Then, from the back, a graduate student asked a devastating question: “How am I supposed to build a life in the face of this news? Where do I find hope?”

I find myself thinking of her as the headlines once again turn apocalyptic, with a new threat looming. The public resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former researcher with Anthropic, over his fears about AI’s fast-growing genocidal superpowers, has sparked a much-needed call for an industry-wide slowdown.

It’s past time for more robust regulation of AI companies, and I applaud the whistleblowers calling for it. Meanwhile, we average citizens are left reeling. How are we to live in the face of these novel apocalyptic visions? How do we make our grocery lists and take our kids to school while knowing that AI could be planning a highly-coordinated global drone attack or designing a lethal infectious virus within the decade? Where do we find hope?

Back in 1982, during the thick of the Cold War, when the apocalyptic flavor of the day was the threat of nuclear annihilation, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published a seminal paper: “Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness.” In it, he named the human tendency to numb out in the face of absurdity. We repress our knowledge that everyone we love might imminently be bombed into radioactive rubble so that we can tend to the dinner, the tantrum, the deadline. This is practical and necessary and sensible. It is also spiritually corrosive, not to mention politically ineffectual. The existential threat still exists; we have simply turned away.

I raise this not to cast any blame. I myself behave this way, every day. I, too, have exigencies: classes to prep, papers to grade, dinners to make, bills to pay. I have a whole repertoire of numbing strategies, many of them at my literal fingertips. (I’m looking at you, iPhone.) I raise it because I want to become more aware of how I tend to numb out, so that I can resist it. And, crucially, because I need your help.

Yes, you, dear reader. You there, phone in hand, perched, just like me, on the dizzying spin of this aching earth. I need you to help me imagine this latest existential threat, to feel the way it quickens my blood, prickles my skin, and swells tidally within me. I need you to help me sit with the feeling, to keep me from numbing it away.

Why? Because it is this willingness to fully imagine the threat—to feel it in our bodies—that allows us to connect with one another in our shared feeling, and through that connection, to act.

Lifton concludes his paper by calling the cultural moment “desperate but hopeful.” Awareness of the nuclear threat was blossoming, and with it a movement toward disarmament. Energized by Dr. Randall Forsberg’s “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” and goaded by authors like Jonathan Schell, who published a series of urgent essays in the New Yorker, people spoke out in city councils, places of worship, public housing, labor unions, and town meetings. And they organized. A million people demonstrated at the UN’s Special Session on Disarmament just a few months before Lifton’s article published—the largest disarmament protest in U.S. history. It took a groundswell—a wave of action spurred by deep human feeling—to pull the U.S. and the Soviet Union back from the brink.

We are at a similar moment now, only the deadlocked powers are the U.S. and China. But awareness is alive and growing. People are pushing back against the massive data center build-out. As of May 2026, at least 430 local opposition groups across 40 states had sprouted up—a sevenfold increase since December. And this activism is already producing results: since 2024, more than 170 billion dollars in data center investment across 20 U.S. states has been blocked, stalled, or canceled. Even more encouraging: data center opposition bridges political divides. A recent Pew Research survey found concern about AI outranks excitement among most Americans.

Awareness is rising, and with it, hope. The AI-pocalypse is not inevitable. Not if we speak out, organize, and—soon—vote. We the people still have the power to elect representatives who believe in AI regulation, and to hold them accountable for instituting change. We can still pull back from this particular brink. But to do it, we need to resist numbness’ siren call and allow ourselves to really imagine, in a physical, bone-and-blood way, the disaster we want to avoid. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But enough of the time to keep ourselves from looking away.

“This issue,” concluded Lifton in 1982, referring to nuclear proliferation, “is deadly serious, but our call is not a grim one. It is a call to life.” A call, in other words, to the fullness of fellow human feeling. It’s emotional and spiritual work, as much as it is political. And it requires support—from loved ones, friends, communities.

I’ll do it if you will, dear reader. Let’s live fully, together.

Though it is certainly not life and death, a parallel confusion is evident in discerning what is real and what is fabricated from news and social media to homework that is completed with little or more than a little help from AI. As a parent and university professor, the confrontation of truth vs. fake is nearly constant.

I grew up in Mumbai/Bombay, India where guns were not plentiful except on Bollywood screens. Parents could send their children on play dates without worrying about whether the adults in the house had guns.

Here in the U.S., it is different. Plentiful daily gun violence belied the use of guns for protection.  Guns made mass shootings –where more than four people are shot –entirely possible and probable. In the U.S., there were nearly 340 mass shootings from South Carolina to Minnesota to Mississippi.

But beyond the encounters between a police officer and an individual out in the streets, a doorbell ring is taken to be a home invasion and one can never be sure who has a gun and who does not. We are suspicious of each other and have to overcome more than shyness to build community.

In the age of AI, one can never be sure what is real and what is fake, what is disinformation and what is truth. To be sure, mortality is not at stake with the ubiquitous AI use, but the future is.

In schools and colleges, the rise of large language models (LLMs) is making essay writing a breeze with just a prompt. I have struggled with assessing how much a student has written is their own work.  Now that the first semester of the year is half completed, it is critical to examine how to deal effectively with AI use before more knowledge learning is lost.

It is necessary to treat LLMs as new ways of accessing the digital world, replacing search engines, much like the calculators replaced the slide rules.  A 2025 study of more than 12,000 high school and college students shows that 97% of the students use AI in their assignments. It should be noted that not all use of AI is cheating.

As in other domains, we are using AI to solve problems created by AI. It is possible to run the term papers through various plagiarism-detection software and decide to set the checking software at the level of a phrase or of a sentence, or at the level of an inarticulately paraphrased but correctly cited scientific paper. Then, assessing if say a plagiarism score of 10% (on some hastily defined scale) is sufficient to initiate punitive actions. There is little guidance from college administrators or the developers of such software packages.

Perhaps developers are waiting for the real-world training instructors inadvertently provide to improve their packages. Perhaps in less than a year, they will post data with confidence intervals based on the behavioral patterns of students and teachers.

To be fair, cheating has always been prevalent in schools and colleges. And, instead of bribing a classmate to write your essay, you need only write a prompt in ChatGPT.  As always, it is up to the instructor to decide how much thought, agony and learning went into a term paper.

But we lose something when we begin each encounter with a stranger or read the first lines of an essay from a place of suspicion. Instructors wonder if the student did really write this, how much came from them and how much was an LLM, and more importantly, do the students understand what they have written.

There are some dire warnings of the use of AI. As recent research shows it can result in, “The erosion of trust, the hollowing-out of the student–teacher relationship, and the further commodification of learning threaten to precipitate a legitimation crisis for the academy itself.”

One solution may be to go old school on this one and use pen and paper in class.  And also to really get to know the students IRL.

Recall that in New Orleans, in the face of the catastrophic hurricane assigned the name Katrina, it was the levee system that did not hold, that burst sending water gushing back into the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished areas. Our project team was exploring what happens to wetland ecosystems when levees systems like the one that broke (i.e., an elevated humanmade barrier or embankment constructed to stop the natural flow of water often to create dry developable land) breach naturally over time. During her presentation, four years before Katrina, the plant biologist said she knew with certainty that if a massive storm hit, the levee systems in New Orleans would not hold. Four years prior to Katrina, she urgently shared this information with government officials, warning them of the imminent threat particularly to poor, elderly, and Black residents if the levee system broke. But instead of taking action to bolster the failing system, she was told: “We have the body bags ready.”

What have we learned in the twenty years since Hurricane Katrina? Twenty years after the dehumanization of the Superdome, the false and racialized narratives conflating looting with survival, the gutting helicopter footage of primarily poor and Black Americans seeking refuge on sinking rooftops, the government, at local, state, and federal levels collectively left the most vulnerable communities to drown and then fight for their lives on their own.

Surely, we’ve made advances since 2005 to increase disaster response. We certainly have. Yet it’s difficult to see that progress as the current federal administration systematically dismantles the upstanding science agencies designed to keep Americans safe. Innovations that include: advances in extreme weather modeling and forecasting, efficient warning systems, effective evacuation mechanisms, comprehensive disaster recovery plans and strategies. For example, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency foundational to our knowledge and understanding of extreme weather events has been decimated and the experts that created and perfected hurricane modeling and tracking have been fired. Likewise, it is the knowledge of experts at the National Weather Service (also part of NOAA) used to issue timely severe weather watches and warnings. Further, these lifesaving warnings and evacuation orders, that allow people time to plan and escape are being silenced.

Just last month Congress unconscionably voted to cancel funding for the Center for Public Broadcasting which supports the very public radio that broadcasts critical extreme weather information to impacted areas, especially in rural regions that may not have access to other information sources. Finally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), designed to help Americans navigate unexpected disasters that leave their lives in disarray was merged with the Department of Homeland Security and lacks leadership and expertise. We saw the consequences of these unconscionable eliminations decisions that allowed incompetence and dysfunction to lead the response in Texas during the floods that took too many lives; urgent calls unanswered, critical funding inaccessible, emergency warning systems failed. The slice of human tragedy we witnessed in Texas is a warning of what is to come on much larger scales as climate change increases the likelihood and severity of extreme weather events. We must act now.

What can we do? How do we maintain hope and possibility as publicly available climate data and tools are erased from federal websites, limiting the ability to make evidence-based decisions? As agencies like the National Science Foundation terminate grants that engage in climate science research because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities;” an experience I know too well, having lost my NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award that supports science teachers and students as community-based climate action researchers.

What we do is we reimagine, we resist, we collectively stand up. For inspiration, I look to sources of bravery and determination in and outside of science including: Data scientists saving and archiving tools that the government has tried to erase, scientists at the National Institute of Health and on, issuing powerful statements of ethics and solidarity; persistent Americans, especially in red states, who attend town halls demanding that politicians answer to them, their constituents; residents of Los Angeles peacefully marching in solidarity with their immigrant neighbors and in defiance of a president who they will not allow to mischaracterize them; artists who reject the attempted erasure of their creativity because U.S. history and politics, in its truth telling, isn’t supposed to be comfortable.

As a professor I see the young people across this nation fighting to be heard, demanding the future they desire and envisioning it into being. We must stand up for science because science can be used to keep us all safe, especially the most vulnerable among us. On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we stand together as those who not just refuse to be silenced but who demand and reimagine anew.

I am a subject matter expert and consultant on sexual exploitation and when I teach parents about the risks of online sexual exploitation, including grooming, sextortion, and sex trafficking, they ask, “what parental controls do you recommend?” After all, 55% of parents of children under five years old allow their children to interact with a smartphone. Unfortunately, there are no parental controls that guarantee protection from online predators.

Technologies for blocking inappropriate content are not well tuned so it can be difficult to find the right level of control. A very high level of security will increase blocking of appropriate sites, frustrating your child, and encouraging them to seek ways around the controls. A lower level of security will allow more illicit content through. Maintaining the right level of control for a child’s developmental age and social sophistication is a relentless and evolving challenge.

Predators are more sophisticated than parental controls. They know how to pose as children on Roblox, Discord, Snapchat, Instagram, and more. They use a grooming process to gain the attention and trust of children. Thus, once children are able to control their own contacts, they can be targeted by exploiters who pose as peers and slowly fish for relationships, targeting children who are going through a hard time, such as bullying, a fight with a parent, or a break-up. Children who are swayed by the attention can be convinced to share increasingly personal information, including pictures. If a child can be convinced to send pictures of their body, they can be used by the predator for money, power, or sextortion.

The grooming process can also result in the predator identifying the child’s location and seeking contact with the child. Thus, it is important for children to avoid sharing social media posts with locations where they live, go to school, play, or work. Parents should avoid “sharenting” because posting private information about children not only violates their privacy but can also lead to identity theft, bullying, and exploitation.

Parents risk losing any battle of wills related to social media as their children become teenagers and start focusing on peer relationships and connectivity. This fight can cause damage to the parent-child relationship and ultimately make the child even more vulnerable to predators, who are sophisticated at psychologically exploiting children. For example, predators know how to increase distance between a teenager and their parents. They empathize with a teenager’s desire for autonomy and use predictable parental reactions against them. “Don’t tell your parents about our relationship or they will take your phone away,” is a common ploy. If the child does tell their parents, and their parents do take away their phone, the predator is proven correct and can now provide the child with a phone they control.

Given all this, parents are critical in nurturing their children’s safe use of social media and internet connectivity. This includes setting time limits and monitoring use while teaching social media literacy. In addition, parents can engage their children in consistent, ongoing discussions about the benefits and harms of social media.

Nurturing a parent-child relationship that adapts to a child’s development and encourages open communication takes the power away from predators who seek to exploit the need for love, belonging, and self-esteem. Talking to children about their bodies, healthy relationships, and consent versus coercion from an early age – before they enter early adolescence – helps equip them with knowledge before they gather information online or from their middle school friends.

When parents create consistent, ongoing opportunities to talk about sensitive topics before children seek relationships outside the family, parents become a safe place for teenagers and young adults to seek guidance, even when they are old enough to have full access to social media and are focused entirely on their peers.

A parents’ relationship with their child is their best weapon against predators.

This paradox presents a challenge for educators like myself. On the one hand, children with disabilities face diminished access to equitable education due to cuts to Medicaid and the Department of Education. On the other hand, ADA regulations offer a vital and long-overdue step toward digital accessibility in our public schools and universities.

ADA Title II regulations, updated in April 2024, require public entities to meet digital accessibility standards. At the public university level, many professors, staff, and administrators are beginning to grapple with what it means to ensure that digital content in classrooms is accessible — by 2026 for entities serving a population of 50,000 or more, and by 2027 for those serving fewer. This effort is guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, a widely recognized set of standards designed to make digital content usable for all.

To be sure, this mandate places significant demands on staff, administrators and faculty. I have heard colleagues at various universities voice their frustrations. Many feel overwhelmed by the workload of updating course materials, uncertain where to begin, and even questioning the necessity of the effort, wondering, for example, whether it is needed if there are no blind or deaf students currently enrolled in their classes. This is why ensuring that instructors and staff understand both how to make materials accessible and, more importantly, why it matters is not just helpful—it’s essential.

Over one billion people worldwide have a disability, according to the World Health Organization. In our classrooms, many students live with disabilities, some visible, others less apparent, including those related to neurodiversity, chronic illness or mental health.

Individuals with dyslexia may rely on screen readers or audio versions of course materials. Students with ADHD may benefit from simplified layouts to maintain focus. Captions can support students who are learning in a second language or studying in noisy, shared spaces. Likewise, students with color blindness may struggle to interpret color-coded charts or slides, and benefit from designs that use text labels or patterns in addition to colors.

Accessibility is not just for a few; it’s for everyone. When we design with inclusion in mind, we create learning environments that support the diversity of our students.

Accessible syllabi, lecture slides and course websites are more than just boxes to check—they create equitable opportunities for learning and ensure that everyone can fully participate in education.

During an accessible design workshop my students and I conducted with middle school students and their parents, a parent who works at a university shared how the session reshaped her perspective on accessibility and Title II. What had once felt like a burdensome workplace requirement became a meaningful practice. By learning about the challenges people with disabilities face when software is inaccessible, and engaging with videos and hands-on activities, she gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of making content accessible.

As universities rush to update digital materials to meet accessibility standards and create workshops for faculty, staff, and teaching assistants, it is crucial to focus not only on meeting legal requirements but also on remembering why accessibility is essential. It’s not just about mandates; it’s about promoting equal access to education.

Institutions can take this moment to invest in accessibility training that goes beyond compliance and fosters understanding. Using videos, case studies, and hands-on activities can help illustrate why accessibility is important. This mandate presents an opportunity for universities to reimagine their approach to education, ensuring access for all learners.

In addition to considering software accessibility, it’s also important to reflect on accessibility within our teaching practices. These changes benefit not only neurodiverse students but all learners. Simple adjustments, such as offering additional formats for lectures, like recorded videos or written summaries can make content more accessible. Providing flexible assessment options, such as project-based assignments, can support students who struggle with traditional testing formats.

As federal budget cuts jeopardize the education, research and services for people with disabilities, the future feels more uncertain than ever.

ADA and its Title II provisions are more vital than ever. Public universities and institutions must remain committed to creating inclusive learning environments for all students.

Oprah Winfrey’s recent TV special, “AI and the Future of Us,” brought the angst and excitement of AI home as the architects, researchers, pundits, and opposers unraveled the esotericism surrounding AI, laying bare its promise and peril.

GenAI and the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) have induced a tapestry of fear that calls into question perceptions of reality and the  resistance to change crafted from a shared understanding of normalcy, historicized violence and domination, structured biases and privileges, loss of privacy, control, autonomy, criminality, ultimately human capacity, and obsolescence—scary stuff.

As faculty in a major Illinois state university system, like many in my field, I feared AI would eventually replace educators and take over the world. As a Black feminist, I suspected AI would minimize voices based on bias.

According to Yeshimabeit Milner and Amy Traub, Data for Black Lives founders, these fears are valid not because AI is a hotbed for domination but because data capitalism could actualize those fears.

Data capitalism refers to an “economic model built on the extraction and commodification of data and the use of big data and algorithms as tools to concentrate and consolidate power in ways that dramatically increase inequality along the lines of race, class, gender, and disabilities.”

Awareness of and vigilance against technocracy exploitation and manipulation of stolen data for capital gain is essential. Critical consumption and skill development of AI tools are ways to navigate and counter these pitfalls. AI’s potential as an evolutionary tool far outweighs the fear that it can be used in repressive and subtractive ways.

Thirty-six percent of faculty surveyed in 2024 by Tyson Partners have never used GenAI. Those who do primarily use it in assessment, structure feedback, and refine communication. University faculty’s consistent use of GenAI lags students by 37%. Across the educational landscape, students want to use GenAI and view it as a valuable tool in their learning and academic pursuits more than their teachers.

I began expanding my use of GenAI in research and other areas of the profession in 2023. Before that, I had used Grammarly,  LiquidText, search engines, and annotation platforms for research but had not considered other tools.

While serving on a dissertation committee, I turned to ChatGPT to discuss the nuances of intersectionality, and immediately noticed no reference to Black feminist thought.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, author of the 2023 book Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, is one of the foremost authorities on AI inequity and justice.

While a graduate student at MIT working on an art project, she discovered AI bias in its stereotypical responses to darker skin and other cultural prompts. Her work, as well as others, has brought into light the way AI bias causes harm to historically marginalized and minoritized individuals and groups.

GenAI pulls from galaxies of data marred by racism, sexism, ableism, and casteism, offered up as disinformation intended to mislead. Users will also have to field hallucinations, fabrications of things that do not exist, and misrepresentations of things that may exist but are taken out of context or distorted.

For my work, the omission of Black feminists is characteristic of power differentials architected into GenAI, ranking and ordering what knowledge is more important.

In one Chat GPT session, I challenged the erasure of Black feminist contributions to the discourse of intersectionality with what I knew. The bot apologized, and a compelling dialogue ensued. Ideas and concepts branched in many conceptual directions and were organized in a way that made it possible to connect with larger ideas. I began asking more intentional and complex questions that deconstructed normed concepts in multiple contexts.

GenAI, as a thought partner, is always ready to engage and never tires or gets frustrated by the constant need to understand minor details. It was like having a second brain or a conceptual enhancement that brought excitement back to learning by exploring new conceptual pathways that sparked creativity.

That was dampened by a nagging feeling that this discourse was somehow cheating. The bite of this feeling comes from experiential wisdom, an awareness of the knowledge and methods used to diminish and devalue Black women’s work. I worried that publicly admitting that I use GenAI as a thought partner would make me more vulnerable to attacks branding me as plagiaristic, ultimately questioning my worth.

In March 2024, I accepted with trepidation an invitation to share my experiences using GenAI on a university-wide panel. During the question-and-answer period, several faculty members expressed a common concern about GenAI: it is sophisticated student cheating.

Cheating is an issue that educators must address, but experts warn against fixation. “Before ChatGPT hit the scene, some 60 to 70 percent of students reported engaging in at least one form of ‘cheating” behavior, said Denise Pope, one of the researchers of a Standford Study of GenAI and Student Cheating. The Standford Researchers found that students’ cheating dipped for years.

Since introducing AI detection in April 2023, Turnitin, a plagiarism software, has reviewed over 200 million papers. Eleven percent of those papers had at least 20% AI writing, and over 60 million papers had at least 80% AI writing present.

In a Wiley study, 33% of students surveyed felt that GenAI made it too easy for students to cheat. In contrast, faculty reported they felt that AI use eroded critical thinking skills. When asked if cheating would occur over the next three years, 38% of students said that cheating would remain about the same, and 48% of faculty agreed.

Perhaps the fixation on GenAI’s threat to academic integrity comes from the fear of change. Perhaps policing students’ cheating offers some semblance of normalcy, clinging to a system designed to exclude and dehumanize. Notable experts argue that humans naturally fear the unknown, allowing those powerholders to exploit this fear for socio-cultural and political advantage.

A key component of balancing and expanding human ingenuity through engaging GenAI as a thought partner requires learning to ask the right questions through prompt engineering. Fear expressed as a fixated gaze on cheating or second-guessing the use of AI as a tool will not allow for preparing young people whose futures will be vastly different than what is known.

GenAI, allows users to access its benefits while discerning its perils. Educators, educational leaders, administrators, policymakers, faculty, students, and tech innovators must work to make AI accessible and inclusive so that all users can reap its benefits without bias or erasure.

In the name of equity.

At the same time, the value we attach to human life is decreasing, as evidenced by a diminishing life expectancy. There is an urgent need to rein in costs and still enhance the quality of life. Life should be valued high, while living it should not be expensive. Investing in Artificial Intelligence can help facilitate these.

When I was debating whether to relocate to the United States more than two decades ago, my friends told me that the value the country attaches to life is far greater compared to any other country and essential commodities are surprisingly affordable.

Unfortunately, that seems to be changing for various reasons – a corrupted value system, mental health issues, diseases, drug overdoses, the resulting strain on the healthcare system, and many more. No wonder, the American quality of life has been declining.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can’t fix everything, of course, but it can help alleviate financial pressures on individuals and communities. And that will help improve the quality of life.

AI can help lower costs and, owing to productivity gains, give time back to people to focus more on the quality of their and others’ lives. By automating repetitive, mundane tasks and making the work more interesting, jobs can become more satisfying, reducing anxieties and stress levels, and boosting mental health.

AI can help identify opportunities for improved efficiency and democratize access to services including healthcare and education. Enhancing access reduces costs significantly. The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in May 2022 reported that the proportion of the US hospitals using AI has increased thrice since 2020.

Significant productivity improvements can be achieved in any vertical that AI is applied to. Increased productivity translates to reduced costs for the manufacturers and lowered prices of consumer goods to the customers. In transportation, AI can help reduce congestion and optimize routes, thereby saving fuel.

Automating tasks in financial management using AI goes way beyond algorithmic trading by executing trades based on analytics generated from the market and opportunities identified. In addition to keeping the trading costs low, this also removes human error due to emotions, biases, and unnecessary apprehensions that are often a cause for poor performance.

AI has unleashed major breakthroughs in preventive care and personalized medicine lowering the risk for expensive treatments and hospitalization. Public safety can be enhanced by AI enabled predictive policing, efficient emergency response, and improved disaster management.

In my machine learning classes, sustainability topics play a big role. Students are incentivized to work on a semester-long project applying machine learning for sustainable outcomes. Sustainable practices lead to a better environment, help avoid calamities, and therefore lower costs. Using AI for precision farming, optimizing agricultural practices, and making them sustainable can lower food costs. All these and more lead to lowering inflation.

Of course, governance and social factors always trump technology. If the government decides to increase its spending like in the case of the American Rescue Plan and CARES Act, or if the national debt ceiling continues to be raised, or if the Federal Reserve increases the money supply, AI may not be able to help much.

Corporate greed, excessive price increases, opportunistic labor practices, and other such vile circumstances can also create inequities and inflation that AI may not be able to help with. Also, AI is not entirely free of flaws. AI deployments are often impacted by privacy, fairness, and job displacement concerns, to name a few. In my talk to the University of Bolton audiences,  I explained the social sustainability impacts of AI.

It is therefore imperative that AI be used responsibly. AI is certainly no panacea but will go a long way in ensuring an affordable quality of life while lowering costs and keeping inflation in check if used ethically, responsibly, and in a manner fair and beneficial to society. For all these reasons and more, investing in AI can help in an affordable quality of life and retirement in the long run.

Those treated for their hepatitis C live longer, have lower rates of liver cirrhosis, and lower rates of other chronic diseases like diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Yet, only 40% of those with chronic hepatitis C infection in the U.S. are aware of their diagnosis.

Even when patients have a diagnosis and seek curative treatment, the hurdles are immense –  as few as 22% receive these effective therapies. Despite the 2021 development of a U.S. national strategic plan to achieve HCV elimination in 2030 in line with World Health Organization goals for worldwide HCV elimination, the U.S. is  not on track to meet these goals.

This is due to a complex path to treatment, deficiencies in available rapid testing, restrictions on prescribing treatment, and a reluctance to meet patients where they are. Some states are addressing this, as in Massachusetts, where leaders recently introduced its HCV Elimination Plan. 

To receive treatment, patients must first be diagnosed. This requires a visit with a doctor for a blood test to check for an antibody to the hepatitis C virus. Then, patients with a positive antibody must return for another visit to have another blood test to see if they have detectable virus in their blood.

Depending on where they live and which insurance provider they have, patients may need to have viral genotype testing to find out what strain of virus they have. They also may need to prove they already have liver damage, and they may need to see a specialist physician, or may even need to prove sobriety.

If these measures seem complex and restrictive, it’s because they were designed to filter insurance coverage for expensive, curative treatments – treatments that range in cost from $23,000 – $95,000 without insurance.

Another barrier to treatment is the outdated testing system. Available tests to diagnose hepatitis C infection must be performed in large clinical laboratories, which may result in delays to treatment and is a recognized barrier.

In the U.S., there are no approved tests to detect hepatitis C at the point-of-care. This limits both where tests can be performed and how long it takes to get a diagnosis. This lack of rapid diagnosis is particularly important for patients with hepatitis C – many of whom have little contact with the healthcare system and may not have symptoms associated with the disease for years.

COVID-19 had an adverse impact on hepatitis C elimination efforts in the U.S.. But the expanded access to rapid diagnostic testing and governmental programs created to more rapidly approve these tests also present a unique opportunity to make real progress.

Many states continue to impose restrictions on the prescription of hepatitis C treatment, including requirements for prior authorization, viral genotyping, staging for the severity of liver disease, sobriety, and specialist prescribers.

These requirements do not serve patients’ interests and need to be removed in light of high cure rates deliverable to all patients receiving these treatments and professional recommendations that all patients be treated.

Physicians often diagnose patients with hepatitis C only when they begin to experience the symptoms that come from years of liver damage. The delayed diagnosis unnecessarily allows patients to develop liver dysfunction and failure, further straining already limited healthcare resources.

It is necessary to meet patients where they are to diagnose and treat their hepatitis C.  Changing this will require efforts to build on the success of advanced practice provider treatment models and increasing access to treatments in primary care as well as settings where patients have fleeting encounters with healthcare.

Those sites include substance use disorder treatment facilities, syringe service programs, mobile treatment programs, correctional facilities, federally qualified health clinics, inpatient wards, and emergency departments.

All of these limitations lead to significant losses in the cascade of care for hepatitis C, with fewer patients receiving treatment than those diagnosed with active infection.

It is possible for a future when patients could receive a diagnosis and be given treatment in the same day. Accurate point of care tests to detect hepatitis C infection are already approved abroad.  Researchers have shown it is possible to effectively treat hepatitis C with fewer doctor visits for monitoring.

There must be rapid approval of available tests, funding for existing treatments, elimination of restrictions on prescribing, and simplified treatment models.

Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Rachael Fleurence, science advisors to President Joe Biden,  published a roadmap in 2023 for eliminating this deadly disease in the U.S.. The approved Biden-Harris 2024 budget allocated $5.1 billion over 10 years to fund the National Hepatitis C Elimination Program – a program that would increase testing, expand access to treatment, and empower public health strategies to eliminate this curable disease.

While it will take time to see the healthcare savings of this program, as lives are saved and chronic diseases are avoided, experts estimate that the benefits begin to compound after only five years.

Allowing Americans to suffer from a curable illness and spend more money to do so is unconscionable.

As graduations are ongoing this month across the country, and students commit to universities and colleges for the coming academic year, the crisis in the humanities shows no signs of abating.

Lower enrollments, poor administrative management and even worse fiscal planning, lack of public confidence in its value have long been warning signs.

Faculty and administrators of higher education humanities programs and departments have been squawking about the costs of letting subject matter like history, religion, philosophy, languages, literatures fail for years.

Yet humanities departments continue to be slashed or right-sized out of existence, often on the eve of graduation ceremonies, as was the case most recently at St. Cloud State. Decisions at West Virginia, where humanities programs have been consistently targeted for the last decade, produced national outrage on social media. But the devastation continues, leaving the humanities “on the cutting room floor” across the nation.

Ironically, having a college degree in any major is still the best possible predictor of job placement and economic success. This is true even among humanities majors. According to the American Academy of Arts and Scientists, 2023  statistics indicate that humanities graduates have the same chance on the job market as business and engineering majors nationally.

To be sure, data on which college degrees currently generate the highest earnings put STEM degrees ahead of humanities majors. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that chemical engineering majors earn the most at $79,000 early career, while advertising and public relations majors earn $74,000 and performing arts majors earn the least with $38,000. But the study also shows that the gap in unemployment rates is only a few percentage points.

The costs are huge for students, to be sure. But the dangers of allowing an arena of inquiry that is core to the kind of knowledge production colleges and universities prize to disappear are catastrophic.

The science, technology, engineering and medical fields (STEM) are finding this out the hard way in 2024.  The National Science Foundation – one of the biggest federal funding agencies in the nation – recently had their budget cut by over 8%.

Matt Hourihan, Associate Director of Research and Development at the Federation of American Sciences, warned that American science would lose its global competitiveness.

Barbara Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, went a step further, arguing,  “Congressional failure to restore NSF’s budget jeopardizes our country’s future economic and national security.”

Given the dependence of STEM on federal dollars to advance their research in university settings, these budget losses are cataclysmic. Following the canary-in the-coal-mine logic, they should be seen as omens of worse to come.

But in order for that canary logic to make sense, it is necessary to understand it not only as a quaint metaphor but as a risk management strategy with a history.

Research shows the rapid rise discussions of the urgency of anticipating risks to coal mine integrity and safety through the use of canaries, who were sent down the shaft to test for carbon monoxide poisoning in the late 19^th century.

Thanks in part to this tried and true method of risk assessment, canaries became useful on World War I battlefields, where toxic gas was first used as a weapon of mass destruction. As the research also shows, canaries were not just indicators of danger. They were proactively used as risk predictors.

That makes the humanities not just predictors of what’s happening in STEM, but the prophets of what’s on the horizon for the university system as a whole.

For many if not most disciplines across the higher education landscape, the danger is already here. Social sciences are grappling with a credibility crisis, especially in studies designed to replicate data collection for verifiability purposes. As for STEM fields, the Pew Research Center reports that Americans’ trust in science is in steady decline.

If the NSF continues to inflict more cuts, the future of the undergraduate B.A. and B.S. degrees is precarious. Lack of trust in higher education in general is as pervasive as the crisis of faith is in any one domain of the academy. 

This crisis of trust, combined with shrinking student numbers that risk forecaster Harry S. Dent called attention to in his book, The Demographic Cliff: How to Survive and Prosper During the Great Deflation Ahead, means that higher education will struggle to recruit the undergraduates it needs to continue to flourish in the coming decades.

With research expenditures in the humanities topping $500 million per year in the last decade, the humanities as an enterprise is too big, and too crucial to the future of the whole university ecosystem, to be allowed to fail.

Campus leaders need to aggressively reframe their humanities risk-management strategies if they want to save the whole university. And STEM faculty need to reach across the aisle and learn from humanists first-hand what partial failure looks like, and how to arrest it, together.

The canary is sounding the warning for everyone.

This law, while framed around national security, primarily impacts young people and follows state-level actions to constrain social media platforms, such as the law signed last month in Florida.

Following years of inaction and wait-and-see dialogue, policymakers often deferred to tech companies to set their own rules. This was often at the expense of individuals on issues like privacy and mental health.

If upheld in court, these actions may offer hope to some that American society is at a turning point. Unfortunately, these policies will not work. Their aims to protect young people or prevent Chinese interference are not well-served by the policy designs.

To be sure, tech entities cannot regulate themselves, but it is also imprudent to allow regulation by an angry mob. As a technology policy expert, I know that effective governance requires domain expertise and cooperation. Social media governance needs to respond to social norms, community expectations, and the voices of the public. But it also must also be practically possible.

And this is where many recent proposals and new laws fall short. While parents might know what is best for their children– with respect to screentime or readiness for a particular device or app– their emotional pleas to ban it do not actually offer a detailed enough solution to be impactful.

Banning Chinese ownership of one app does nothing to stop dataflows via the 1000s of other apps with Chinese developers—just look at the popularity of Shein and Temu—or any of the cheap smart devices that constantly send data internationally. Research documents significant international traffic to Internet-of-Things (IoT) developers, both through experiments and crowdsourced data shared by users, with China among the most prominent recipients.

Preventing new downloads via Google or Apple app markets does nothing to stop current users, or even out of market downloads. Sideloading, as it is called when a user installs an app directly from the developer or as shared peer-to-peer, is a popular approach to testing new apps and supporting research, and the EU even requires Apple to allow this practice under the Digital Markets Act. It is also growing in popularity globally.

Requiring parental consent for 14- or 15-year-olds to use social media draws on ineffective notice and choice mechanisms that already certainly do not do anything to protect user privacy. It is implausible to expect the same mechanism to do more in this situation.

Many experts agree that these policies are too simplistic. Meaningful age-gating would likely require collaboration with internet service providers and device manufacturers, or more complex or multifactor authentication by parents.

Addressing international data-flows requires a combination of coordinated legal and infrastructural solutions. Scholars have asserted for decades that technologies are governed by a combination of law, social norms, markets, and technical architecture.

Good solutions to these issues require intentionally addressing all four components.

Outside of my work as a researcher, my main responsibility is as a parent. I am deeply invested in these issues. From administrators asking for consent to social media screening as a part of daycare admissions to a preschool requirement to use an app that documented dietary, potty-training, and medical details, parents must address these concerns.

It is frustrating when privacy policies for apps that document children’s lives only outline how parents’ data in using the app would be protected. As children grow, so too do concerns including whether or not the school teaches good password practices or if YouTube Kids has solved their problems with explicit content. In using age restrictions on Disney+, parents need to figure out what is being censored and whether or not it aligns with their values on intellectual freedom.

Fortunately, I have the tools and expertise to affect change in this space, but many do not. All parents need to be heard in this conversation.

Lawmakers need to understand that the domain of technology policy is unique and that they must balance public concerns with expert guidance. Laws to address society’s many problems around social media need to reflect what is technically possible and effective toward social concerns and goals.

In my 2021 book, Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons, I demonstrate that sustainable and impactful technology governance requires cooperation. Policymakers, advocates, teachers, administrators, and parents all need to work together.

Multifaceted problems require multifaceted solutions.