I've always been deeply uncomfortable with the casual observation that "schools are prisons," even if there are undoubtedly schools that do almost everything in their power to circumscribe the freedom and mobility of their students. This assertion – "schools are prisons" – flattens the many important
The 74 published an op-ed this week, penned by an AI industry consultant, invoking Sputnik and claiming that "AI education is the new space race." I'm going to set aside its problematic call for "AI literacy" for another day; and although it's
The dire wolf is not back. The New Yorker tried to convince us otherwise this week, with an article that surely makes one wonder what happened to its famed fact-checking department. Extinct, I guess, much like the Canis dirus which lived in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago.
In 2016 Microsoft made headlines when it debuted Tay, a chatbot modeled to speak like a teenage girl, which rather dramatically turned into a "Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours," as The Telegraph put it. The Twitter bot was designed to “learn” from the other Twitter users who
It's been another very dark week, hasn't it. Not even Cory Booker's act of elocutionary endurance could shake me out of the gloom. It's a personal gloom, no doubt – this week marked the five year anniversary of the last time I saw
According to some of the surveys that its evangelists are prone to cite, AI is now everywhere in education – or if not now, then soon, widely and excitedly adopted by the majority of teachers and students. To that, I utter the words of Marcia Brady, "Sure Jan." When
If you don't mind, I'd like to return to that other big story that appeared recently in The Atlantic. No, no, not the one where editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg describes how he was added to the Trump Administration's Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb
The Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will speak at the ASU+GSV Summit next month. The conference makes no mention in its blurb promoting the Secretary's appearance of what happened last week: President Trump's executive order to dismantle her department. There's no mention of
The Gates Foundation, we learned this week, is backing away from its environmental efforts, slashing staff and funding for projects that sought in part to address global climate change. Bill Gates is "retooling his empire for the Trump era," as The New York Times put it. No mention
I’d said in my last email that I didn’t plan on sending you anything today. I ran the NYC Half yesterday and presumed that I’d be too anxious on Saturday and too tired on Sunday to write anything. Think of this as either a bonus email or
On Saturday night, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and prominent pro-Palestine campus activist still living in campus housing with his 8-month-pregnant wife, a US citizen. Initially, Khalil, who was born in Syria, was told his student visa was being revoked; when agents were told he
There's an argument I make in Teaching Machines that I'd like to repeat here – a setup to this first of many essays in which I work through some ideas about AI, agents, and agency: In 1971 the psychologist B. F. Skinner published his most controversial book,
"It's Bad." It's very very bad. And each week, when I gather up the education and AI-related news here, I keep wishing I could say we've reached the peak of this mountain of horrors and that things will get easier, things will
There were numerous news items last week about surveillance and algorithmic decision-making in the workplace. These kinds of stories aren’t new, of course. But as Elon Musk has infiltrated the White House, instructing his minions to eliminate as much of the federal workforce as possible; and as the Trump
“If you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart?” The quotation above, from Dan Davies's new book The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – And How the World Lost Its Mind, has been playing on repeat in my head since I read it this
On Friday morning, a few hours after I sent you the last newsletter, we picked Poppy up from the veterinary hospital. The nurse presented us with the little tennis ball Poppy had picked up in the park and tried to squirrel home unseen, swallowing it, we think, just as we
The political-technological crisis is only deepening in the United States, and I hardly know where to begin today's email to you, other than to say that I hope you're okay. And if you're not, do feel free to hit "reply" – I can&
Among the myriad negative reactions to the recent release of the Chinese AI model DeepSeek, one of the most common involved what was an obvious “gotcha” query: questioning the chatbot about the 1989 student protests Tiananmen Square, and noting that – tut tut – the results were so clearly censored. Rarely was
Digital technology and algorithmic recommendations have, as the story goes, segmented society into a million little data-driven designations, where we all watch and listen to different content – a radical individualization that has shattered any shared consensus about culture or politics, about reality. Even the classroom, particularly thanks to "personalized
Some time in the coming months, tickets will go on sale for the fall production of Waiting for Godot on Broadway — a new production starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves — and I swear to you right now, I am already ready to hit the “buy” button. I first read Samuel
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. – Margaret Atwood, The
“DeepSeek R1,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared last week, “is AI’s Sputnik moment.” And as Sputnik – in its original 1957 instantiation and in its subsequent and repeated invocations – has always shaped education policy, particularly in regard to ed-tech, I thought I’d better say something. But one of the
"AI Will Empower Humanity," says Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist, OpenAI funder, co-founder of Linkedin, and member (along with Peter Thiel, David O. Sacks, and Elon Musk) of the "PayPal Mafia." (Related, from The Guardian's Chris McGreal: "How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’
Ideally, on Monday mornings, I've got an essay for you. (Schedule of events here at Second Breakfast: Monday’s newsletter: essay, most of it for paid subscribers; Friday’s: the week’s news, yay! the news!, for everyone.) Although the word “essay” comes from the French essayer (to