On February 3, 2026, Omaha attorney Gregory Lake went before the Nebraska Supreme Court to argue an appeal in a divorce and child custody case, Prososki v. Regan, S-25-0295.

Thirty-seven seconds into the argument, Lake was interrupted by one of the justices. “Before we get into that, I’d like to ask you about your brief.”

Lake: “Of course.”

Justice: “And your brief had a number of errors in it that were submitted. Can you explain to us how that occurred?”
Lake: “Absolutely, Your Honor. I was on my 10th wedding anniversary. While flying down there, my computer broke. And I uploaded the incorrect version of my brief.”

Opposing counsel then informed the court that of the 63 references in Lake’s brief, 57 were either fabricated, contained misquotes from other cases, or misquotes from the statutes themselves.

Justice: “The brief that was submitted had misquotes from cases, fictitious cases, and misquotes from statutes. How were those all generated in your, I guess, the version that you did submit to us?”
Lake: “Sure. It was a draft. And when I... My writing process is when I’m drafting, I stick in things that I know wouldn’t pass muster.”
Justice: “The elephant in the room is whether or not you used artificial intelligence. Did you?”
Lake: “No, I did not.”
Justice: “With respect, if you didn’t use artificial intelligence, how do we end up with a citation to cases that don’t exist? I mean, it’s frankly a little hard to believe that’s just a citation error.”
Lake: “Certainly, Your Honor. And again, like I said, I was... My computer was broken.”

Later in the argument:

Justice: “With a number of mistakes and basically misleading comments that were made in the brief, why shouldn’t this appeal just be treated as frivolous?”
Lake: “Your Honor, I don’t have a great answer for that.”

At stake was the custody of the child of Lake’s client, Jason Regan. “This was supposed to be where I felt my story would be heard,” he said.

Lake isn’t the first attorney to be caught using AI in a legal brief, nor is he the last. The consequences can be severe. In April of this year, Oregon attorney Stephen Brigandi was sanctioned and fined $110,000 in the largest AI-hallucination penalty in US history. The case he represented was dismissed with prejudice, preventing it from being refiled. A website built by AI/legal Senior Research Fellow at HEC Paris, Damien Charlotin, has identified 1730 legal decisions in cases in which generative AI produced hallucinated content, with at least 3-4 cases being added each day. While the majority (59%) of these cases involve pro se (self represented) litigants, nearly 40% are cases represented by an attorney. The consequences can be life-altering for those caught in the crosshairs, like Jason Regan.

In spite of the risks, AI adoption is accelerating and with it, an implicit if tentative trust in the models, even as hallucination persists like a metastatic cancer through the body of collective knowledge. Hallucination - the production of a statistically plausible but often inaccurate response - creates pseudo-answers that, even to a trained eye, can look and feel like the real thing. And because the leading LLMs (Large Language Models) are trained on publicly-available internet data, the hallucinations themselves become part of the corpus that trains subsequent outputs, risking a cascade of compounding misinformation.

Leading frontier AI labs have taken steps, or at least a stand, to stem the tide of “slop” as it is commonly called. In September 2025 OpenAI (GPT) published a paper in which they identified the problem, if not a complete solution. At its root, according to OpenAI, the standard training and evaluation mechanisms reward confident guessing over a safer “I don’t know” response. OpenAI’s initial response has been to provide grounding options via web search as well as file search, and they have called for a new mechanism that prioritizes “I don’t know” responses over plausible guesses. Google/Gemini has also opted for the grounding method by pointing Gemini to live search results in Google, with citations to the pages from which the information was pulled. According to Google, hallucinations have been reduced by 40%. Anthropic (Claude) opted to build a grounding layer directly into Claude itself, offering connectors that point to verified sources (e.g. Westlaw, HealthEx), as well as a Citations API that ties assertions to original sources.

Though the solutions proffered by each lab are different, they’re efforts to solve the same problem. But none of them address the root: the provenance and authority of the data the models retrieve from. What’s needed is a multi-domain, canonicalized corpus, sourced through a governed methodology, that is verified before it’s ever retrieved. Where a source can’t be confirmed, the model should say so.

ATLAS is our response to that gap, and the reason we’ve devoted ourselves to this mission. AI models can tell you what’s plausible. They can’t yet tell you what’s true. We believe that distinction is worth fighting for. And with stakes so high, as Jason Regan learned, we believe everyone has a right, as well as a responsibility, to expect nothing less.

- S

Sources

• Prososki v. Regan, 321 Neb. 38, No. S-25-295 (Nebraska Supreme Court, filed March 20, 2026)

• Nebraska Judicial Branch — case docket (oral argument date, parties, counsel)

• Nebraska Supreme Court questions attorney about AI use in court brief — WOWT (the oral argument exchange)

• Nebraska Supreme Court suspends Omaha attorney over AI use — WOWT (the suspension and admission)

• AI Hallucination Cases Database — Damien Charlotin (case count, jurisdictions, party breakdown)

• Federal judge hands down $110K penalty against 2 lawyers for AI errors — ABA Journal (Stephen Brigandi, Oregon)

• Why Language Models Hallucinate — OpenAI (Kalai, Nachum, Vempala, Zhang, Sept. 2025)

• Grounding with Google Search — Gemini API docs

• Anthropic in Legal: What You Need to Know — Clio

• Introducing Citations on the Anthropic API — Claude

• Anthropic debuts Claude for Healthcare — Fortune

• Shumailov et al., “AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data,” Nature, July 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

On Christmas Eve 1968, Bill Anders was faced with a choice.

His life in that moment was a series of highly regimented, intensely structured and scheduled activities in a plan that needed to be executed to the exact letter, minute by minute. Gazing out the window, he saw something that took his breath away. It was a sight no human being had ever seen before.

“Oh my God, look at that picture over there,” he said to his colleague Frank Borman. “Hey, don’t take that,” Borman joked. “It’s not scheduled.”

But Anders, rookie astronaut and lunar photographer on the Apollo 8 mission, insisted, asking his colleague James Lovell for color film. “Earthrise,” as it was later called, became the most influential environmental photograph of all time, and one of the most famous photographic images in history.

Had Anders adhered strictly to the plan, we may not have Earthrise, nor the global shift in consciousness and public policy that resulted. To see our delicate planet, a blue-green orb set against the vastness of space, in this entirely new way, was catalytic. Earthrise was the inspiration for the modern environmental movement and the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Later that year, the 91st Congress nearly unanimously passed the Clean Air Act, the Senate voting 73-0 and the House of Representatives 375-1. Just weeks earlier, on December 2, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established.

The plan and schedule for the Apollo 8 mission had been meticulously designed by scientists and technicians whose chief goal was to keep three men alive in space. Every minute was calibrated to that objective. But the moment that ultimately defined the mission, and the very notion of space exploration as a whole, was entirely unplanned, in which a human being, inspired by what he saw, departed from the script. That one choice, made spontaneously in an instant, changed the course of history.

Half a century later, history is cycling again. Humanity’s progression through the AI revolution is now in full swing, with adoption and usage exploding at unprecedented rates. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a test, inviting users to help them improve it. Within 5 days there were 1 million users. In less than two months there were 100 million users, becoming the fastest consumer app adoption ever recorded. In 2022, roughly 1 in 10 workers used some form of generative AI in their work. By 2025 that number had grown 4-5x: 78% of organizations, 43% of knowledge workers, and roughly half of all Americans are now using AI. No other technology has moved this fast at this scale.

At its core, AI is an automation technology. Every transformative technological revolution in human history has automated something that used to be done by hand. The Industrial Revolution automated physical labor. The Digital Revolution automated the processing of information and data.

Unlike previous revolutions, however, AI automates cognition itself: analysis, pattern recognition, prioritizing, decision-making, drafting, planning. Complex tasks once considered the unique provenance of the human mind are being executed with increasing efficiency and skill in the virtual hands of our new machine thought partners. Our to-do lists and transactional activities have become delegable, often completed with greater precision, which suggests - jobs and income notwithstanding - the potential for an explosion in human discretionary time in the near future.

Which brings us back to Earthrise and questions implicit in Anders’ photograph: How will we use our time? Freed from a hyper-scheduled agenda, will we look out the window and allow ourselves to be spontaneously moved by what we see? Freed from the to-do lists of our daily lives, what will we focus on instead? The optimists’ answer, offered by technology advocates, is that we will finally be freed for higher-order thinking, creativity, and human connection. More Earthrise moments, in other words. More time to look out the window.

But it also assumes we have trained ourselves to truly see, and to derive meaning from what we see. It also assumes that we haven’t automated or “optimized” our lives to such a degree that that becomes the sole measure of their value.

Anders saw something no human had seen before: the earth from a vantage point outside its orbit. His decision to deviate from Apollo 8’s tightly managed schedule to capture a photo changed history and shaped the way we think about our home planet. It was a definitively human moment, a human decision, made possible through human judgement.

The AI era forces us to consider what aspects of our lives, if any, we will automate. But the deeper question is whether we are preserving the conditions for our own interruptibility. Spontaneity, curiosity, inspiration, moments of transcendence can’t be predicted any more than they can be inferred through scraping the internet. These are the moments that define who we are as a species.

Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, we have captured a world-changing power. With it comes world-bearing responsibility. Commoditized cognition comes at a price. At the dawn of this new era, we are already aware of many compelling ways in which this spark is a net gain, broadening the horizons of our capacity to understand the world and universe in which we live. May we continue to stay curious and to deepen our understanding of the fire in our hands. Eyes wide open.

- S

Sources

• Who Took the Legendary Earthrise Photo From Apollo 8? - Smithsonian Magazine

• Apollo 8 Earthrise - NASA

• ‘Earthrise’ Picture: How Apollo 8’s Photo Was Made - TIME

• ‘Earthrise,’ the Photo That Propelled the Environmental Movement - WTTW Chicago

• Clean Air Amendments of 1970, 91st Congress - Congress.gov

• EPA History: The Clean Air Act of 1970 - EPA

• Monitoring AI Adoption in the US Economy - Federal Reserve

• State of Generative AI Adoption 2025 - St. Louis Fed

• After the ChatGPT Moment: Measuring AI’s Adoption - Epoch AI

• 2026 AI Index Report - Stanford HAI

• ChatGPT Statistics - DemandSage

In December 1952, competitive runner John Landy ran the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds. When asked whether he could get his pace under 4 minutes, his response was “Frankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound like much, but to me, it’s like trying to break through a brick wall.” His assessment, reinforced by many sports commentators who believed such a feat could prove fatal, was that the human body was simply not built to run a mile in under 4 minutes.

Fifteen months later, on a blustery day in Oxford, England, a young medical student took to the cinder track on Iffley Road after working his shift at a local hospital. It was May 6, 1954.

He completed his first lap in :58, then his pace slightly slackened. As he began his fourth and final lap, he was at 3:01. But when Roger Bannister’s chest split the tape at the finish line at 3:59.4, the sound barrier of the running world was broken.

Forty-six days later, John Landy broke the 4 minute mile.

A busy medical student, Roger Bannister developed a training regimen that could be squeezed into his 30 minute lunch breaks at the hospital. Without the luxury of a flexible schedule, he made the most of whatever time he had. What he lacked in resource, he made up for in knowledge and in imagination.

Grounded in his understanding of human physiology: the cardiovascular system and the nervous system - in particular, the brain - Bannister concluded that the human heart could sustain the effort required to break the 4-minute mark. And by training the brain to absolutely know it was possible, he imagined he could override any potential panic response that could sabotage his goal.

That last ingredient - his trained imagination - unlocked the gate of possibility, not just for him, but for Landy and the 1600 runners who have accomplished the seemingly impossible since.

Unlocking the Gate

The key Bannister possessed was imagination. Combining his deep knowledge of the workings of the human body with a willingness to explore the frontiers of possibility, Bannister imagined a new way of training and performing in a human body. It was his imagination, backed by his training, that changed the world.

That key is the single most important instrument of our time.

Earlier this year, in January, tech founder and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and AI strategist Parth Patil teamed up for a 3-part conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Possible. The focus was largely on AI enterprise integration and what it means to become truly AI-native.

The centerpiece of the conversation, however, landed via a comment by Hoffman that succinctly encapsulates not only his humanist-technologist ethos, but forms the epistemological basis for the era in which we now live: the only true limit to how we use this revolutionary technology is human imagination itself.

Hoffman, a student of philosophy and an alumnus of the progressive, humanist-focused Putney School in Vermont, is no stranger to foundational thinking. His career is a builder’s odyssey, shaping the defining technologies of our era: PayPal, LinkedIn, Greylock, each venture a proof of the same underlying thesis.

In placing the ideological center of gravity on human imagination, Hoffman wasn’t being poetic. Rather, he was identifying the actual constraint. While so much contemporary focus is on the current limitations of compute, access, or technical prowess, Hoffman asserts that human imagination is the ultimate gatekeeper to progress, and our highest leverage.

Hoffman argues that AI represents a fundamental democratization of capability. We are at a moment when technology gives millions of people simultaneous access to tools once available only to institutions. He calls this “superagency:” the amplification of what any one person can accomplish, as outlined in his 2025 book by that name (Superagency, Authors Equity, 2025).

It’s a precise thesis. But a force multiplier requires a force. Superagency requires agency. And nowhere is human agency more powerfully reflected than in our capacity for imagination. It is the nexus of creativity and achievement, the frontier that has compelled our species since we harnessed fire. Imagination is the connective tissue between our highest aspirations and the determination to materialize them. Expanding human imagination is the work of our time.

Though it will play out most fully in the technological arena, this is not a technology question. At its core, this is a human development question.

Understanding Agency

Human agency is a set of capabilities that expresses our causal connection to the world around us. We learn this as infants and toddlers: the child who builds a tower of blocks, only to knock them down and build again, is learning that actions create consequences in the material world.

Certain aspects of human agency appear universal. The idea that we are the author of our own lives, often in cooperation with the divine, shows up across cultures, developmental psychology, and human history as a prerequisite for meaningful action. Its close companion is efficacy: the belief that our actions have real consequences, intended or unintended, that what we do matters. In that sense, efficacy is a form of faith: actions taken in the absence of a known, certain outcome.

Then there is imagination itself: the capacity to visualize that which doesn’t yet exist until it finally does. Before running a sub-4-minute mile, Bannister first trained his mind: the feel of it, the pace, the physiological reality. Imagination at that level of fidelity is one of the most potent forms of human agency.

At the foundation of agency is the unknown. When we act as agents in our own lives, we are embracing the uncertainty of the outcome. As agents, we are saying yes to participating in a creative process that may or may not work out the way we planned. We are experimenting with the laws of the universe to see whether we can bend them. Superagency is a collective practice that extends the reach of human capability to a species-wide scale.

These capacities are influenced by circumstance, culture, opportunity, and the examples we have been given or denied. The stories we tell, the models we hold up, and the access we extend to others are foundational to how, or even whether, we are building toward superagency.

Hoffman believes, as do I, that this is the ground upon which we must build the world we intend.

Courage to Imagine

It’s pithy and almost too easy to simply say “imagination is the key.” It’s more complicated to act on that ideal. Constraints to imagination, in order to be transcended in service to human agency, must first be acknowledged.

Of all constraints to human imagination, fear is the most pervasive. It is encoded in our DNA: we are descendants of ancient humans whose instinct toward self-preservation, fueled by fear, kept them from eating poisonous plants or being killed by predators. Those of us who enjoy the luxury of not living daily with mortal threats to our survival will find that that instinct is still alive and well, taking different forms: fear of failure, of being wrong. Fear is an imagination killer.

False certainty is subtler and perhaps more dangerous. It masquerades as realism or as “responsible thinking.” The doctors who believed with utmost certainty that the human heart would fail under four-minute-mile conditions were reasoning from a widely accepted framework of assumptions. It turned out their assumptions were wrong. Accepted frameworks are often limits to what is possible. Adherents are frequently the last to challenge their own thinking.

Third is a scarcity of models that enlarge and evolve our understanding of what’s possible. We cannot clearly imagine what we have not seen any evidence of. Bannister’s sub-4-minute mile would likely not have been possible without Swedish runner Gundar Hägg’s 9-year world record at 4:01.4. Imagination feeds on evidence. Deny leading evidence and you constrain the imagination. This is why democratization and access matter: education, mentors, stories of others on a shared path.

For all of us, in our work lives and beyond, the implications are direct. The roles that will matter most in an AI-native world are not necessarily the most technically proficient. They are the roles that require imagination: the capacity to ask questions yet to be asked, to see configurations that don’t yet exist, to persevere through the uncertainty of building something new. AI executes brilliantly within the parameters we give it. Defining those parameters is still a distinctly human job. Expanding the parameters, even more so.

Hoffman’s superagency - a democratized expansion of human capability - is dependent on the very thing that created this technological revolution in the first place: a well-fed human imagination. It is here that the greatest potential, the most impactful opportunities for investment exist in building the world we want. This is the most consequential work of our time.

- S

Sources

Superagency, Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Authors Equity, January 28, 2025

“Reid Riffs with Parth Patil on Enterprise AI Integration (Part 2 of 3),” Possible podcast, January 21, 2026. possible.fm/reidriffswithparth

John Landy, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, December 1952 and February 1954

Roger Bannister, sub-4-minute mile, May 6, 1954, Iffley Road, Oxford. World Athletics record progression

Gunder Hägg, world mile record of 4:01.4, set July 17, 1945, Malmö, Sweden. Held nine years until Bannister. World Athletics

On May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII signed his encyclical Rerum Novarum, or “Of New Things.” It was a response to the rapid rise of urbanization, factory labor, and the plight of workers during the Second Industrial Revolution.

One month ago, on the 135th anniversary of its publication, Pope Leo XIV, who chose his name in honor of Leo XIII, signed his first encyclical. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence was released to the public ten days later, on May 25, 2026. The 5-chapter, 245-paragraph letter aims to equip the global community with a moral framework and vocabulary of ethics for our rapidly changing, techno-centric world.

While formal papal letters, or epistles, are nearly as old as the Church itself (the first was written in 96 AD to the church at Corinth by Pope Clement I), they have evolved in scope, and with them, the role of the papacy itself. Formal communications from the Pope historically focused on doctrinal issues or matters within the Church. Encyclicals emerged as a distinct papal communication in the mid-18th century with the 1740 publication of Ubi Primum by Pope Benedict, addressing the role and responsibilities of the bishops of the Church.

The 1891 publication of Rerum Novarum was the first to extend beyond cloistered walls to address pressing issues in world affairs, ushering in a new genre of “social encyclicals” with a broader mission. In 1963, Pope John XXIII’s publication of Pacem In Terris, explicitly addressed “to all men of goodwill,” was the first by a pope to a global, non-Catholic audience. It was his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, rising concerns about human rights, and the need for nuclear disarmament. Subsequent social encyclicals have addressed issues from the Cold War to the global debt crisis, COVID, and the environment. Each has been published in response to the defining issue of the time, with far-reaching, generational implications for the world.

In taking on artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical urgently calls for a shared ethics to address the consequences, intended or unintended, of the rapid ascendancy of the technology and its increasing reach into every aspect of human life.

Magnifica Humanitas opens with a vivid contrast between two widely-referenced images: the Tower of Babel and the ideal City of Jerusalem, both the literal and metaphorical representation of a society built upon the ideals of human dignity and cooperation. Leo XIV returns to this dichotomy repeatedly throughout his encyclical, inviting the world to consider and consciously choose which to build with this new technological capacity.

As with previous social encyclicals, Magnifica Humanitas centers human dignity at the core of its moral argument. “The fundamental dignity of each person... is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.” In a world increasingly defined almost exclusively by the productivity of human work, Leo XIV reminds us that dignity is intrinsic to the human being, not conditioned on an arbitrary measure of output.

Magnifica Humanitas raises concerns about power and control as technology reaches increasingly deeper into private lives, with the power to shape practices before public policy has a chance to respond. He calls for AI to be “disarmed:” stripped of the assumption that “technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” Disarming, he writes, “does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

Leo XIV brings renewed focus to AI’s implications for human work. “The ‘new ways’ of working are not necessarily better... while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work.” (MH 150) On AI in warfare, he doesn’t equivocate: “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.” (MH 198) AI risks making the inhumanity of armed conflict easier and more impersonal by lowering the threshold for the possibility of using force to resolve conflict.

But perhaps most striking is Leo XIV’s juxtaposition between the transhumanist vision emerging from Silicon Valley and his celebration of the humanness of humanity itself. Where tech leaders hail AI as the remover of all barriers and limitations to being human - limits to human memory, cognition, even mortality itself; Leo XIV deliberately celebrates those limitations. ”Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” (MH 118) As head of a 2000-year-old institution that has, throughout most of its complex history, waged ideological war on the human condition, this positioning evolves the more humanistic stance of the modern Church into a full embrace of the frailty and fallibility of the human condition, while calling for its ongoing transformation.

Papal encyclicals have influenced public policy, extending far beyond traditional ecclesiastical spheres. They have been read and frequently cited by political leaders and policymakers, as well as religious leaders from other traditions. Rerum Novarum shaped labor law in countries with almost no Catholic population. Laudato Si’ was cited at UN climate negotiations by people who had never set foot in a church. Anthropic’s own co-founder, Dario Amodei, responded to Magnifica Humanitas by reaffirming the need for a slower pace of development of the technology to ensure it is done ethically.

Leo XIV reminds us that the ultimate power to decide how this era will be defined rests in human hands. ”Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” It is not “a force antagonistic to humanity,” nor is it “inherently evil.” (MH 4, 9) But it is also not neutral or innocent. It carries the imprint of the values of whoever built it, and whoever uses it.

Whether one is Catholic or not, religious or not, Magnifica Humanitas is a treatise that calls every one of us to participate actively, fully, and consciously in determining how this new technology will define this era and the ongoing evolution of our species by insisting on the democratization of public policy and an ethics-based set of guardrails to its development.

Will we build a Tower of Babel or the New Jerusalem? The choice is ultimately in our human hands.

- S

Sources

Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican.va)
Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power - Vatican News
‘Magnifica Humanitas’: Pope Leo Invokes Justice to Combat ‘Anti-Human Vision’ in AI - NC Register/CNA
What’s in a name? Why the pope picked ‘Leo XIV’ - America Magazine
Pope Leo XIV explains his choice of name - Vatican News (X)
Ubi Primum - Papal Encyclicals
First Epistle of Clement - Wikipedia
Pope St. Clement I - Letter to the Corinthians - Catholic Culture
Here is a list of all the social encyclicals of the Catholic Church - Aleteia
Pacem in terris - Wikipedia

We arrived in Vermont on Sunday in the midst of a blustery storm. The winds, gusting from the north as they often do here, produced waves on the lake which, set against the grey sky, made the lake feel more like the North Atlantic. On days like these, it’s easy to imagine that Lake Champlain was an inland sea many thousands of years ago.

I woke this morning to the pre-dawn light and the lake was like glass. Not a ripple could be seen, except those created by the family of otters that live among the rocks along our beach and shoreline. The sky was clear as hues of sunlight emerged from behind the Green Mountains to the east, dappling the water with shimmering gold.

The natural world reminds us that the only constant in life is change. Evolution, growth, adaptation - these are all coded deeply in our DNA. And yet, most of us meet moments of change with wariness or even fear: the greater the change, the greater the fear. That, too, is deeply coded into our DNA. It is the survival instinct in action: “What is this thing? I don’t know what it is. Is it a threat to me, to my family?” From the beginning of time, humans have asked these questions. We survived because they did.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that as we face the scope and scale of change happening in our world in the AI era: global, structural, and accelerating at an unparalleled pace, that there is considerable anxiety afoot. Many fear for their jobs or livelihoods. Others are worried about the role AI already plays in how we interact and even how we think. While the technology may be novel, the fears it has elicited are not.

So how do we respond constructively and creatively to this moment? Each of us will have our own answers, but there are some universal opportunities in this to consider.

First: ground in the big picture. We’d do well to remember that we are nature. We are derived from the very substance of the earth and cosmos: the elements and minerals that make up the stars and the mantle of our home planet. We are, quite literally, stardust. And we are woven into the fabric of the whole pattern of life on earth in all its complexities, uncertainties, and ineffable beauty. If you are reading this, chances are you are human, part of the species homo sapiens, who have been walking this 4.5 billion year old planet for 100,000-300,000 years. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the amount of change our species has seen, and has created, during our relatively brief time here.

Second: ground in the small picture. Your daily habits shape your world. They ultimately shape who you are. Think about the activities that make up your daily life, especially those that don’t involve screen time: making coffee in the morning, walking the dog, preparing meals, stretching, meditating. Whatever it is you do each day outside of screens, think about how those activities define your day, your life, your identity. What matters most to you, as reflected in your daily activities? Do they help you feel more grounded, more connected, more human? Is there anything you want to change, to add or remove from your list? Why or why not? This is an invitation to become the architect of your own human life, one small daily action at a time.

Third: ground in the movement between the two, the big and the small. We are all a small part of much larger stories: the story of humanity, the story of earth, and both are ever-evolving. The oscillation between the two reminds us to honor the evolution itself as a process, not just an outcome, of our efforts.

It is the daily tending of the garden of our lives, honoring the collaboration between us and that mysterious force that grows the carrots, tomatoes, and pea shoots. If last week’s question about work in the AI era is “What are you building?” this week’s asks: “What are we growing?”

For all of our accomplishments and capabilities, we can’t force the growth. We do our part: watering, weeding - the daily actions of tending and care. But the process itself has its own timetable. It’s governed by the very laws of the natural world that gave rise to all of life on earth, including us.

None of this changes in the AI era. We are still here. We are still human. We are still, like all other life on earth, beholden to the laws of the natural world and how things work around here. And nature, like us, is constantly changing. May we find comfort in the steadfast daily-ness of our lives as well as the constancy of change. By doing so, may we meet this pivotal moment with all the humanity we can.

- S

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On March 29, 2024, fantasy and sci-fi author Joanna Maciejewska posted the following on X:

“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The post went viral, with roughly 3.3M views, 92,000 likes and 21,000 reposts. Maciejewska’s post touched a raw nerve, exposing a tension many are feeling as AI proliferates into every aspect of our lives. Perhaps you’re feeling it too. From the boardroom to the kitchen table, it is a near-universal conversation.

But what Maciejewska’s post also voiced is the question of what exactly we want this technology to do (or not do) for us in our daily lives. While the answers will be as diverse and varied as we are, the question reveals a common thread, woven through a deeper, perhaps unconscious level of our thinking: by articulating what tasks we want to delegate to AIs and robots, we are telling ourselves what we value most about our daily human lives. As AI adoption accelerates and its reach into our lives deepens, every one of us is invited to consider precisely what those values are. What we learn from those answers, about ourselves and each other, will shape the course of civilization for generations to come.

The decision to delegate specific life functions or nothing at all to AI is, by implication, a statement about what matters most to us. It is a reflection of how and on what terms we want to participate in the mundanity of daily human activities. It invites us to rethink what we’re here to do with our lives, especially in what we might consider our life’s work, the role of jobs, and how we sustain our lives.

This is not a passive process. At a time when fears about widespread job loss pervade the airwaves and assumptions about what it means to “work” are being dismantled and reorganized, the AI era is forcing us to actively reexamine the notion of work itself. Where is the “human-in-the-loop,” as engineers might ask? And what exactly is the loop?

A Brief History of Work

For most of human history, daily life on earth did not include a separate activity called “work.” Human labor provided sustenance for life for one’s self, family, tribe, or village. It was defined by the needs of the moment as influenced by climate, topography, and season. As Jared Diamond points out in his Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997) the shape of the continents themselves played a fundamental role in the evolution of civilization: Eurasia’s east-west orientation allowed for the establishment of crops, animals, and resources across a band of thousands of miles of similar latitude and climate, whereas the Americas’ north-south orientation necessitated seasonal migration and continuous re-adaptation to temperate climates in order to access and cultivate food sources.

The Ju/‘hoansi, hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, are among the oldest continuous cultures on earth. Documented by anthropologist James Suzman who lived among them for decades, the Ju/‘hoansi spend roughly 15 hours per week on work, most of which was indistinguishable from leisure. 4500 miles to the north, ancient Greeks differentiated labor and leisure. Labor was seen as needed for survival. Leisure - the Greek scholē, root of the word “school” - represented the freedom to pursue knowledge.

The progressive bifurcation of labor and leisure continued into mid-18th century Britain, where, in 1771, Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill at Cromford was established. Widely considered the first true factory, it was a system that centralized not only labor but the laborers themselves. Arkwright built workers’ cottages so close to the mill that there was no separation between work and private life. Work became a place where one sold their labor in the form of time. Value was derivative of productivity; not intrinsic to life itself.

It became an ethos that defined western thought and persists to this day. In his work The Protestant Ethic (1904-5, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik), Max Weber described a quasi-doctrine of industriousness as piety. Calvinism, combined with Luther’s secular-work-as-divine-calling, held up hard work as a measure of godliness, idleness as precondition for debauchery and even evil. Long after Calvinism’s influence faded, the “iron cage” of the relentless pursuit of productivity prevails: a kind of internalized indentured servitude to the merciless master of progress.

By the mid-20th century, a new revolution was dawning. Advances in automation and technology were changing the way companies operated. Management theorist Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge worker” when, in his groundbreaking 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow, Drucker predicted that by the 21st century, the most valuable assets in a company would not be machines or capital, but the people who think for a living. Drucker forecasted knowledge work as the dominant form of labor in the US and Europe by the turn of the century.*

In the 67 years since, it has exploded as a broad category representing everything from IT specialists to product managers, consultants to c-suite executives. With it came a new dilemma: if “thinking” is the work, and one presumably thinks all the time, when is one not working? And how is productivity measured? When the product itself is less immediate or obvious, product-ivity becomes the metric. For knowledge workers it has meant the dissolving of boundaries between work and personal life, risking the erosion of personal relationships, of meaning derived from anything outside of one’s work.

Across each era, patterns and themes emerge. First, every civilization-changing revolutionary leap in innovation has been met by widespread fear, while heralded by others as ushering in a new golden age that would free up more of humanity’s time for leisurely pursuits - echoes of that ancient Greek ideal. Both proved to be right. Every revolution has had its winners and losers, especially at the economic, political, social, and racial margins.**

Second, through the arc of these revolutions: from agrarian life to the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the Industrial Revolutions to the Digital Revolution, and from the Digital Revolution to the AI Revolution, the purview of work has shifted from what you do (Industrial) to what you know (Digital) to who you are. With every era, work has assumed an increasingly pervasive jurisdiction over the self. We have traveled from Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things” to work itself as the measure of all things.

“What are you building?”

I overheard two young people at a cafe the other day. As they were catching up with each other, the question they exchanged was “What are you building?” I was struck by what I heard.

First, the ubiquity of the verb “build” reflects a nascent way of thinking about how we work in the AI era. Rather than “what do you do?” (as in, what is your job/career), a new vernacular has emerged. “What are you building?”

Second, “building” is an inherently process-oriented activity. To build, to be a builder, is to participate in the generative process of creating something, possibly that has never existed before. It is intrinsically optimistic, forward-looking, and creative.

This is, to me, the brightest promise of the AI era. When combined with an unprecedented availability of world-class tools to, we are poised to see some of the most astonishing achievements and creativity we have ever seen. It will happen across all domains.

But in order for this promise to be fulfilled for the greatest number of people, we need to ground this sweeping vision in a shared ethos that is best defined by two principles: democratization and discernment.

Democratization ensures the broadest accessibility of the most advanced tools available to as many as possible. It means lowering the barrier to entry economically by providing hardware and software tools for those who may have been left behind by the Digital Revolution. By doing so, we open the possibility for self-trained innovators and entrepreneurs to solve problems once thought to be unfixable.

We must also acknowledge that the “freedom to reconsider work” is not evenly distributed. It presupposes a foundation of economic security many don’t have. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that AI will likely worsen overall inequality. To ensure this doesn’t become reality, we need to address accessibility now, broadly and aggressively.

Discernment goes deeper. It speaks to the philosophical and ethical questions at the heart of our decision-making as a society. For the sake of brevity, I won’t list all of them here. I’ll tackle these in future essays.

Among the core questions:
• How do we define what it means to be “human” in an era that is increasingly hybrid, where human outputs are more and more a shared product of collaboration with AI?
• What do we delegate to machines, and what stays human? What remains uniquely human in this context, and why does it matter - not just to us personally, but to the global human community?
• How can we ensure the growth of AI and its physical infrastructure “do no harm” to the earth (Hippocrates, Chief Oren Lyons***), the life support system for our species?
• What is the role of creativity, of ownership over one’s own creative outputs and labor, and how can those be harnessed in service to what Buddha called “sammā-ājīva,” “right/whole livelihood,” that sustains our lives?

Who’s doing the dishes?

And what about our bodies? These exquisite marrowy, electric bio-suits we inhabit? As neuroscientist Richard Cytowic points out, we operate Stone Age hardware in a screen age. Physical energy is finite, and rest is essential for overall health as well as the optimal functioning of our brains. How we feel impacts how we think. Unlike our agentic or robotic counterparts, we need water, sleep, food, shelter, movement to sustain our lives.

Our brains need rest. They need boredom, play, stillness, and “offline time” to do the essential work of integrating ideas, consolidating memory, and synthesizing information. Too much input without rest starves our brains of the very process that generates fresh ideas, new insights, and to meaning. Einstein’s foundational “thought experiments” came to him while sailing Lake Geneva or playing the violin. Newton developed the theory of gravity while resting (some say napping) beneath an apple tree during a forced year off from his studies during the Great Plague. Our world has been shaped and reshaped by insights from brilliant minds at leisure - scholē - the ultimate “school” of deep human knowledge. Our ancient Greek ancestors nod in recognition. How do we center being human, in all of its idiosyncrasies and possibility, at the core of an ethos for this revolutionary time?

Asking the question at scale

Just as individuals face these questions, organizations and companies must too. Our publishing company met this moment by asking ourselves: what stays human in our work? How do we democratize our work and exercise discernment in the AI era? As creators of the bestselling nature field guides of all time, we aren’t strangers to complex projects. Our 50 year legacy was built on rigorous scholarship from thousands of the best scientists and experts in the world and includes leading reference titles in pet care for the ASPCA, decorative arts for the Smithsonian, and others. To navigate the Digital Revolution we built an infrastructure that enabled us to bring knowledge to rising generations in new ways. What started in 2018 as the new foundation for our work became, in May 2025, Fieldstone ATLAS™: Assimilation of Taxonomic data for Leverage via Automation and Scale.

Counter to the prevailing “scrape-and- share” modes of current AIs and LLMs, we decided the human-in-the-loop remains at the center of our ethos and defines its value. As hallucinated responses from AIs proliferate, we responded by evolving our methodology to scale access to knowledge - trusted, grounded, verified (by real human experts), validated knowledge - to those platforms humans are increasingly turning to for answers they can trust. Our work extends to reference knowledge from any domain. Through a commitment to human excellence, combined with the best technical tools available, we bring our core human values of trust, knowledge, accuracy, and rigor into this new era. It is our response to Maciejewska’s question. We hope that by doing so, we inspire others to do the same.

As a civilization, we certainly aren’t the first to ask these questions. What is unprecedented is the sheer scale, velocity, and stakes against which we are doing this work. In every area of our lives, we are all being challenged to consider what remains exclusively and uniquely human in our work and lives; what, if anything, becomes the domain of our new digital/robotic compatriots; and how we want to design our lives. Though our answers will be as diverse as we are, may we take up this challenge together as homo sapiens, with all the courage and commitment our human bodies can hold. It may be - indeed, is - the most important work of our lives.

Now, back to the dishes.
-S

* Drucker was right. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows management, professional, and related occupations now account for 44% of the U.S. workforce — roughly 71 million people. Globally, knowledge workers represent an estimated 30% of the labor force, synthesized from national statistical agencies. No single authoritative body tracks the category. Source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

**This may be my understatement of the year, and I hope readers will forgive the oversimplification of what is a lifetime’s work (or more) to truly explicate the intersection of these dynamics within a comprehensive history of capitalism.

***From “First, Do No Harm to the Earth,” Chief Oren Lyons’ July 2011 address at the White House. Lyons (b. 1930) is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and has spent six decades as a global voice for Indigenous rights and environmental responsibility.

Sources & Further Reading

Joanna Maciejewska, X post, March 29, 2024

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997)

James Suzman, Work: A Deep History (Penguin, 2021)

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik)

Peter Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow (Harper & Row, 1959)

Richard Cytowic, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age (MIT Press, 2024)

Chief Oren Lyons, “Do No Harm to the Earth,” White House address, July 2011

International Monetary Fund, Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, Staff Discussion Note, January 2024

The Buddha, on sammā-ājīva (right livelihood), the Noble Eightfold Path

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The sun was just peeking out from behind the San Gabriel Mountains as I sipped my coffee in the pre-dawn light. It’s my favorite time of day. I was re-reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, specifically in search of a reference I had remembered from my first reading of the book, related to an idea I was simmering.

I never did find the reference I was looking for. Instead, as the sun rose that morning, book in hand, I was hit squarely in the noggin with the mental equivalent of a 2x4.

In his discussion on behavior change, Clear outlines three layers: Outcomes (outer layer), Processes (middle layer), and Identity (core layer). He argues that the third, Identity, is the deepest and ultimately where long-term successful habit forming happens. All three matter, but what’s most important is the direction of change. From Outcomes-in, we are chasing results as an external dependency that we hope will ultimately shift our identity. (e.g. “When I lose x pounds, make x dollars, I will consider myself healthy, wealthy,” etc.) As anyone who’s tried to create a new habit knows, progress almost never happens overnight. Outside-in, we are more likely to get derailed in the absence of immediate results or at least demonstrable progress toward those outcomes.

Shift the direction to inside-out and suddenly it’s a different animal. “Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits,” he writes. “The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.” Boom. Lasting habits, lasting change, happen from the inside out.

Who are we? Who do we wish to become?

Over the course of my eclectic career, I have worn many hats, embraced many identities. Opera singer. Public speaker. Running coach. Voice coach. Environmentalist. Corporate finance. Abstract painter. Leadership and personal development coach. Publisher. Entrepreneur. Daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother. I have loved and still love them all. And one more.

Writer.

Over the years I have used writing to puzzle things out that baffled or enraged me, to inspire hope and solutions-oriented thinking in others when the world seemed to be going haywire. I’ve written essays, long-form social media posts, chapters of yet-unpublished books that simmer in the recesses of my mind in every waking moment.

But I have never thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I’ve pushed pretty hard against it when others have suggested I am. I don’t know the cause of that deep resistance. That I come from a family of writers, scholars, librarians, and am a publisher myself may be contributing factors. My father published enough books to be able to stack his against his father’s books and come out on top of a self-imposed competition with his father’s ghost. Hm.

When confronted on the pages of a book I had read before with the inescapable question: who do I wish to become?, for some reason, on that sunny early morning, looking out at the San Gabriel Mountains, “writer” tumbled out of my consciousness before I had the chance to yank it by the arm and reel it back in.

I am a writer. I am becoming a writer. I am many other things too, but “writer” is no longer an exiled part of who I am.

Busted by my own unedited mind, staring down the inescapable straight-talk-logic of Clear’s book (could he have a more perfect name?), I was reminded that “behind every system of actions is a belief.” The converse is also true: behind every belief is a system, or pattern, of actions. Action reinforces belief. Belief forms identity.

A writer writes.

Three friends in the last five days, independent of one another, suggested I start a Substack. I’ve learned to pay attention to things happening in threes. So here I am.

My writings will be centered on three themes:

Work: how we create livelihood that sustains us and those we love, especially in the AI era;

Life: how we spend the unknowably finite hours of our “one wild and precious” time here (thank you, Mary Oliver); and

Meaning: how we find or make it, even when things in our life, our world, make absolutely no sense and we’re not even sure what’s real.

Some will be long-form, teasing out ideas I’m curious about and seeing where they go. Others will be short nuggets, possibly inspired by some great thinker I am reading at the time. Sometimes I’ll write in prose, other times it might be poetry. I’ll be here every week, on Tuesdays.

I can’t promise earth-shattering insights or world-changing epistemologies. I can’t (really, won’t) offer easy answers or pithy platitudes. Rather, on these digital pages, I promise to be as brave and transparent as my stoic New England Yankee self will allow, perhaps warmed and stretched by the California sunshine in which I’m now blessed to live. Growing up in Vermont, I was raised on little light (thank you, Noah Kahan) and am making up for it.

I can promise to keep it real, and hope that by doing so, it brings something of value into your world. You are making time to be here. I promise to strive to make it worth your time. I won’t do it perfectly, and I hope that’s ok. A test kitchen for ideas means some experiments will be delicious; others might turn out inedible. It’s apparently how we writers roll. Heartfelt thanks to James Clear, for making it so…clear.

Let’s begin.
S