The power of music

I spend a lot of my leisure time in listening mode. Usually books and podcasts. I’m a bit of a learning nerd and like consuming information through audio. But recently I’m finding myself listening more and more to music.

Maybe it’s a mood, maybe it’s just June and I’m really tired, but I find every time I try to listen to something informative my mind just drifts. I lose focus, I lose the plot.

So, I’ve moved to music. I’ve listened to more music in the last week than I usually listen to in any given month. Music has been feeding my soul. It has been recharging my mental and physical batteries and making me feel alive.

I have so much respect and admiration for the creators of music. They put musical notes and lyrics together that touch people’s souls. They move us, inspire us, change our moods, and have us singing along with them.

Powerful.

I tip my hat to all the creatives out there who alter our reality with their beats. You change our lives in so many positive ways.

Honouring Ceremony

Last night I went to our district’s Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony. It’s a celebration of heritage and culture. It reminds me that we need to make sure that we provide spaces for people of all backgrounds to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be honoured.

This seems particularly prescient with what is happening south of our border. Using book-banning in Texas as an example, individual communities can decide what books are acceptable and not acceptable to be in schools. Books about different cultures or life choices can be banned simply because the majority are not in favour of them. I am dumbfounded that this is something happening in 2025. But it is.

Inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, and ultimately kindness and love are all being threatened. I grew up in a very multicultural family. We celebrated our differences through food, and at meal time everyone was always welcome. That was our way of honouring. We welcomed you even if your potato salad had raisins in it. But jokes aside, I see what’s happening in the States right now and it scares me.

Our work is not done yet. Inequities still fall along heritage lines, and injustices of the past are far from reconciled. And in this polarized environment, we need events like our Indigenous Education Grad Honouring Ceremony to remind us to celebrate our differences, respect and value heritage, and provide an avenue where the cultures and heritage of our youth are not only respected, but revered and truly honoured.

Weak-ends

Sometimes the weekends just fly by. They are more like weak-ends rather than weekends. That’s not to say the weekend was bad, but simply that it flew by so quickly that it feels like it simply wasn’t long enough. Batteries don’t feel fully charged, I’m not feeling fully rested.

A couple weekends back I was very unproductive and mostly just rested. Yet, when the weekend was done I felt like I got what I needed out of the weekend. Last weekend I was a lot busier and still I felt like I had a good weekend.

This weekend I had a couple enjoyable events to attend, and I got a really good workout in, and still the weekend felt too short. Maybe it’s that I didn’t sleep well? Maybe it’s just entering June and knowing how much work is still to come before the summer break? Maybe it’s my age?

No matter the reason, I had a weak-end this past weekend, and I’m going to have to give myself some TLC to get through this week.

Unprepared for the transition

I just read, “From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?”
By Charis McGowan in the Guardian. It’s a series of stories about people who had secure jobs until AI replaced them.

Last week I saw a video of a car manufacturer in China that builds the entire car using robotics. They call these ‘Dark Factories’, fully automated buildings that don’t need lighting like most factories because the machines have sensors and don’t need the factory lit up like is required with human-filled factories.

Five years ago I heard of a shortage of workers that was inevitable as population growth decreases, but I now see that those fears were unwarranted. We aren’t going to need more employees in the future, but rather far less. AI agents and robots are literally going to steal jobs from a significant number of working people. It has already started but the scale of this is going to magnify considerably in the next 5-10 years.

How do we make the economy work when most countries will have unemployment rates exceeding 20%? What kind of jobs will a laid off 40-55 year old be able to do that AI won’t? What does a 30 year old with a liberal arts degree do as a former customer service employee who was laid off because AI can do their job better and cheaper?

10 writers for a website becomes a job for 1 editor who edits and ‘humanizes’ AI written articles. 10 tech support workers are replaced by AI support and just 2 human technicians. 10 people in graphic design are all replaced by the department boss who was a graphic designer before being promoted. Now he or she uses AI and pumps out the work of all 10 past employees. This isn’t science fiction, it’s happening right now.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for mass unemployment? What will the job market look like? What will all these unemployed people do? How does our economy survive?

On the bright side, here’s what I think we’ll see:

  1. Universal Basic Income – Every person gets a livable wage whether they work or not. Is it enough to live in luxury? No, but you can be unemployed for a long period of time and not have to worry about your basic needs.
  2. Reduced work weeks – If you work more than 30 hours a week, you are probably working for yourself. Think 6 hour days or 4-day work weeks.
  3. Less chores – From cleaning to yard work, to cooking… those things that consumed your time after work will only be done by you if you want to do it. Otherwise, you’ll have these done for you by affordable robots that have a lot more features and convenience than the Roomba that vacuums your floor while you watch TV.

So while conveniences and more idle time are coming, they are coming with a massive number of jobs lost. The question is, what is the transition going to look like? Who suffers during the transition? And will we get to these positive outcomes before too many people are jobless, unable to compete with AI, and not meaningfully able to contribute to or survive in our AI and robotics driven economy?

The pump

I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to work out with my buddy at his gym, at least once a week for the past few months. My home routine is usually just cardio, stretching, then working one muscle group to fatigue… sometimes with just 3 sets of one exercise, and sometimes 3 each of two exercises, but again using the same muscle group.

With my buddy, at his gym, we do a bit more than that. The last couple workouts have focused on shoulders with some biceps and triceps thrown in. Both of these last two workouts I’ve pushed hard enough that my shoulder muscles were jacked up. I could feel the pump long after the workout was done.

While I’m not used to this feeling, and it’s a bit uncomfortable, I have to say that I really enjoy it! It’s a feeling that says, ‘I’ve pushed myself’, and while it isn’t necessarily a pleasant feeling, it comes with a good sense of accomplishment. The pump is not something you feel unless you’ve really made your muscles work.

Now I need to figure out how to add more to my home program so that I get this feeling a bit more often. It’s hard when I’m on a time crunch, but I know I can do this more often, and I want to get to that ‘pumped up’ feeling on a regular basis.

As an aside, I’m blown away by how much creatine helps with reducing soreness. A workout like today’s would normally lead me to total soreness in a couple days that would make lifting my arms above my head feel like work. But since adding creatine to my daily health regimen, I’ve hardly ever had that level of soreness, even after hitting personal bests or working to a pump like I did today. And that makes the pump so much more enjoyable when I’m not going to feel like I’m physically paying for it two days from now.

Passion Projects

For the second day in a row I got to watch student IDS – Independent Directed Study – final presentations. The last couple were from a Grade 11 on ‘Coding a Cookbook’ and a grade 12 on ‘Creating a Music Album’.

I’m so glad we recorded these. Both the depth of learning and the appreciation of the learning process were on full display. Presentations were exceptional both in design and also in delivery. This isn’t a surprise because these are skills intentionally taught at Inquiry Hub. And students do so many presentations at our school that they comfortably get in front of an audience to speak.

Still, I watch and I’m so impressed with the ability of these teenagers to be captivating presenters. And there is no better presentation to watch than an IDS, where the entire curriculum is designed by the students. Let students work on and learn about topics they are truly passionate and interested in, and they’ll very often go above and beyond expectations.

Celebrating challenges

I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Morning light

I love waking up to my room getting lighter. My body just tells me it’s time to get up. As each day has slowly gotten longer we are now at the point where light creeps through the edges of our darkened curtains and signals me that it is time to rise. With a 5am wake up time, it takes until this time of year for that to actually happen.

My perfect routine would be in bed by 11pm, wake up at 5 to 5:30am, then a nice siesta in the afternoon. But I can’t siesta at work, so I force myself to bed before 10pm. Still, a night like last night had me up until almost 11 anyway. Even a couple sleep meditations couldn’t get me to sleep.

Yet it was easy to wake up before my alarm this morning. With daylight sneaking into the room my body told me it was time to get up. And so for the next few months my mornings will be a lot easier, and I’ll awaken ready for the day… all thanks to the morning light.

Self-interests in AI

Yesterday I read the following in the ‘Superhuman Newsletter (5/26/25)’:

Bad Robot: A new study from Palisade Research claims that “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off”, even when it was explicitly instructed to shut down. The study raises serious safety concerns.

It amazes me how we’ve gotten here. Ten, or even five years ago there were all kinds of discussions about of AI safety. There was a belief that future AI would be built in isolation with an ‘air-gap’, used as a security measure to ensure AI systems remained contained and separate from other networks or systems. We would grow this intelligence in a metaphorical petri dish and build safety guards around it before we let it out into the wild

Instead, these systems have been built fully in the wild. They have been give unlimited data and information, and we’ve built them in a way that we aren’t sure we understand their ‘thinking’. They surprise us with choices like choosing not to turn off when explicitly asked to. Meanwhile we are simultaneously training them to use ‘agents’ that interact with the real world.

What we are essentially doing is building a super intelligence that can act autonomously, while simultaneously building robots that are faster, stronger, more agile, and fully programmable by us… or by an AI. Let’s just pause for a moment and think about these two technologies working together. It’s hard not to construct a dystopian vision of the future when we watch these technologies collide.

And the reality is that we have not built an air-gap. We don’t have a kill switch. We are essentially heading down a path to having super-intelligent AI ignoring our commands while operating robots and machines that will make us feeble in comparison (in intelligence, strength, and mobility).

When our intelligence compared to AI is equivalent to a chimpanzee’s intelligence compared to ours, how will this super-intelligence treat us? This is not a hyperbole, it’s a real question we should be thinking about. If today’s rather simplistic LLM AI models are already choosing to ignore our commands what makes us think a super-intelligent AI will listen to or reason with us?

All is well and good when our interests align, but I don’t see any evidence that self-interested AI will necessarily have aligned interests with the intelligent monkeys that we are. And the fact that we’re building this super-intelligence out in the wild gives reason to pause and wonder what will become of humanity in an age of super-intelligent AI?

Tasks in my calendar

I’ve got a full day today, but when I look at my calendar I don’t see meetings, I see tasks. For example, a phone call to make, an order to buy, a form submission deadline. I used to just flag tasks but I’ve found that adding them to my calendar is far more effective.

Looking at my calendar on a Monday can sometimes be daunting. So many small tasks that got carried over from the previous week. Yet this is far more effective than having a separate tasks list. Sure I still keep a small paper ‘To Do’ list with some big items that can’t just be checked off in a 15 or 30 minute calendar appointment time, but most of my tasks get calendared.

And sometimes those tasks get moved to the next day. So many times a calendar item gets swallowed up by the daily goings on of a school building. My intention to get 3 tasks done between 9:30-10:30 suddenly becomes 1 task done in the afternoon and the 2 others being pushed to later in the week. But I am definitely more efficient and effective when these tasks are in my calendar.

If I need more information before I can send an email? Slide the email right into my calendar. I need to prep (or read something) for an upcoming meeting? Slide an appointment into my calendar before the meeting.

I look at my calendar all the time. It’s available on all my devices. And consistently adding tasks to my calendar has helped me stay on top of things that can easily be missed when juggling a busy day of distractions. The key is to look back at my calendar at the end of the day and make sure anything missed gets moved forward.