instance), or individuals whose first language isn’t English who are able to find entirely new audiences for their writing.

The point is that an AI witch hunt (as it’s been called) makes us small, fearful, and weak when AI can instead make us smarter, more efficient and successful.

My discussions with fellow writers about the AI checker issue has made this idea of free thought and exploration even more urgent. So I’d recommend exploring these ideas for yourself and taking the time to read some of Peter Gray’s work. You can find his Substack here:

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So I was delighted to meet an entrepreneur putting an AI stake in the ground and offering up innovation that gets at a core challenge facing families: the “mental load” of parenting, and specifically of motherhood.

Introducing AVA

This week I had the pleasure of participating in an event for women hosted by Chief, moderated by Samantha Mulcahy, and alongside fellow panel guest Laura Cunningham, founder of a new app called AVA. What Laura and I share is a passion for digital literacy and personal empowerment, and after two hours talking with a room full of engaged women, it was clear we’re on the right track in giving them what they need to understand and embrace this new technology.

We are all living in this moment where AI can allow women to move ahead with ideas, projects, and initiatives like never before—but many of us aren’t embracing the potential. So not only is AVA a game-changer for busy parents, it’s an example of the ways in which AI can supercharge female entrepreneurship—and that’s something worth paying attention to.

I had a chance to speak with Laura in more detail recently, and here is what I learned about this thoughtful business leader and her new project AVA.

Entrepreneur Laura Cunningham

AIF: Tell me more about your background and what brought you to this moment?

LC: I’ve spent more than fifteen years as a product leader, almost all of it at the intersection of technology and human systems that are supposed to serve people but usually aren’t built for them.

I started in public education. I worked inside the New York City Department of Education, in what was then Mayor Bloomberg’s Office of Innovation, using technology to help teachers and administrators understand what kids were learning in an ongoing way. From there I went to KIPP, the national charter school network, and then spent years in ed-tech startups, both early and later stage, building products for teachers, students and their families. Most recently, before AVA, I led AI product strategy at NEAR, a layer-1 blockchain and deep-tech company.

So my through line isn’t education or crypto or AI, exactly. I keep ending up in places where the technology is powerful and the humans it’s meant to serve are an afterthought. I’ve spent my career trying to close that gap. AVA is the most personal version of that work I’ve ever done, because this time the human being the system forgot about was me.

AIF: What has motherhood changed about your thoughts / experience of work?

LC: A few things...

The first is efficiency. I became a radically better worker after I had my daughters because my hours got much more finite. I know when my workday starts and when it ends, and I hold the hours with my family as non-negotiable. We eat dinner together almost every night, as a matter of principle. In order to make this work, I’ve had to increase my focus on work that leads to outcomes instead of the kind that looks pretty in a deck. I’ve had to get ruthless about what actually matters and I think that constraint has made me sharper.

The second is mission. I’ve always been mission-driven, sometimes to a fault. But becoming a mother took that from an intellectual commitment to something closer to a physical one. I want to contribute to the world in a way my kids will one day understand. I want my daughters to see me leading. I want them to grow up with a model of a woman who can build something real and still be fully a woman and fully a mother, not as a balancing act but as one whole life.

The third is that motherhood kind of cured me of the optimization story. For years I chased “balance,” which is a lie we sell women, the idea that if you just distribute yourself correctly across every demand, you win. You don’t. You just get very good at being partial everywhere. What I want now is something more like self-actualization. Becoming more fully the person I’m capable of being, in all of it, instead of managing myself into smaller and smaller pieces. That shift is honestly a big part of why AVA exists.

AIF: What is AVA?

LC: AVA is a company focused on reducing the mental load of parenthood (usually, statistically, motherhood) which leads to both mental health issues as well as workforce attrition. AVA is both a product—an app that uses agentic AI to proactively handle family admin and coordination work—and a community of parents who are advocating for better support systems in the US. 

AIF: Tell me more about how it works?

LC: Every modern household runs on an enormous amount of invisible executive-function labor. The remembering, the anticipating, the coordinating, the deciding. Roughly fifteen hours a week of it, and it falls disproportionately on one person, usually the mother. We have a name for it now, the mental load, but naming it hasn’t moved it. Most families are running this on sheer vigilance, group chats, and hope.

AVA the app is an ambient AI layer built to help you carry that load. It helps you anticipate what needs to happen, find the best solutions for your specific family, and makes sure things get done. 

The belief underneath the whole company is simple: care is infrastructure. We’ve spent a century treating the work of running a family as a personal talent or a personal failing, when it’s actually infrastructure that a household needs and that no one ever built. AVA is my attempt to build it. 

AIF: Do you think women are hesitant to embrace AI? 

LC: I think the reality is, as usual, more nuanced than it might first seem.

Starting with a fact that surprises people: parents (ahem, moms) are among the heaviest AI users in the country right now. Surveys have found around 79% of parents using AI versus about 54% of non-parents. Mothers are using it for caregiving logistics, for the mental-load work that has no other tool, for scripts to have a hard conversation with a partner. So the “women won’t touch it” narrative is not totally true.

What is real is that women are being punished for using it in ways men are not. There’s research showing that when identical work is labeled as AI-assisted, it’s rated as less competent, and the penalty is more than double for women. Women are far more likely to hide their AI use at work. Men are significantly more likely to be encouraged by their managers to use it, and more likely to be praised when they do. So I think many women are having a rational response to a real, measurable tax that we pay and men don’t.

And I think into this moment, our culture is handing women a set of scripts about how to personally deal with all this, and I think every one of them is a trap. Use AI to frantically keep up, which is just the girlboss optimization story in a new logo, making each woman individually responsible for a structural shift she didn’t design. Or refuse it as principled resistance, which sounds noble but falls hardest on exactly the women whose jobs are most exposed.

Women are something like 83% of workers in the most AI-exposed occupations. For a woman in that position, refusing the tool her whole industry is adopting is more like unilateral disarmament. Or the two quieter scripts: use it but hide it, or use it and apologize for it. All four ask us to manage our own complicity instead of changing who gets to shape what comes next.

My belief is that we need to use it, see it, and shape it. Use it, because the leverage is real (it truly makes me feel so powerful!). See it, meaning refuse to hide our use, because the penalty exists precisely because women’s work keeps getting made invisible, and the fix is to make it legible. And shape it, which is the one that actually matters most.

AIF: So ironically, AI may be MOST useful to women...

LC: I think this all comes back to the hyper-concentration of power that has been born from “big tech” over the last 20 years. 

Right now a very small number of people are setting the direction of this technology. I sometimes think there are fewer than a hundred people genuinely steering it, moving fast and largely unchecked, while the rest of us are kept busy and fragmented.

Women are about 22% of the global AI workforce, and the pipeline that would put more of us in the rooms where these tools get designed is actually shrinking right now, at the exact moment the public conversation is telling women to step back. Two doors are closing simultaneously. If we are not in the room, there is no reason to expect the tools to reflect our real lives.

So the thing that has to change is that concentration of power. And the answer is emphatically not women stepping away from the table. That’s the worst possible move, and it’s dressed up right now as virtue. We have to do the opposite. We have to be in the conversations, we have to be building the products and not just consuming them, and we have to insist on being visible when we use them so the data stops confirming what the culture already wants to believe.

I think the best way to counter this concentration is to build the civic muscle for distributed power. Many people, moving in coordination, with a shared understanding of the problem and a shared plan. That requires exactly the human capacities that get coded as soft and dismissed: empathy, the ability to be with people you disagree with, the work of actually organizing other humans toward something.

AIF: What are some concrete examples of what needs to change?

The pipeline has to reopen, which means companies and investors have to stop letting women in early-career product and engineering roles quietly wash out. The workplace penalty on visible AI use has to be named and dismantled, because it’s just the credit gap and the mental-load gap wearing a new outfit. And we need governance and civic structures with real teeth, because we’ve now watched what happens when we outsource the ethics of this technology to a handful of billionaires and hope for the best.

The version of the future I’m working toward is one where the woman running the household isn’t the last person the technology considers but rather the person it was designed around, because she was in the room helping design it. That’s the whole bet. Care is infrastructure, and until we treat it as such, our society will continue to rupture for everyone but the top .0001%.

Ready to give AVA a try?

AVA is a behind-the-scenes parenting partner that handles family admin and coordination so parents can get time back. Download the app here and use the code AI4FAM for early access. There is a two-week free trial, and after that you will receive discounted access for 6 months. AVA is also hosting onboarding sessions for direct support with setup and to answer any questions—check out the upcoming dates here.

But maybe there is a different way to look at this dilemma right now…

As a trained journalist with decades of writing experience under my belt, I’m comfortable using AI precisely because I know my own personal voice. Much in the same way that I would digest and include research found via a Google search, AI is research and source material. In fact, while I find AI to be enormously useful, it can sometimes be a tedious companion to writing.

The point isn’t AI or no AI, but teaching our children to cultivate, appreciate, and employ their own personal voice. This should be something we encourage as part of their education. But at the same time, AI is not magic, it takes work to use effectively.

What is Personal Voice, and Why is it Valuable?

*Personal voice* isn’t about style but it’s about our individual identity. When teens develop a distinct personal voice, they’re establishing how they communicate their thoughts, values, and perspectives to the world, and that can’t be replicated by AI.

This foundation of authenticity becomes especially important when collaborating with AI writing tools. AI can sometimes homogenize expression if used without intention. So, for that and many other reasons, AI should never be a substitution for writing, but instead serve as a way to enhance, provide substance, and deepen the research underpinning written content.

The ability to write in a way that sounds not only uniquely human, but uniquely individual with all our quirks, insights, and emotional resonance baked in should be the goal. And for teens preparing to enter higher education or the workforce, this distinction can be invaluable.

From Tool to Partner

When teens develop their personal voice, they approach AI writing tools differently—not as magic answer machines but as detailed (and often mistaken, FYI) thought partners. When a teen learns to embrace their personal style and way of thinking, the questions and collaboration with AI becomes even more effective. Better questions are asked, and higher-quality responses are given back.

To that point, we don’t talk enough about how to extract high-quality AI-generated responses from tools such as Claude or ChatGPT. When teens prompt AI with thoughtful, specific, prompts, they also get much better responses. Teens who ask questions authentically and naturally also receive content back that reflects their thinking style. This leads to output that better aligns with a teen’s intentions, making the collaboration more productive.

Does it mean that AI will just learn to replicate our voice? Possibly, but even that is a step far enough ahead to even presume we have a defined style. It also presumes that we are singularly predictable. And, of course, we are not.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, teens with well-developed voices can selectively implement AI suggestions rather than accepting them wholesale. They can recognize which AI contributions enhance their message and content, and which dilute their authentic expression. They can’t t also stay alert to AI hallucinations or inaccuracies.

It’s almost assured that the jobs of the future will require expertise in AI collaboration, so this entire exercise is also a great start to preparing for jobs of the future.

Answering: Who Am I?

For parents and kids, the exercise of developing individual authenticity and personal voice is not only a critical skill, it can be an emotional oasis of rule-free thinking and behaving at a time when we are incredibly led and regimented.

And the best part is that the steps to get there are easy and free, here are a few suggestions:

1. Encourage Regular Free Writing

Free writing, which is writing without editing, rules, or judgment, for at least 10-15 minutes daily, is one of the most effective ways to develop personal voice.

Teens should give themselves the freedom and space to write about anything that interests them. Forget worries about grammar, structure, or even basic logic or coherence! Just write. And if putting pen to paper feels most natural, do it. If writing on a computer, or taking notes on a smart device seems more natural, then go for it. Over time, patterns will emerge in the content that reveal a natural tone and tenor that might even be surprising.

Even without the pressure new technology has put on all of us, the joys of free and unrestricted writing have been a dwindling art for some time.

2. Read and Then Read Some More (Duh!)

Suggesting that teens read more seems obvious. But we don’t often tell kids why they must read. And of course, the reason is in part to appreciate and recognize different styles and writer voices.

Discussing what a teen likes or dislikes about various writing styles can also help them identify elements they might incorporate into their own work. So another suggestion is for teens to practice writing in the style of an author they like and discussing this with family, friends or teachers.

As families, we know reading is, indeed, fundamental, but we don’t talk enough about books, authors, style and why and what we like.

3. Practice Reflection Through Journaling

Unlike free writing, journaling is something more personal and focused. Regular journaling creates space for teens to process thoughts and emotions through writing. While journal writing also doesn’t have external requirements, it can be more guided and personal, giving teens the additional opportunity of working out personal issues at the same time.

For journal writing, other kinds of prompts can help too. These can include:

• What made you feel strongly today and why?

• If you could change one thing about your day, what would it be?

• What’s something you believe that most people disagree with?

4. Give Constructive Feedback on Voice, Not Content

When reviewing your teen’s writing, or suggesting they do the same for one another, comment specifically on the very elements that are starting to shine through. For instance: “I notice you use many vivid metaphors that’s becoming part of your signature style” or “Your humor really comes through in how you describe challenges.” Parents, guardians and caregivers can help teens start to appreciate what their emerging voice looks like.

5. Introduce Voice-Focused Exercises

Once teens get going, and they are ready for more, the culmination of the above work is trying to flex these skills. Here are a few ways:

• Rewrite a paragraph in three different emotional tones

• Describe the same event from three different perspectives

• Translate formal writing into their natural speaking style

• Take a piece of AI-generated writing and rewrite it to make the piece more personal

6. Adults: Be Honest About Your Own Questions

As an adult, could you answer the same questions about what your personal voice looks like? We are going through the same challenges in navigating the use of AI and if we are being honest, most of us couldn’t answer this question.

So the steps above are just as useful to all of us as we navigate what it means to use AI to write.

Start by sharing your own writing with your kids, and discuss how you’ve developed your voice-over time. Point out specific elements that reflect your personality, values, or thinking style.

Practical Suggestions for Work With AI

Once everyone is a bit more comfortable understanding what an individual voice looks like, then it’s on to seeing what impact this new knowledge has on AI use. It starts off with some experimentation and play. For instance, try:

• Writing a first draft without AI, then using AI for suggestions, and comparing the results

• Giving AI a sample of their writing and asking it to analyze their voice characteristics

• Having teens edit AI-generated content to better match their voice and feel more personal

The goal isn’t for teens (or adults) to develop a static, unchanging voice. Rather, it’s to help build a foundation of authentic self-expression that can evolve as teens grow, while maintaining core elements that reflect one’s personality. It goes without saying that any relationship with AI writing tools should be one where technology amplifies one’s voice rather than replacing it.

As parents and educators, our role is to create spaces where teens can experiment, reflect, and gradually discover how they want to express themselves in the world. By valuing personal voice, we teach them that their unique perspective matters and that while AI can assist their writing process, their humanity remains irreplaceable.

Too often, these days, we force structure, rules and rigid thinking that hampers the type of off-piste, creativity that is the anecdote to technology. Let’s not lose this ability to run free intellectually and in one’s work.

In this collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence, the most powerful results emerge when teens bring their authentic voices to the table, not try to circumvent and veil its influence and contribution to one’s work.

The technology may provide suggestions, structure, and efficiency, but the soul of meaningful writing will always be the human voice behind the words.

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Now, I’m naturally quite cynical and immediately side-eyed the prospect of a senior SVP at a publishing house wanting to just “catch up” about my work. But, on the other hand, the email seemed very real. In fact, it wasn’t like any spam email I’ve ever received…

Email from *MacMillan*

Here is what dropped into my email last week…

See how “human like” the note is. The information about my book is accurate and there is even a nod to the second one I’m currently writing. It’s clear and articulate with a professional tone that makes no promises—just an expression of “interest” in my work.

On first glance, the details about Allison also seem very believable. The structure of the email is “clean” with a nice signature, a photo, and details about the publishing company that are(mostly) correct.

The Role AI Plays

What made the email feel authentic wasn’t just that it praised my work—it was that it reflected my actual aspirations. In “studying” humans AI systems understand what messages might be most emotionally compelling to us. This is one of the most important things to understand about AI…in aggregating and analyzing human output and behavior, a system in the wrong hands can coerce and manipulate quite easily.

An AI system can take publicly available information—in this case, my website, LinkedIn profile, Amazon book description, interviews, or media appearances—and weave those details into a highly personalized message. The result feels authentic because much of it is true.

It’s also important to note that AI is able here to easily employ tactics that humans use to coerce others. It’s not that a system is somehow more clever or manipulative, it’s that we can be and AI has learned from us. It can collate those things that work. For instance:

• It referenced a real person with a prestigious title.

• It contained accurate, specific compliments about my work.

• It expressed interest rather than urgency (making it feel less like a scam).

• It didn’t ask for money immediately, lowering suspicion.

• It invited an ongoing professional relationship rather than demanding action.

The Fraud Markers

Identifying an email like this as fraud isn’t too difficult if you know the markers. But first, no matter how compelling, believable, or personal an email is, if it’s not from someone you’ve heard from before, or would expect to hear from, you should take a moment to consider its veracity anyway. We are prone to optimism, but need to look at any outreach that may be “unrealistic” with suspicion from the get-go.

These include email addresses in the header that do not come from a company’s domain. That’s a big reason to stop, and if you have any questions, forward it to someone at the company via an official domain.

Then there are also little flaws such as an additional email copied that wasn’t mine (but it was my name); a few capitalization inconsistencies; and other details that are too familiar or sound “strange.”

Your instincts can be the guide. But the goal should be to first, just stop and do nothing.

Tips to Protect Your Family

The Email Address is the Giveaway

If the email is not coming from an actual company domain, don’t respond or click. Ever. And be 100% sure. So for instance, you might get an email from facebookcompany.com or another that on first glance “seems” legit. But don’t do a thing before checking first.

From there you can ignore, of course. But if you want to understand if there is even a chance that the note is real (or want to help root out fraud), you can Google to find the actual email of the person or a commonly-available email like legal@company.com. In this case the email would have come from macmillan.com.

Watch for the Follow Up

If you were shaky in your resolve after getting the first email, then a follow-up might wear you down. You might ask, “why would a fraudster send such a thoughtful follow-up?” Well, that’s the cleverness of this crime… and AI can make it easy.

It Takes a Village

The Publishing Fraud Slayers

It’s all of us who can work together to ensure that AI is used for good and not to benefit criminals—and it starts with spreading the word. In this case, it didn’t take long for me to find an intrepid group documenting and fighting this very fraud. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have been collecting examples of this very issue and publishing the results.

The emails are incredible when looked at en masse. The Writer Beware blog breaks down individual cases like mine in detail, while their main site tracks scams across the industry more broadly. Between the two, you’ll get both the specifics and the bigger picture.

Speak Up

Yes, it takes extra work to do your part to help root out this type of fraud. But this is the way we educate our communities and ensure a future where we are all much savvier and in control.

If you get an email like this, consider reporting it to any interested party, from the person targeted to lawyers and industry organizations as I have above. It’s exactly the kind of documentation that helps the rest of us spot the pattern faster. And, of course, it’s critical to help our kids understand what is happening as well.

Have questions? Let me know.

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

6 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…

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6 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.

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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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