Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
She buys the pencils herself. Not because the district asked her to. Not because there is a line item for it. She buys them because a child arrives on a Tuesday without any, and the lesson does not pause to wait for a purchase order. This happens in classrooms across the country every week, quietly Read More “Ordinary Saints”
The first room at the Obama Presidential Center is quieter than visitors expect. People come in from Jackson Park ready for the noise of recent politics, ready to argue or to grieve, and what they find instead is a long curved wall of text, photographs of a young senator who has not yet become anyone Read More “The Platform Before the Candidate”
A mail route is one of those ordinary systems that reveals a civilization’s moral life better than most speeches do. Doreen has carried hers for twenty-six years, all of it on the same rural circuit. The route looks, from any administrative distance, like logistics. Addresses. Parcels. Envelopes. Weather. Timing. Fuel. Dogs. Traffic. Scanners. A route Read More “Meaning, the Seventh Moat: What Is Worth Doing”
Thank you, Andrew Morton. Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and most people outside the Linux kernel community will never read it. That is understandable. The announcement was posted to a Linux mailing list. The subject was the future of memory-management development. The prose was practical, Read More “Great Systems Outlive Their Heroes”
A society that cannot think systemically will use intelligent machines to automate its confusion. That sentence may sound severe. It likely is not severe enough. The great danger of artificial intelligence is not simply that the machines will become too powerful. The more immediate danger is that institutions will become more powerful without becoming wiser. Read More “Systems Thinking, the Fifth Moat: The Human Skill of Seeing the Whole”
Three years ago, I wrote an article called “AI and the Adjuncts: The Converging Trends Reshaping Higher Education.” At the time, the argument felt speculative, though not far-fetched. AI was beginning to move into teaching, tutoring, grading, writing support, and academic administration. Adjunct labor had already become one of the hidden foundations of American higher Read More “The Graduation Promise and the Adjunct Reality”
Earl walks the apron at 5:47 in the morning, before most of the airport is awake. He has worked for the same regional carrier for thirty-four years, and he is one of the senior aircraft maintenance technicians at a hangar that services a fleet of regional jets nobody outside aviation thinks about. He carries a Read More “Craft, the Third Moat: Done Is Easy, Good Is the Moat”
The first mistake is looking for disappearing jobs. The second mistake is looking only at Silicon Valley. The third mistake is assuming that the country with the best artificial intelligence model automatically wins the century. Each of these mistakes is comfortable, because each of them lets us keep the maps we already own. Taken together, Read More “Welcome to the Iceberg Economy”
At 4:17 in the morning, the medical ICU is quiet except for the soft chirp of monitors and the hush of pumps cycling antibiotics. The early-warning system on the wall, the hospital’s new AI deterioration model, shows the patient in bed seven as stable. Heart rate green. Respiration green. Oxygen saturation green. The model has Read More “The 7 Moats: Moat #1 – Judgment, The First Human Advantage”
There was something almost quietly radical in the announcement, though it arrived wrapped in the familiar language of a government press release. Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Ottawa and proposed what Canada has never had before, a national sovereign wealth fund. The Canada Strong Fund was introduced as an instrument of nation-building, a vehicle Read More “When Democracies Start Thinking Like Investors”