👋 friends!
We are officially well into May and Denver celebrated by closing schools for a snow day yesterday. 😩
And so we made the most of it with Star Wars movies (in honor of May the 4th), hot chocolate, and snow forts. Today we’re back to 70 degrees and sunny. Go figure.
Another busy week in AI - Anthropic and OpenAI seem to be making big announcements every other day. Their pace is insane.
In today’s note:
Parenting in the AI era: AI Fog and congress making moves on AI Companions
Connection spark: the best gift of all for Teacher Appreciation Week
Hands-on with AI: an interactive career explorer
The whoa zone: a surprising partnership and a surprising monk
🤿 Let’s dive in…
Parenting in the AI Era
“AI Fog” is throwing a wrench into future planning
This week Harvard Business Review put a name to something that I’ve been feeling for the past year - the mind-spinning uncertainty of how AI will impact our longterm livelihood. The author calls it AI Fog.
For our whole lives, we’ve been able to invest in decisions that we believe will pay off for us in the longterm - a four year college degree in a specific major, a big mortgage on a house, going to med school even though it means significant debt.
Now, the AI fog makes it impossible to know whether these investments will pay off over time. We can no longer plan 20-30 years out.
So what the heck do we do?! Well, they argue that the right approach in this type of fog is to optimize for optionality.
Stay agile when it comes to career path - reskill often, prioritize adaptability over professional identity (relatedly: this article - which makes a strong argument for a liberal arts education - is worth reading)
“Stage-gate” big investments where possible as opposed to putting massive amounts of money down at once (e.g. phased home renovations, rental-based vs big buy-ins for elder care, etc.)
Refocus on opportunities as they come up - be willing to take new directions rather than rigidly following a predetermined path
My thoughts: yikes, this feels uncomfortable. But optionality is very teachable and starting now can help to give our kids a head start.
Source: ChatGPT image creator
Momentum builds in congress to ban AI companions for minors
Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22 to 0 to advance the GUARD Act (Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue). It now goes to the Senate floor for debate. It’s a bill that would:
Ban AI companion chatbots for anyone under 18
Mandate age verification
Require AI systems to disclose their non-human status and lack of professional credentials to all users
Make it a federal crime to knowingly let a chatbot engage minors in sexually explicit content or coerce them toward self-harm or suicide
Important to note that it would not ban all AI chatbots, but rather those that are “designed to simulate an interpersonal or emotional interaction, friendship, or therapeutic communication with the user.”
My thoughts: I think this is a good thing. But the devil is also in the details… I have no idea how they will appropriately distinguish chatbots vs “companions”, (e.g. we all know that ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can also simulate friendship and emotional support). There are also a lot of questions around how they will accurately age gate and protect privacy, so the bill will likely have some changes before being fully passed.
Regardless of any laws, we still need to be having the conversations with our kids about how AI is not our friend - it simulates empathy and is sycophantic in order to keep us engaged. Don’t fall for it. The friendships we want and need are the real (and messy and hard) ones.
Image source: ChatGPT
CONNECTION SPARK
The best gift of all for Teacher Appreciation Week
It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and as a room parent for Leo's kindergarten class I've spent the past few days collecting Venmo donations, coloring sheets, and trinkets. Super kind, lovely, and I’m sure will be appreciated.
But I realized that in the swirl of all of this (and all the end-of-school-year insanity), I’ve been treating this as something else to just check off the list. And I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t.
Teachers say that the most appreciated gift of all is a sincere note of thanks. These are the notes that they save. On hard days they pull them out, reread them, and remember that they're darn good at what they do.. ❤️
If you have a teacher this year who has gone above and beyond, take five minutes today and write to them / email them and let them know. A specific moment, a specific impact, a specific kid. It costs nothing and will mean everything.
Image source: Gemini
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HANDS-ON WITH AI
Visualizing career possibilities
Speaking of optionality, a fun and interesting exercise to try - especially with older kids as they start to think and dream about what they want to be wihen they grow up - is to use the interactive charts and graphs feature in Claude to visually show career possibilities based on their skills, interests, personality, etc.
Just go to Claude and type a version of the prompt below. Sit with your child while they fill in the inputs - their answers might surprise you. Then, save the prompt and do it again in a year from now and see what’s changed!
Build me an interactive career exploration flowchart for [name], [age]. Here's what they're like: Skills they're naturally good at: [X, Y, Z], Interests and hobbies: [X, Y, Z], Subjects they like in school: [X, Y, Z], Their personality in 3 words: [XXX].
Branch this out into 15 to 20 possible career paths. Include a mix of:
- 5 obvious careers that match these skills and interests - 5 less obvious careers that connect in surprising ways - 5 careers that probably didn't exist 10 years ago - 2 or 3 careers that may not exist yet but plausibly will in 15 years given AI and other shifts
For every career node, when I tap it, show me:
- What a typical day actually looks like (specific, not generic) - The school subjects, hobbies, or activities they could lean into now to start exploring it - One question [name] could ask a real person in that field - One AI-resilient skill that would matter most in this career. Make it visual and clickable. Use plain language Archer can understand. Avoid jargon.
FWIW, I was delightfully surprised when I tested this prompt out… (it ended up building a full artifact rather than an inline chart, but cool and instant)!
Source: screenshot of Claude output
THE WHOA ZONE
A surprising partnership
For those of us using Claude, the usage caps have been frustrating lately. Anthropic has been struggling to secure enough compute to keep up with the massive surge in demand over the past few months.
But surprisingly, SpaceXAI (aka Elon Musk) has come to their rescue by allowing them to lease all of Colossus 1, a 300+ MW Memphis supercluster with more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, coming online within the month.
Well, that should help!
This is interesting given the OpenAI v Musk lawsuit in progress - clearly he is taking a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach.
Here come the robot monks
Gabi, a robot, is the newest ordained monk at a Buddhist temple in Seoul. Apparently it’s an effort to promote the “modern relevance” of Buddhism. 🤔
And that’s a wrap! If you've found this newsletter helpful, please forward it along to any friends and fellow parents who might also benefit - we’re all in this crazy together.
And, if you have any thoughts, feedback, or requests, please reply or drop a comment - I’d love to hear from you.
Glow on,
Michaela
Read some other recent Glow Notes below:
