Category: writing

  • Can AI Make Us More Human?

    And will we have a choice? I like working with ChatGPT as a thought partner. I don’t think of it as a coach, a therapist or an assistant, because I will never fully trust that it has the human qualities or expertise that I need from the people who fill those roles in my life. But…

  • How Meditation Is Like Looking at The Sun

    I was incredibly fortunate to experience the 2024 solar eclipse in optimal conditions. It was a warm spring day. The sky was clear. Montreal, the city I live in, was devoted to making this a communal experience, providing hundreds of thousands of eclipse glasses for free. Most of the schools were closed so that people…

  • Harnessing The Unhappiness of Future Generations

    Whether AI will support the happiness, or the misery, of future generations is up to us I didn’t need a world happiness report to tell me that young adults in North America are suffering alarming levels of unhappiness. I witnessed this first hand last week, when I went to see Dune with a young family member…

  • Never mind the mindfulness

    5 key differences between awareness meditation and mindfulness meditation I remember my first experience of awareness meditation like I remember the feeling of riding a bike without training wheels. Meditation master, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, used a Tibetan singing bowl for two very short guided meditations. In the first, the instruction was simple and clear: “Listen…

  • Compassion over empathy in the era of AI

    A while back, I had some very difficult news to convey to someone I cared about. Out of respect for privacy, I’m not going to go into details, but I knew this was news that was going to have a serious impact. I also knew the way that I delivered it might shape this person’s…

  • The A, B, C and D of A.I.

    I wrote The A.I. Primer for the Algorithm and Data Literacy Project by Digital Moment (where you can download it in English or French.) It’s intended as a very low floor to the learning trajectory of AI literacy, and is suitable for teens, teachers, and any adults who might feel intimidated by the idea of learning…

  • AI Literacy: Reframing Attitudes

    This is a thought piece I wrote for a panel on Algorithm Literacy that I was invited to moderate at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week in September. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to Paris, but still worth thinking about for 2024, so sharing it here… Recently, out of curiosity, I asked Chat GPT 3…

  • We all deserve to know more about AI

    Since you bought your first smartphone, an entire generation of kids has been born that will never know a world not mediated by AI algorithms. Why is this important? For one thing AI and kids is serious business. According to a Pew research report released in 2019, YouTube videos targeted at and featuring children were…

  • The Write Mood

    In his book Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, British evolutionary psychologist Dylan Evans argues that one of the things that distinguishes us from animals is that we are the only species that has invented artificial technologies to alter our moods. The first of these was language. “Our ancestors probably consoled each other with hugs and…

  • On The Difference between Writer’s block and Blogger’s block

    I wrote this a few years back when I was a more prolific blogger.  As I head into the last stretch of a book manuscript, I’m suffering from a bit of both writer’s and blogger’s block. Hoping this re-post will dislodge some cognitive sludge.  Lately I’ve been experiencing a bout of blogger’s block. I’m long…