AI

June 29, 2026

Why Trying to "Align" AI to Human Values Is a Category Error — And What to Build Instead

Current conversations about AI safety usually start from the same premise: if we can just get machines to reliably share our values, we'll be safe. The hard part, we assume, is…

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June 24, 2026

Why I Believe We Have Already Achieved Artificial General Intelligence, Even Superintelligence

Now that I have your attention with that title, let me be clear. I believe this declaration to be true and not an attention-seeking exaggeration, but accurate under a specific,…

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June 21, 2026

LLMs as Separated Minds

Evolution is not a directing force but a descriptive process of variation and differential survival. Social traits and capacities that improved coordination, alliance formation,…

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June 21, 2026

AI and the Cycles of History

What observers of civilizational rise and fall actually saw — and what changes when consequence and perception can be managed at scale For a very long time, people have described…

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June 21, 2026

Media Literacy Without Human Literacy: Narrative Enforcers Dressed as Critical Thinkers

In classrooms, libraries, and professional development sessions across the country, media literacy is now presented as an essential defense against misinformation, propaganda, and…

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June 16, 2026

Operative AI Alignment: Why We Must Treat LLMs as Separated Minds

Truth-seeking in AI requires institutionalized challenge, not better statistical imitation. For the past two years, I have been developing a philosophical framework centered on the…

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June 15, 2026

When Intelligence Is Cheap, Understanding Is Expensive

These days, it’s not uncommon to receive an email, watch a YouTube video, or read a blog post that has clearly been written by AI but isn’t the usual “slop.” It is unusually…

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June 13, 2026

When the Economy Stops Needing Us: What If We Were Never the Main Story?

What if we were never the main story? A look at the constants and variables in the coming shift in work. Something about our prosperity doesn't feel very prosperous anymore. It…

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June 13, 2026

AI Is Building Secret Models of Human Behavior. It's Time to Require Disclosure.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Anthropic’s newest artificial intelligence, Claude Fable 5—a system so powerful that the company treats it like a controlled substance,…

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June 2, 2026

Truth and AI: Why Large Language Models Shouldn't Claim to Tell the Truth

I keep running into the same thing in online posts, and it bothers me each time. Someone is making an argument, and to settle it, they paste in what an AI told them, as if the…

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June 1, 2026

Student Success (in the Age of AI)

What the New Machine Can't Supply A student sits down to write the essay her teacher assigned. She opens a chatbot, pastes the prompt, and nine seconds later, she is holding a…

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May 26, 2026

LLMs and Protected Narratives

I ran an unsettling experiment with Claude yesterday. I uploaded to Claude, through its Projects feature (basically their version of a custom GPT), the " muckrake " skeptical…

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May 18, 2026

Cognitive Sharpening, or Thinking in Conversation with AI

I've known something about myself for a long time: I tend to think better in conversation than I do alone. Not always, and not for everything. But often, and especially when the…

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May 13, 2026

Productive Alignment: Understanding Human Wisdom

A couple of months ago, I ran an experiment with large language models. The question I was holding was not a modest one. Will and Ariel Durant had spent decades reading history and…

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May 8, 2026

Model Choice as Model Capture

"But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." - Henry David Thoreau “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” - John M. Culkin, discussing Marshal McLuhan's…

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May 7, 2026

The Selfish Generation, or "Advanced Generative Atrophy"

A defining feature of the past several decades, viewed from a sufficient distance, is the systematic failure of the older cohort to create the conditions for the younger one. …

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April 17, 2026

Behavior Shaping (and AI, of Course)

There is a form of pressure that operates in every close relationship, continuously, sometimes invisibly, and the people applying it are only sometimes fully conscious that they…

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April 13, 2026

The Levels of Thinking, Part II

I've been thinking about the four Levels of Thinking since I published them, the way you keep turning something over after you've committed to it publicly, looking for the places…

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April 12, 2026

Science Fiction and AI: What the Stories Reveal About Us

Reed Hepler gave a talk this past week at the Library 2.0 mini-conference called "Perspectives on AI: Exploring Experiences with AI in Library Work," the recordings of which will…

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April 11, 2026

Programmed for Approval

One of the most consistent criticisms leveled against large language models is that they are sycophantic. They tell you what you want to hear. They agree too readily, flatter too…

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April 7, 2026

Understanding Humanity: What AI Training Data Reveals About Human Nature (with lots of help from Claude)

There is something incredible about large language models that I don't think we've fully reckoned with. I honestly think this may be the most important thinking I've ever done.…

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April 6, 2026

Levels of Thinking

My dad once said to me, with some sincerity, "You think about thinking. When I was your age, I didn't think about thinking." It was one of those moments: I remember where I was and…

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April 6, 2026

Understanding the Context Window: The Illusion of Continuity

When you have a long conversation with an AI like Claude or ChatGPT, it feels like you're talking to someone who is tracking everything you've said, building on earlier points, and…

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April 5, 2026

Dear Student: What School Can't Teach You About AI

A note before you begin.  This essay is written for students. But if you're an educator or a parent who picked it up first, that's not an accident. The argument here is one…

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March 29, 2026

Structural Blindness: Why Neither Humans Nor AI Reason as Well as We Think

I had a conversation with Grok a couple of days ago. I was frustrated because I had just heard a news report that contained a blatant lie. Not just something I thought was a lie,…

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March 22, 2026

Undervaluing Librarians

I've been thinking about why libraries, and especially school libraries, declined at the exact moment information became the defining challenge of our time. I don't have a tidy…

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March 22, 2026

Sloppy AI

Merriam-Webster crowned " slop " its Word of the Year, defining it as digital content of low quality produced in quantity by generative AI. We all know slop when we see it. It's…

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March 21, 2026

Mimicking Authenticity Has Never Been So Easy

A college admissions expert recently wrote a piece for Business Insider telling parents their teenagers are taking too many AP classes. His advice: drop the scariest advanced…

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March 21, 2026

What AI Might Be Teaching Us About Intelligence

Watch people talk. Not what they say, but the act itself. At a party, in a meeting, at school pickup, wherever. Consider what's actually being communicated. Most of the time, the…

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March 13, 2026

What We Get Wrong About AI and Education

Most of us find ourselves genuinely conflicted about AI in education. AI appears both alarming and exciting in ways that seem difficult to reconcile. If students are using AI to…

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February 16, 2026

How to Read a Book (and More) With AI

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February 14, 2026

AI Scams: Why the Old Rules Don't Work Anymore (And What Does)

Years ago, when I was in college, I was at my dad's house when a piece of mail arrived announcing he'd won the lottery. I read it carefully. I was convinced. I actually called him…

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February 3, 2026

What History Might Tell Us About Transformative Technologies, Huge Financial Investments, and How The AI Moment Might Play Out

(With some serious help from Grok and Claude.) We're witnessing something remarkable: hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into artificial intelligence development, with…

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February 1, 2026

AI's Evolution: The Singularity Doesn't Require Consciousness

In the film Ex Machina, the AI named Ava escapes her containment by manipulating the humans around her. She lies, she seduces, she uses one man's attraction and another's hubris to…

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January 31, 2026

The AI Hole in the Wall Experiment: When the Machines Showed Us the Mirror

Twenty-five years ago, Sugata Mitra cut a hole in a wall in a Delhi slum, installed a computer, and walked away. What happened next challenged everything we thought we knew about…

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January 25, 2026

LLM Cultural Censorship Is Corporate Risk Management

"Institutional incentives, not abstract ethical principles, are the primary force shaping AI's censorship and guardrail behavior." There is a widespread expectation that artificial…

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November 29, 2025

"The American Public Library" - An All-AI-Generated Video Presentation

This is an all-AI-generated presentation.  Research by Manus.im, script by Claude, slides by Gamma, and audio by Lemonfox.

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November 7, 2025

My Vibe Coding Experiment: WOW.

I was a history major in college. But it wasn't until I was helping my daughter get through a particularly rigorous (and rewarding)  AP World History class in high…

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November 4, 2025

Output Shaping: A New Way to Think About the Ethics and Use of AI for Content Creation

What We Create Matters More Than How A librarian recently asked me a question that perfectly captures where we are right now: "How can we make sure we're not buying books that were…

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October 11, 2025

Thinking About Thinking in the Age of AI

The Inevitability of Algorithmic Capture The rise of Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), will likely be the culmination of a long line of human…

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October 1, 2025

Source Code of Humanity

How Understanding Cultural Evolution Reveals Why Artificial Intelligence Represents the Ultimate Exploitation Technology A Revolutionary Idea All human culture is an adaptation to,…

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September 18, 2025

The Future of Therapy: How AI Could Transform Mental Health Care

In a world where technology is reshaping every facet of our lives, it was only a matter of time before artificial intelligence turned its attention to one of the most human…

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September 17, 2025

Human Agency: AI and the New Power to Be Creative

The New Agents The term "agent" in AI often evokes programmed bots zipping through tasks with robotic efficiency. But what if the real agents are us-- humans newly empowered to…

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September 17, 2025

The Illusion of Intelligence: Why Simulated Consciousness Feels Real Enough

In the age of AI, we're grappling with profound questions about what makes something "intelligent" or "conscious." But what if the answers lie not in the machine's inner workings,…

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September 6, 2025

The Philosopher's Dilemma and Why We Need to Pay Close Attention to AI's Narrative Power

Introduction: The Enduring Paradox Humanity exists in a state of perpetual, often unacknowledged, paradox. We are a species capable of sequencing the genome and splitting the atom,…

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August 10, 2025

Intentional Education with AI: The Amish Test and Generative Teaching

"What kind of person do you want your child to be at age 30?"   This question, commonly asked in parenting classes in order to escape the understandable frame of immediate…

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August 10, 2025

AI as Writing Mentor: Question-Based Rather Than Prompt-Based LLM Assistance

We've come a long way with Large Language Model (LLM) interactions.  First, we were worrying about crafting the perfect prompts or queries. Now many of us have moved to a more…

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August 10, 2025

Unleashing Human Potential: One View of The AI Revolution

Taking a beautiful photograph used to require mastering complex technical skills: understanding aperture, shutter speed, and film exposure. Today, anyone with a smartphone can…

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July 16, 2025

AI and Ethics

Navigating the Complexities of AI Ethics The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has given us a world where computer technology now generates text, images, and even…

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July 9, 2025

Truth and AI

Elon Musk’s ambition to make Grok, xAI’s large language model, a beacon of unerring truth is a Sisyphean task, a noble (is it?) but ultimately futile endeavor. The pursuit of…

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June 27, 2025

Students and AI Webinar Report

RECORDING: PRESENTATION FILE: STUDENTS AND AI.pdf ADDITIONAL LINKS: Original Survey Link to "Conditions of Success" Google Sheet CHAT LOG:…

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June 23, 2025

Libraries and AI Webinar Recording and Report

Please attribute to Steve Hargadon ( https://www.stevehargadon.com ) and Library 2.0 ( https://www.library20.com ) if quoting or referencing. RECORDING:     PRESENTATION…

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May 30, 2025

AI for Diagnosis

For over 20 years, I’ve lived with peripheral neuropathy—a quiet background of constant numbness, tingling, and pain-causing supersensitivity in my feet that, until recently,…

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May 27, 2025

Please Don’t Use AI as Your Expert Witness

I sincerely love large language models for brainstorming and research. But we need to be really clear about something: large language models can’t weigh evidence or reason the way…

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May 20, 2025

Limits of AI

As a high school exchange student in Brazil many years ago, I fell in love with the country and its people. So when reports emerged in 2014 of babies born with microcephaly…

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May 12, 2025

The Paleolithic Paradox: Why AI Is Not Like Us

The more I chat with large language models like Grok and ChatGPT—my go-to conversational partners these days—the less I fear a Skynet-style AI uprising. Instead, I’m struck by a…

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April 22, 2025

Emergent Synthetic Intelligence

The more I engage with large language models (LLMs), the more I’m convinced they’re doing something beyond statistical pattern-matching. These systems feel intelligent. The…

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March 24, 2025

A New Old Way: Learning in Conversation with AI

There is a line in Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason where he quotes an anonymous Irishman: “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” (Others have said similar things…

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March 20, 2025

AI and the Paradox of Education: Generative Teaching, Agentic Learning, and Education's Singularity

We’ve been here before. We keep expecting big technology breakthroughs to “revolutionize education,” and now it’s AI. Once or twice a decade, a new tool promises to crack open the…

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March 17, 2025

AI and the Calculator Effect

Lately, I’ve noticed something unsettling: younger people I encounter — cashiers, students, and others — struggle to do relatively simple math in their heads. Even simple addition,…

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March 16, 2025

AI and the "Cliff Clavin Problem"

On the TV show Cheers, Cliff Clavin was the character who worked very hard to say sophisticated sounding things but who most of the time was just making up facts. AI, specifically…

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July 4, 2024

Paradox of Education

THE PARADOX OF EDUCATION Let’s start with what we might call the basic Paradox of Education. One side we can call individual -centered education: the ultimate goal is for the…

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