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DL 410

Published: November 2, 2025 • 📧 Newsletter

The Chaos Engine

Every era builds its own engine of progress, and every engine, eventually, shakes itself apart.

Last week, we examined the implementation fantasy: the belief that complex systems will behave as planned. This week, we’re witnessing what happens when they don’t.

From a nationwide cloud failure that brought classrooms to a halt, to AI models deciding what students can read or watch on the evening news, authority itself is fragmenting. Human expertise is being replaced by automated proxies. Fast, confident, and profoundly fallible.

What emerges is an unsettling pattern: a chaos engine powered by our collective faith in systems we no longer control.

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🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 Recent Work

This week I published the following:

💻 AI’s Authority Deficit: The Outsourced Decision

As artificial intelligence accelerates, more and more authority, moral, editorial, civic, is being handed off to untested code. From the classroom to the newsroom to the marketplace, we’re witnessing a quiet transfer of judgment from humans to algorithms, often without consent or recourse.

AI Screens Your Reading List

In an alarming twist on book bans, several Texas school districts are now using ChatGPT to scan library collections for “sexually explicit” content under a new state law. The role once held by trained librarians, professionals skilled in literary nuance and developmental appropriateness, is now performed by an opaque model with no context, no accountability, and a history of fabrication.

AI Screens Your Worldview

Across the Atlantic, Channel 4 introduced Arti, an AI-generated news presenter. Promoted as a digital “innovation,” Arti blurs the line between journalism and simulation. This raises questions about trust, editorial responsibility, and the slow automation of credibility itself.

Shopping on Autopilot

Meanwhile, commerce is entering an “agentic” era where AI assistants autonomously shop, compare, and buy on your behalf. It’s a seductive promise of convenience—but one that replaces discernment with delegation. What happens when your purchasing power becomes a proxy for the algorithm’s incentives, not your own values?

⛓️‍💥 The Capacity Crisis: When the Cloud Goes Dark

Behind this delegation lies another problem: the fragility of the very systems we depend on. A massive AWS outage on October 20, 2025 crippled the U.S. East region for over 15 hours, disrupting critical infrastructure from hospitals to schools. EdTech platforms went down, leaving teachers and students locked out of assignments and grades.

When authority is outsourced to systems we neither control nor fully understand, accountability becomes a casualty, and resilience an afterthought.

🧠 The Battle for the Internet’s Memory

The struggle over who controls online knowledge is reaching a breaking point. Reddit has entered open legal combat with OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity after the AI firms filed suit on October 23 challenging Reddit’s decision to restrict and monetize access to its user-generated data.

At stake is more than corporate rivalry: who owns the public internet? Should AI companies have the right to scrape, store, and profit from the collective digital commons. Our posts, our words, our cultural memory. All without permission or compensation?

The outcome will define not just how AI learns, but who gets to decide what knowledge is worth remembering.

🎭 The Whimsical, the Weird, and the Worrisome

Even the most futuristic inventions reveal the same underlying tension: as we automate, we also abdicate.

Your $20,000 Robot Butler Comes With a Human Guest

Meet Neo, a $20,000 humanoid robot built to fold laundry, fetch coffee, and clean your kitchen. The catch? Its “expert mode” allows remote human operators wearing VR headsets to teleoperate it, inside your home, to help it “learn.”

When asked about privacy concerns, the CEO brushed them aside: “If you buy this product, you accept that social contract.” In other words, the cost of convenience may soon include a stranger virtually walking through your living room.

It’s not just a new gadget. It’s a preview of surveillance by design, a future where we open our doors to systems we can’t see and people we didn’t invite.

🤔 Consider

The great danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
— Sydney J. Harris

A reminder that the tools we build to extend our intelligence can also erode our empathy and nuance. The challenge is not merely to make machines more human, but to ensure humans don’t become more machine-like.

Across these stories, from libraries and newsrooms to shopping carts and smart homes, the same question surfaces: who decides, and who is accountable when they get it wrong?

In the rush to automate judgment, we risk trading expertise for efficiency, nuance for scale, and human agency for algorithmic authority. The technology may be dazzling, but the deficit of accountability is growing faster than the code.

⚡ What You Can Do This Week

For Educators & Parents: When new AI systems or district policies appear, ask: Whose expertise is being replaced? Insist on transparent decision-making and local human oversight before implementation.

For School & District Leaders: Audit your dependencies. Could your instruction, grading, or communication systems survive a cloud outage? Build redundancy, document workflows, and train staff for offline continuity.

For Teachers: Integrate AI literacy into existing lessons. Don’t just use the tools, but have students analyze how and why an AI produces specific outputs. Turn algorithmic bias into a teachable moment.

For Citizens: Support policies and initiatives that demand data transparency, digital equity, and public oversight of AI systems. The right to explanation should be a civic norm, not a privilege.

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