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I’ve been watching a new show on Apple TV, Pluribus , and it has been doing that irritating thing good fiction does, following me around long after the episode ends. The premise is simple and unsettling: imagine a world where self-interest has been removed from human behaviour. Not discouraged or regulated, but eliminated altogether. What remains looks, at least on the surface, calm and cooperative. And yet the story’s energy comes from a growing sense of loss. The protagonis

Over the holidays, I found myself reading a new World Economic Forum report on “human-centric skills” titled New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage . It’s the sort of document I’ve learned to approach with both interest and caution: polished, data-heavy, earnest in tone, and widely circulated among people who shape policy and education. Buried in the report was a neat little matrix ranking skills by current importance and future demand. I almost skimmed past it. Th

I have never written a prediction before. As a teacher and learning designer, I usually concern myself with how people learn, not with forecasting the future. But over the past year, it has become increasingly hard to ignore what is happening around me. The fields I work in — education, writing, learning design — are being rewritten by artificial intelligence. Tasks that once took hours of human judgment now take minutes. What once required teams of professionals can often be

A question once sent you to a library. Now it takes you three seconds on ChatGPT. Knowledge that once felt hard-won now appears on command, and yet we’re no wiser for it. In a world where every fact is a click away, knowing has lost some of its meaning. For decades, we built our systems of education and work around the idea of useful knowledge: information that could be applied, measured, and monetized. It made sense in the industrial world. Useful knowledge built bridges, wr

In 2004, an uncle I deeply admired handed me a thin novel without much explanation, just a small smile, and said, “Try this.” Until then, most of my reading was dutiful: education, leadership, learning design, the things I believed would make me better at my work. He seemed to sense that my curiosity was tugging at the edges of that narrow path. So he gave me Waiting for the Barbarians , as if placing a compass in my hand before I even knew I was lost. What struck me wasn’t t

A new paper in Nature Communications —from researchers at the University of Cambridge—has been on my mind this week. It analyses MRI data from 4,216 people aged 5 to 91 and looks at 12 measures of brain network organisation. These measures have intimidating names—small-worldness, modularity, global efficiency, betweenness centrality—but each is simply a lens on how the brain is wired: how different regions communicate, how tightly they cluster, and how swiftly information flo

A 2024 paper from the University of Pennsylvania came with an unambiguous title: “Generative AI Can Harm Learning.” In this study of high-school students, those who used a generative-AI assistant during practice scored dramatically better in the short term — 48 to 127 percent higher than peers who worked unaided. But when tested later, their scores dropped 17 percent below those of students who hadn’t used AI at all. The explanation was simple: the tool had become a cognitive

For years, “skilling” has been sold as the answer to rural youth unemployment. But in practice, much of this training has prepared young people for low-level, dead-end jobs — security guards, delivery boys, bottom-of-the-pyramid tech — that offer poverty wages and little dignity. Our systems funnel rural youth into the narrowest possible pathways, with the least possibility for growth. Most “skilling” programs treat young people as replaceable units of labour, not as learners

We live in an age when the past is being rewritten every day — sometimes by new discoveries, sometimes by old ideologies. Political leaders invoke “golden ages.” Social media churns out myths dressed as facts. The less we understand history, the easier it becomes to manipulate us with half-truths about the present. In school, I found history boring — a march of dates, kings, and battles that felt remote and meaningless. I couldn’t have imagined that, years later, it would bec

When Amusing Ourselves to Death  was published in 1985, its author, Neil Postman, could not have imagined a world of TikTok reels, YouTube shorts, and infinite scrolls. Yet his warning about the trivialization of public discourse feels eerily prescient. It’s one of those rare works that doesn’t age — the world simply grows into it. The book opens with the image of four American cities, each symbolizing the “spirit of a culture.” Once, Boston represented a world of political a

According to Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute, China now leads in 57 out of 64 of the world’s most critical technologies. Let’s say you take that with a bagful of salt. Even then, it’s a staggering achievement for a country that, in 1950, was desperately poor, agrarian, and largely cut off from the modern world. A big part of the story lies in how China treated education: not as a private ladder for individual mobility, but as public infrastructure for national progress

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index  has once again crowned Switzerland the most innovative country in the world. China ranks tenth. At first glance, this sounds plausible — a small, wealthy, research-driven country outperforming a vast developing one. But the details tell a slightly different story. According to WIPO, the outputs  of innovation include just two things: knowledge and technology , and creative outputs . In knowledge an

I came across an interview recently, with psychologist Paul Bloom, titled “What’s Wrong with Having an AI Friend?”  The question sounds almost mischievous. After all, if an AI can listen patiently, respond with care, and be available at all hours, why not call it a friend? Friendship is more than companionship. It rests on reciprocity, on vulnerability, on the unpredictability of two separate lives bumping against each other. A real friend is fun to be with; but they also can

A recent article in Nautilus asked a question that sounds improbable but is scientifically serious: Could the Sun’s orbit shape evolution?  It describes research suggesting that as our solar system moves through the Milky Way, the varying intensity of cosmic rays might influence mutation rates on Earth, subtly shaping the course of life itself. To even imagine such a link requires a mind that is fluent in both astrophysics and evolutionary biology — two fields that, in most

Most of us grow up believing that mathematics belongs to prodigies — children who solve puzzles in seconds, multiply large numbers in their heads, or finish the syllabus before anyone else. The rest of us, we are told, simply don’t have the talent. We learn early that you are either “a math person” or not, as if mathematical ability is something fixed at birth. But the lives of some of the most remarkable mathematicians of our time tell a different story. Maryam Mirzakhani, t

If you listen to the conversations around corporate learning today, they sound like a race. Microlearning, AI copilots, bite-sized...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go  is one of the most unsettling novels I’ve read. It isn’t dramatic or loud, but the quiet way it unfolds...

On October 1, the world lost Jane Goodall. She died at the age of 91 while on a speaking tour in California. The news hit me harder than...

In my previous post, I wrote about misconceptions in science and mentioned a film, A Private Universe . In that film, Harvard graduates...

All of us have seen science classrooms with high-achieving students who can ace tests, rattle off definitions, and solve problems neatly....