Monthly Archives: February 2026

Chore masters

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I grew up watching the Jetsons, expecting that one day I’d get to travel around in flying cars. And in this cartoon, the Jetson family had a robotic maid named Rosie, who was always cleaning up behind them. While I’m not sure if flying cars are going to be widespread in the next few years, I think we are going to see a lot of robots doing chores for us.

Just a couple weeks ago I was in a store and watched a robot make a latte for one of the customers. His order included a choice of milk art to go on top… a little flair to add to the experience of having a machine be your barista.

How long before we see somewhat intelligent, human-like robots in every house, each doing mundane chores we’d all rather not do? I’m sure these robots won’t put the wrong items in the dryer… like I do. I’m sure they won’t complain about yard work… like I do. I’m sure they won’t sit on the couch at the end of a long day wishing there weren’t chores to get done… like I do.

I look forward to having a chore master robot that will do the mundane things I don’t like to do. I’d be thrilled to not do dishes again. I’d love to not spend time folding down boxes and putting out the garbage and recycling. I’d have no issues with the idea of never vacuuming again. I’m ready, just wondering how long I have to wait?

We are ONE

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One of my favourite ancient texts is the Tao Te Ching. In it ‘The Way’ cannot be named, because to name it is to separate it from itself, to identify a part rather than the whole.

Jesus said, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within you.”

Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

The ancients understood the interconnectedness of everything.

I think the best metaphor for this is also the scientific equivalent… everything in the universe is a wave. Do you want to know something really interesting about a wave? Move deeper in, away from the turbulent shore of an ocean and watch a wave approaching you. The water doesn’t travel with the wave. The wave travels, but the water itself only ebbs and flows, rises and falls. The water molecules at the tip of a wave 30 feet away from you don’t reach you when the wave does, it essentially stays 30 feet away from you as the wave travels your way. The wave is ‘one’ with the ocean.

This interconnectedness is everywhere, and we are learning more and more about these connections. Some things we’ve known for a very long time because they are easily observable, like how women who live together will have their menstrual cycle synchronize. Some things are more recently discovered, like how trees will communicate and share food through mycelium, even across species to keep the forest strong. We are all connected. Life is all connected.

And yet humans fight over things that divide us. Things like borders, religion, politics, social status, and ideology. We choose not to see connections, but differences. We choose to ignore the messages in our ancient texts, and find reasons to ‘other’ those that are not like us.

We rather get lost in turbulence than recognize we are all part of the same ocean, all riding the ebb and flow of the same wave.

“Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.” ~Tao Te Ching

What will it take to recognize that we are all one… and that the arguing needs to stop?

Blogging Reader Revival

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I’m not ready to do it, but maybe someone out in the blogosphere can. Do you know what we need? A revival of Google Reader. Somebody with a paid version of a good AI coder needs to get on this. Build a version of Google reader but with some AI brilliance added in.

3 new features:

1. Have it learn from the reader. Whichever feeds the reader spends more time on gets priority in the feed.

2. AI summaries of the posts. The reader can choose from 3 levels, ranging from a one line summary to a detailed synopsis.

3. An audio reader option.

Make it free for up to 6 feeds, $6 a year for 20 feeds, or $12 a year for unlimited feeds. I’m sick and tired of apps gouging us for yearly fees.

So, who wants it and who’s going to build it?

What’s the real AI risk in education?

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I read a great article on LinkedIn by Ken Shelton. He looked at two articles:

“On one side:
AI as productivity infrastructure.
On the other:
AI as compliance enforcement.

But in both cases, the conversation centers on efficiency and policing, not on whether learning itself has been redesigned for an AI-rich world. Using historical context, one could reasonably make similar arguments around the implementation of technology as well. If students are learning to “sound human” to avoid detection…If institutions are investing in increasingly sophisticated surveillance tools…If teachers are primarily using AI to move faster within the same structures…Then we have to ask, as I have shared in previous posts:

Are we adapting learning?
Or are we simply optimizing and defending legacy systems?”

I found his article more interesting than the two he shared. I especially loved his final paragraph:

“The risk isn’t just that AI is moving too fast. The risk is that our response remains reactive, oscillating between efficiency and enforcement, without addressing purpose, power, and pedagogy. Therefore, the real inflection point isn’t technological, it’s analytical and philosophical.”

My thoughts: In education, go ahead and use AI to make teaching and lessons better, use it to help students learn, and also help them understand how to use AI to enrich their learning. But don’t use it to make learning easier. Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.

So educators need to do two things: First, they need to use AI to make what they are doing even better. And secondly, they need to shift the learning experience to one where they no longer need to worry about policing and compliance. For example: The work isn’t finished with an essay, but with students defending their points in the essay against other students with slightly different points or different perspectives. The students who wrote the essay with AI and didn’t fully comprehend the topic can’t argue their perspective as well as the ones who were willing to do the work… and if they did use AI and can then argue the points better than their peers, that only proves that they understand how to use AI as a learning tool and not a tool to do the work for them. Because the real risk of AI in education is that the AI is doing the work, the struggle, and the learning for the student.

The problem we face is how learning can be circumvented by AI. And so the challenge for educators is to make it more challenging to use AI inappropriately, and to use AI to aid in making learning experiences more challenging. This is not an easy task, but it’s one we need to figure out and do well if we want our students to be learners who will have significance in a world where AI is all around us.

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Update: Just found this LinkedIn post by William (Bill) Ferriter, and it has two awesome images to fit with the above.

Update 2: I forgot about this post: Thinking Requires Effort

“Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.“

Path to Nowhere

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We all do it.

We choose a path that doesn’t take us where we want to go… a path to nowhere.

Endless scrolling on social media. Binge-watching shows instead of pursuing hobbies. Saying yes to everything and stretching ourselves too thin. Procrastinating on big goals by tackling tiny, irrelevant tasks. Staying in our comfort zones, avoiding new skills that scare us. Skipping exercise or eating junk for quick fixes. Remaining friends with negative people who drain our energy. Buying stuff to feel better, but still feeling empty after our purchases, or buying on impulse because it’s easy, and the items aren’t too expensive.

But the costs are real. The path isn’t forward. These are all paths to nowhere.

Oblivious to what’s coming

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If you talk to people about LLM’s like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, you’ll still hear things like, ‘They hallucinate and will make up fake research’, and something I heard recently, ‘they actually make work harder because workers need to spend more time editing and cleaning up what they produce’. What people who say this don’t realize is that this is pre-January 2026, and we are now fully into February 2026. Yes, things are moving that fast! And furthermore, what most people, including me, have not been paying attention to is that when we use the free version of these tools, we are essentially months and months behind what the latest models can do.

Matt Shumer’s ‘Something Big Is Happening‘, was written just 4 days ago and has already been seen by millions of people. Yes, it’s a bit of a long read, but it is also a ‘must read’. Here is an excerpt:

“Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”

I recently shared my thoughts on the upcoming ‘Fiscal year end squeeze‘, where I said, “Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.” What I’m realizing now, after reading Matt’s article, is that the situation is far worse than I thought, because AI is coming after not just these jobs, but almost every other jobs these newly unemployed people will be looking for.

If I was out of a job right now, what I’d be doing is paying the monthly fees for the 2-3 best AI models out there and learning how to power use them. I wouldn’t be looking for a job, I’d be trying to find a niche where I could work for myself, or maybe become a contractor doing things for people who don’t realize that AI is good enough to get the work done faster than they can do it. Because the reality is that the vast majority of people in the world are oblivious to just how fast this disruption is coming, and unlike other disruptions in the past this one is going to happen everywhere and all at once. Most people can’t fathom how disruptive this will be, and even as I share this as a warning… I’m not sure I fully grasp the full impact either.

Share less tragedy

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We don’t have to feign naivety and pretend something horrible didn’t happen. Sad things happen in the world and we need to understand this. What we don’t need is a constant flow of news and a detailed account of the event pushed on to us, and more importantly pushed onto kids.

This was some professional advice shared with me 14 years ago, after a tragic suicide in our community that was followed shortly after by a school shouting in the US.

  • Refrain from sharing images or video of the incident.
  • If discussions do take place within the classroom, we recommend they be limited to a brief sharing of facts.
  • There will understandably be some anxiety around this incident and staff and students may have some level of emotional impact from the news.
  • Please watch for any changes in behaviour, particularly among vulnerable students, and refer appropriately to your school counsellor as needed.

Children don’t need to see report after report about a tragic incident. It doesn’t have to be the topic of a current events discussion. And nothing needs to be shared about a perpetrator of a horrific crime. Not even the perpetrator’s name. Not at school, not at home.

I could go on, but I’ve share a lot on this already, many years ago:

‘Care or Fear’

Excerpt: We often get results based on the pictures we fill our young impressionable  students’ heads with. Tomorrow, I fear that well-intentioned teachers could stir up thoughts of fear for personal safety in young minds, as concerns about Newtown are discussed. As I said, ‘I’m willing to bet that hundreds of thousands of students that might have felt safe in their school, and would not have questioned their own safety, will now think of that question (Am I safe?) and perhaps be more frightened than if that question did not get discussed.’

And then I followed up with ‘A new tragedy of the commons’

Excerpt: The fact is that we know, both through research and from historical evidence, that glorified stories perpetuate the very sadness we are appalled by. But that doesn’t stop a major national magazine, MACLEAN’S, from glorifying a killer on their front cover page. I’ve shared the cover below, but took some creative liberties with a red pen to prevent this very post from doing what I wish others wouldn’t.

When I see a cover page like this, I’m left wondering what we truly value in our society?

It comes down to this: We need to care for those who are concerned, we don’t need to amplify concern. The less we share tragic stories as a community, the more care we are showing for that community.

Health advice rollercoaster

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Coffee is bad for you, no wait, it’s good for you! A glass of read wine a day is good for your heart health, no wait, any amount of alcohol is unhealthy! Drink fruit juice, it’s high in vitamins, no wait, there’s too much sugar and not enough fibre in the juice alone! Creatine can damage your liver, no wait, it just spikes the creatine marker for liver issues, it doesn’t actually mean your liver is having issues, just that you have to look at different markers if you supplement your creatine.

From what food to eat, to what vitamins and supplements you should and shouldn’t take together, to exercises that are guaranteed to give you results, it seem like there is always a constant stream of new, updated research and information about improving heath which contradicts something we’ve heard (and believed) previously.

Here are 2 rules to follow as you travel the health advice rollercoaster:

1. The science matters. How big is the sample size, how many other studies suggest the same thing?

2. The messaging. When the threat is over emphasized, the message needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When a product is being pitched, there is an underlying benefit to exaggerating, either the cost of not taking the product or the benefit of taking it. This doesn’t mean that what is being said is true or false, it just means you need a good dose of scepticism unless you’re actually referring back to the science yourself.

Ultimately, it comes down to one question, are you getting research or are you being sold something? It’s not that you shouldn’t question both but rather if it’s advertising, this scrutiny should be significantly greater. And, no matter what it is, you can be certain that it’s probably going to contradict something you’ve heard previously. There are going to be a lot more twists, turns, and loops on this roller coaster before we truly understand how our body works and what benefits it the most.

Moths to the flame

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Chris Williamson recently shared this quote:

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” — Jay Alto

Our fixation is intense. We cling to tiny dopamine hits, scrolling unaware of the world around us. Ironically, what we are doing is dividing our attention into tiny video clips, catchy sound bites, and dancing in an emotional roller coaster between humour and rage, while simultaneously focusing our attention on a single screen.

We are merely moths, our screens are the light to which we fly. Our humanity suspended as we meet some primordial desire in a way that would be considered comical if it wasn’t also sad, if not tragic.

Parenting adults

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As an educator, I’ve seen the struggle some parents have with creating boundaries. For example, there are parents who don’t parent because they don’t want to undermine their friendship with their kid. They don’t parent their kid, they raise a buddy. From my experience, this is not good parenting of a school-aged kid. Kids need parental guidance, not just a supportive friend.

As a parent of two young adults, things change.

My wife and I took our youngest out for a birthday dinner last night. It’s hard to believe that my baby girl is 24! During the dinner she made a simple statement, “I’m so glad you two aren’t just my parents but friends I want to be around too.”

That hit a chord with me. My kids aren’t just my kids anymore. They are adults who I enjoy being around, who I want to spend time with, who I miss when I don’t see them. It’s not just that they are my kids, it’s not just that I’m their parent, they are amazing people I want in my life.

That simple statement said so much. It made me feel lucky, blessed. My wife and I raised two awesome kids, and they in turn have given us the ultimate gift in return… they enjoy our company as much as we enjoy theirs. ❤️

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Ps. All that said, I’m still Dad, they are still my kids, as my youngest reminded my by sending me a TikTok about all the things she’ll never learn to do… because that’s a dad’s job! 😆