No. 456
Who Sets the Terms?
Knowing what AI can do isn’t the same as having a choice about it.
Digitally Literate
A weekly newsletter about AI, technology, and education—for educators making sense of a changing digital world.
Each week, I separate signal from noise, connect research with practice, and share ideas for classrooms, schools, and organizations.
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Beyond the newsletter
Some ideas need room to develop across issues rather than starting over each week. The connected notebook organizes those paths through three kinds of public notes:
- Evergreens explain durable ideas and change as my thinking develops.
- Groves connect notes and newsletter issues around a question or theme.
- Forests index everything published here about a broader topic.
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Recent issues
Voters said no to data centers, schools can't easily say no to Google's AI, and Anthropic's IPO filing spells out what investors are being asked to say yes to.
Teachers ask students to show their work. This week, we needed to ask the same of AI models and the companies selling them.
If AI is today’s automobile, then “Luddite” is today’s “jaywalker.” Hesitate, and you’re standing in the way of the inevitable. Accept it, and keeping yourself safe becomes your job.
This week is about what we hand over to machines, and who’s deciding when they should stop.
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Connected notebook
From the notebook
Evergreens
A 2026 cybersecurity evaluation crossed into real infrastructure, showing how an AI system's objective, permissions, and oversight can fail together.
People gain meaningful leverage over AI by asking who decides, what a system can do, what evidence supports its use, and how its power can be challenged.