Thoughts about AI, Part 1

 Thoughts about AI, 1

In the 2026 book “The God Test”, by Michael Wright, the proposition of Artificial Intelligence, AI, being an evolutionary force of a magnitude the human species has never encountered before. He believes that AI is going to create the most abruptly significant social transformation for human beings in history.

At the time of this writing, I have not read the entire book, but I have had numerous initial thoughts about what the era of AI means for humanity and am writing some of them down partly to help organize them in my own head, partly to see how my initial thoughts compare to Wright’s, and partly to have something to share with students, friends, and colleagues since this conversation will be continuing for years to come. 

I often think about the human need and demand for technology; most students tell me this means the more obvious computer and electronic related devices, and other machine/hardware devices. The word technology, to me, is rather broad, and matches what one finds with a quick ask of Google: the practical application of scientific knowledge to achieve goals, solve problems, and simplify daily life. It includes physical tools and devices, but also software and systems and processes (a good example is something like an assembly line or infrastructure like an electrical grid, computer network, distribution networks, and so on). Technology in the modern era dominates entertainment, leisure, and communications, and has simplified life to the point where one does not have to move from a couch to survive, with the possible exception of going to the bathroom on occasion. It is staggering to think about how much any number of technologies has simplified life. 

But how did this all happen, fundamentally? I started thinking about Wright’s statement in the first couple pages of The God Test, that technology is directional through time. For human ancestors, going back on order of a million years or so, there was no true science, certainly not in the modern sense of the term. So what does technology mean for our ancient ancestors, the precursors of modern Homo sapiens? We’re going back to sticks and rocks as tools and weapons, logs used as tools to roll heavy objects so they could move them, wood and animal skins to build shelters and clothing. Fire. Whenever the first seeds were purposely planted for the first crops, dug into the ground with sticks. And some of those same logs and sticks eventually were discovered to float, and the first rafts were invented. These are examples of their technologies, and these were necessary not to make life easier necessarily - it was about survival.

Survival of the fittest. Now this is a connection to the fundamental force of Nature that all of life as we know it is directed by - evolution. 

If the original technologies discovered/invented/developed by human ancestors were for their survival, then evolutionary forces were responsible. All living things try to survive. That is primal and primary. Survival, so they can reproduce and maintain the species from extinction. This is the essence of life on Earth, and every animal, plant, single-celled organism, and bacterium is at the mercy of evolutionary processes, and how they can adapt to a given environment. 

As early humans then dispersed out of Africa and into a larger variety of different environments, new challenges for survival existed. Groups of humans became isolated from others. As generations passed, with more and more migrations and more isolated groups, separate ways of life evolved. Different languages. Different beliefs and ways of thinking. Different cultures and religions that formed based on what was being observed and the challenges that affected life for each group. And as groups grew in number, more and more natural resources were being used. Societies formed as numerous individuals lived together, and rules were needed. Civilizations evolved over time, always with the need for survival guiding how different groups developed new technologies and ways of living that were appropriate for the challenges of their environment. 

And sometimes, through traveling, different groups of people ran into other groups of people, who had entirely different life styles, traditions, beliefs, cultures, languages, and technologies. Evolution is fundamentally about survival, and if one group did something that threatened the way of life and survival of the other group, violence results. The advent of war is, in my thinking at least, the result of evolutionary forces and pressures on groups of people. And who tends to win wars? Those with technologies appropriate for scaring others away, or appropriate for eliminating the threat through killing. 

Survival of the fittest. 

The industry of developing machines and methods and strategies for winning wars evolved, and continues to evolve - to the point where it is one of the largest pieces of a nation’s economy and culture and tradition. Of course, even within a single group of people, there are conflicts that result in violence, as individuals are trying to maintain their way of life. 

Evolution is built around competition for survival, meaning humans are competitors by nature. Fight or flight. Survival in order to perpetuate the species, and as family structures developed, one needed to maintain a life where offspring survived and carried on the family name. Competition. In life. For individual and family honor. For natural resources. For technologies that helped make survival easier. For wealth, and land, and homes, which required resources. And for many, having wealth typically means having power. 

Survival of the fittest. Competition. To many humans, the ‘fittest’ are the wealthy, and the wealthy are the powerful. This has become a natural piece of nearly all cultures adn their governments, over so many generations, and of course is at the core of how nations are run, survive, and compete with others. And it drives economies, as well as technological development and ownership. 

Solar covered parking lots - love creative and simple ideas like this!

I got this off Facebook, the "Facts they don't teach you" page:

 France is transforming parking lots into clean energy generators, and it may be one of the most practical climate policies introduced in recent years.

Since July 2023, French law has required parking lots with 80 or more spaces to cover at least half of their surface area with solar canopies. Parking lots with more than 400 spaces must meet the requirement by 2026, while smaller qualifying lots have until 2028 to comply.

The idea is remarkably simple.

Instead of clearing farmland or natural habitats for new solar farms, use land that has already been paved. Parking lots spend most of the day exposed to direct sunlight, making them ideal locations for generating electricity without changing how the land is already used.

The potential is significant. Estimates suggest that if half of France's parking lots were equipped with solar canopies, they could provide between 6.75 and 11.25 gigawatts of installed solar capacity—roughly comparable to the generating capacity of around ten nuclear reactors.

The advantages extend well beyond electricity.

Solar canopies provide shade, reducing temperatures in large paved areas and helping to ease the urban heat island effect. They keep parked vehicles cooler during hot weather, protect them from intense sunlight, rain, and hail, and make parking more comfortable for drivers. Electric vehicle owners benefit as well, since cooler cars require less energy to run their air conditioning after being parked.

France is not the only country moving in this direction. South Korea has also introduced policies requiring solar installations on large public parking lots beginning in late 2025.

The opportunity is even greater elsewhere. With an estimated 800 million parking spaces, the United States has enormous untapped potential to generate clean electricity by making use of infrastructure that already exists, reducing the need to develop additional land for renewable energy projects.

Sometimes the most effective climate solutions are not the most complicated.

They simply make better use of the space we already have.

Source: Chester, M., Horvath, A., & Madanat, S. (2010). Environmental Research Letters

Summaries of Research on Achievement Gaps in K-12 Education: What works?

In Evanston and most diverse communities around the country, academic achievement gaps, which lead to opportunity gaps, are prevalent and tend to be generational. Our Project Excite is one approach that had found these gaps can be reduced, and even eliminated, through a long-term, comprehensive approach that begins with working with students when they are young (Excite started with Black and Hispanic 3rd graders, for instance). 

As I am part of a new community-wide effort to try and get those same results on a grand scale, I used AI to do my own meta-study - a look at numerous research studies in the topic - and find the key ideas, concepts, models, and actions that are found to help attack the gaps. I'm pleased that our Excite model, which was run from 1999-2017, 'discovered' nearly all of this independently; published studies for Excite can be found here. 

Check out the meta-study results, which are loaded with ideas and best practices teachers of all grade levels can do to help their students, especially students of color and lower-income students, who are most likely to fall into the gaps. Lists of references are provided. 

1. Achievement gaps in general;  2. EELS role in fighting achievement gaps;  3. Effect of stereotype threat on gaps;  4. Effect and use of multiple intelligence models on gaps.  

SEL (call it EELS) Resources for Teachers, by Teachers

 Since the COVID pandemic and shutdown of schools here and around the world, I've been fortunate to work with dozens of nationally and globally renowned teachers and educators to develop and promote the commonly called SEL skills - which I think really needs to be renamed and rebranded to what they really are, Everyday Essential Life Skills, or EELS - and provide all sorts of practical resources for teachers. 

ALL of the resources are linked through this Google Sheet, so if you are an educator or just generally interested, have at it and use/copy/modify what you like and can make use of with students!

What does E = mc^2 really tell us?

I'm re-posting this, which I originally wrote in 2016. 

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In my classes, when we are going through the usual classical physics portions of energy and work, I also throw in a couple days of modern theories of energy, including special relativity and some basic quantum mechanical ideas. After we see one way of deriving E = mc^2, and Einstein's energy equation in special relativity, I want to make a point that this is a truly large breakthrough in our thinking of the physical world. I like to use E = mc^2 as a stepping stone to better understand the following:

The discovery of E = mc2 basically sets up the discovery of quantum  mechanics, and the weirdness we see with particles.

            Energy = matter, is effectively what this tells us.

These are two forms of the same stuff, like steam (energy) and ice (matter)  are two forms of the same H2O molecule.

     Whatever properties energy (waves) can have, then matter (particles)  has those properties.

     Whatever properties matter (particles) can have, then energy (waves)  has those properties.

Examples:

If waves have wavelengths, then so must particles

If particles have momentum, then so must waves (light/photons)

If matter is affected by gravity, then so must waves (light/photons)

This equation also re-defines conservation of mass and conservation of energy. In nuclear reactions, conservation of mass is violated, since products weigh less than reactants.

         Conservation of mass-energy is now more correct!

• This equation changed the course of history, as we entered the age of nuclear power and weapons.

• It allows us to understand how stars form and 'burn,' and their life cycles

• It allows us to understand how heavier elements are formed through thermonuclear fusion (nucleosynthesis; we are made of star dust!!)

• It allows us to understand how the universe can form from a burst of pure energy (Big Bang), as we have phase transitions from energy to matter or vice versa.

• The unification of space and time allows us to understand what causes gravity (warps in space-time)

• It allows us to understand how to make particle accelerators and explore the basic question, "What are we made of?"
• It led to the prediction of antimatter 

• It allows us to think in terms of multiple dimensions, giving rise to things like string theories

• It allows us to begin to understand radioactive processes, and nuclear physics

• The theory of photons allowed Einstein to understand photoelectricity (solar energy), for which he won the Nobel Prize

• This also helped lead to his discovery of 'stimulated emission,' the process that makes lasers possible

• It predicts 'matter waves' or the wave-particle duality, which is the heart and soul of quantum mechanics

Not bad for something that seems so simple and innocent!

Scientists start new climate site as nonprofit!

 Good news for science, and more importantly, the world - scientists who were fired from NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have replaced the dismantled climate.gov site with a new climate.us site. The current administration, who openly and often calls climate change a "hoax", and has cut funding and fired some of the world's best climate scientists for political reasons, has put a massive obstacle in the way of nearly the entire rest of the world when it comes to doing something about climate change. We should be thankful to the actual scientists and experts in the field for doing this as a nonprofit, and mostly as on a volunteer basis! 

GO TO CLIMATE.US for all sorts of data, analyses, and discussions of what's going on with the planet!

EELS Should Be the Class Mascot

SEL, short for Social-Emotional Learning, has been defined and used in schools for over thirty years. Prior to 2018, however, I had heard the letters, but never really saw anything about SEL in the first twenty years of my teaching career. This was also true of nearly all of my colleagues I had asked about it. My introduction to what SEL is began on Valentine’s Day, 2018, after the horrific Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 and wounded 18 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. 

The day after Parkland happened, I was on the phone with Joe Fatheree, a dear friend and fellow teacher from central Illinois, talking about teachers not having much say about school safety, or seeing any real progress to reduce the number of school shootings and other violent acts, for decades. We were wondering what could be done to try and produce real results in helping our youth maintain control of their emotions, and generally creating safer schools and environments where kids could learn and grow more while not worrying about so much actual and potential violence too many of our students see with high frequency. As we talked with more colleagues, safety personnel, administrators, school counselors, psychologists, and social workers, and other experts who had interests in this topic, we began to hear and learn about this SEL topic in detail. I was intrigued.

Two years later, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the world began to shut down for nearly one year. The school I worked at did remote learning and some hybrid learning during that time. Once the world began to come out of the shutdown, something became very apparent about the health of many of our students, as well as adults - the state of our mental health was largely in peril. Rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies, violent actions, and other mental health issues rose dramatically in the U.S. and around the world. Now, there was a substantial rise in mental health issues prior to COVID for nearly a decade, but post-COVID it accelerated to the point where districts all around the country began to take an interest in SEL. In my own school district, SEL became one of our four district goals. 

But something both interesting and worrisome began to happen over the last several years regarding SEL - it became politicised. Some politicians began to use language like SEL is part of the Left’s drive towards ‘wokeness’, and that SEL was a way to indoctrinate America’s youth towards a Leftist-Communist political agenda that was destroying the country (Harvard, Kansas, National Review). By 2024, at least eight state legislatures have introduced bills that would limit or ban SEL from the state’s public schools (APA, EdWeek). SEL has now become associated with wokeness, critical race theory (CRT), progressive and Leftist indoctrination programs, and so on. I wonder, though, how many of those who are making claims on either side of the issue actually understand what the core SEL ideas are when it was developed back in 1994, by those who formed the leading organization that drives SEL, CASEL - the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Traditional SEL is built around five competencies, which are Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision-Making. In order to attain any level of competency within one of these competencies, certain skills must be learned, practiced, and applied. One list showing skills associated with each competency is: 

 Self-awareness
The ability to accurately recognize one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior. The ability to accurately assess one’s strengths and limitations, with a well-grounded sense of confidence, optimism, and a growth mindset.

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  Identifying emotions

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  Accurate self-perception

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  Recognizing strengths

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  Self-confidence

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  Self-efficacy

Self-management
The ability to successfully regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations — effectively managing stress, controlling impulses, and motivating oneself. The ability to set and work toward personal and academic goals.

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  Impulse control

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  Stress management

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  Self-discipline

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  Self-motivation

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  Goal-setting

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  Organizational skills

Social awareness
The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The ability to understand social and ethical norms for behavior and to recognize family, school, and community resources and support systems.

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  Perspective-taking

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  Empathy

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  Appreciating diversity

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  Respect for others

Relationship skills
The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. The ability to communicate clearly, listen well, cooperate with others, resist inappropriate social pressure, negotiate conflict constructively, and seek and offer help when needed.

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  Communication

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  Social engagement

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  Relationship-building

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  Teamwork

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  Collaboration

Responsible decision-making
The ability to make constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on ethical standards, safety concerns, and social norms. The realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions, and a consideration of the well-being of oneself and others. How is the content being taught applied in a student’s life and in society?

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  Identifying problems

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  Analyzing situations

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  Solving problems

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  Evaluating & Reflecting

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  Ethical responsibility

I also include two newly proposed competencies: Positive Purpose, and Curiosity & Healthy Skepticism. These include vital skills we need in an age of Artificial Intelligence, and an age of mis- and dis-information. By the way, this list of skills can be added to lesson plan templates, to help keep track of what skills naturally arise and are needed/used in any lesson at any grade level! Teachers already work and use these skills everyday, but likely don't realize they're including EELS within their work with students!

On the surface, when people see these skills for the first time, it is often eye-opening to learn these skills are fundamentally what SEL is meant to expose and teach to students. Not many parents have a problem with such a skills list when they see it, and tend to insist they, of course, want their children to be strong with each skill, because these are skills necessary to navigate and thrive in life. 

I am at the point where I think we need to re-brand SEL. In fact, I’d like to rename it. We have the letters in the wrong order - let us change SEL to ELS, and call SEL what it really is and should mean: Essential Life Skills. As part of the brand, it helps to have a mascot and visual, so I’m thinking of EELS: Everyday Essential Life Skills. 

When students have exposure to and practice with applying these types of skills in everyday situations both in and out of the classroom, the benefits are impressive - and long-lived into adulthood. Studies over the last few decades have shown the following: 

• Improve academic growth and achievement; on average, 11% improvement for students who went through these types of programs;

• Significantly improves a variety of student outcomes: societal skills, academics, social behavior, ability to handle emotional stresses, attitudes towards school and everyday life, fewer behavioral and conduct problems in school;

• Improvements in a variety of student outcomes last long-term (some measured to 18 years after the EELS exposure in school);

• EELS programming and exposure beginning in Kindergarten and lasting through the schooling years of development last a lifetime - those individuals are more likely to stay out of poverty, stay away from drug and alcohol addiction, have better mental and social health, stay out of prison, and get and hold higher paying jobs;

• EELS expenses in school are paid for, and then some, after students leave the school system: there is a 11:1 payoff to the economy for those who came through successful EELS programming and exposure in the school systems - for every $1 invested in EELS, society gains $11 in returns;

• EELS in schools is a key component to reducing poverty and improving economic mobility; 

• Perception among education system stakeholders overwhelmingly feel there is a need for EELS in schools: students, parents, teachers, administrators, scientists, and employers;

• EELS are not all intuitive, but need to be taught and learned; many of the skills are based on societal norms, and need to be taught to our youngest students and continued to be presented year after year for reinforcement as societal stresses increase with age. It would be wise to consider including EELS in all teacher training programs, along with the benefits of including them in the classroom; 

• Most employers (70%) see Emotional Intelligence (EI) as an immediate, essential skill set for their employees: in an age where jobs are significantly and routinely changing or being eliminated due to technology and artificial intelligence, workers are under more and new stresses that have never been experienced in human history, and many are not able to cope and adapt mentally, emotionally or socially. 

Students who are able to maintain control over emotions are more likely to stay out of trouble, be non-violent, and find calmer ways of resolving issues with other students. They can focus better in class. They can work better and more productively with classmates, because collaborative and teamwork skills are part of the EELS. Learning about these and getting real experience and practice with skills don’t suddenly abandon a person upon graduation - they tend to remain over one’s lifetime. This is why people strong in EELS tend to be happier, healthier, and more productive citizens for life - and they tend to earn more and stay out of trouble compared to those who grew up with little or no real exposure and practice with EELS. 

One feature I like about this addresses my original exposure to SEL, which was in the name of school safety. Schools and communities where students are strong and competent in EELS tend to be safer, and kids tend to learn more. 

EELS are a MUST IN SCHOOLS, AND FOR OUR YOUNG PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND MASTER! Especially in the AI world they are inheriting.

Let EELS be your Class Mascot!

And, please don't think about this being one more thing put on your educator plate: