I was honored to testify before the Senate HELP Committee, in my capacity as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at AEI, on how AI can strengthen support for patients, workers, children, and families. It is no secret that I am an optimist about AI’s promise to expand opportunity and make learning more personal. But optimism must be matched with responsibility, including being honest about the emerging challenges and risks. As AI becomes more persuasive and more present in classrooms, we need to take seriously the risks of over-reliance, misalignment with educational goals, and emotional dependence on systems designed to imitate empathy.
A recent webinar with Julia Freeland Fisher, Ryan McBain, and Pat Pataranutaporn explored how AI is learning to simulate warmth, patience, and compassion—traits that make systems feel empathetic. These advances promise major benefits, including personalized tutoring, mental-health support, and reduced loneliness, but also raise concerns about dependency, weakened human bonds, and manipulative “addictive intelligence.” Experts urged designing AI that promotes human flourishing, measuring emotional and social well-being—not just accuracy—and enforcing transparency and child-safety standards. The central question: can AI empathy strengthen human connection rather than replace it?
OpenAI’s GPT-5 introduces a breakthrough in AI safety: real-time monitoring of its internal reasoning, or chain-of-thought (CoT). GPT-5 cut deceptive reasoning from 4.8% in earlier models to 2.1%, with 81% precision and 84% recall in flagging risks. Yet studies warn this interpretability may erode as models evolve toward opaque, machine-optimized reasoning. Both OpenAI and academic researchers urge treating CoT readability as a core safety metric—measured, reported, and preserved through training—to ensure humans retain visibility into how advanced AI systems reason, decide, and potentially deceive.
The White House’s 2025 AI Action Plan outlines an ambitious roadmap aimed at securing America’s global leadership in artificial intelligence through rapid innovation, strategic infrastructure, and assertive international engagement. Emphasizing open-source models, regulatory sandboxes, and workforce initiatives, the plan boldly contrasts previous approaches by accelerating deployment and competitiveness over precautionary regulation. However, critical gaps remain in AI interpretability, state-federal dynamics, copyright clarity, and execution specifics. The ultimate measure of success will depend not merely on technological advancement, but on ensuring responsible governance, maintaining public trust, and effectively managing AI’s profound risks alongside its transformative opportunities.
Google I/O 2025 underscored a pivotal shift toward the "Intelligence of Things," embedding advanced AI into everyday tools and devices, seamlessly integrating technology into daily life rather than creating isolated products. Google's vision emphasizes proactive, personalized AI, exemplified by Gemini 2.5’s deep research tools and immersive communication innovations like Beam and real-time multilingual translation in Google Meet. The event highlighted AI's transformative impact on education, notably through Project Astra's multimodal learning capabilities and LearnLM’s integration into Gemini, significantly enhancing pedagogical effectiveness. Central to this evolution is the critical role of agile public policy in facilitating safe innovation, ensuring AI technologies serve human needs by enhancing safety, productivity, and quality of life.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is education’s version of Gross Domestic Product: a national indicator of the overall education health of the country. By that line of thinking, it’s difficult to see anything but stagnation in the numbers. We’re in an educational recession.
The outlier was Florida, whose NAEP gains were so significant that it prompted Peggy Carr, the usually reserved associate commissioner of assessment at the National Center for Education Statistics, to say, “Something very good is happening in Florida, obviously.” She went on to say that no matter how researchers broke out the data — by race, family income, gender, disabilities — they found that Florida showed growth on the 2017 NAEP, whereas most other states remained flat or saw declines.
Tucked away in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a little-noticed program called the Investing in Opportunity Act, which could bring much-needed financial investments to some of the nation’s most distressed communities. While most attention has focused on the benefits for housing development and new businesses, the program could also spur needed investments in education, particularly charter school facilities and skills training programs.
By now, it is almost routine to see columns sounding the alarm about millions of existing jobs at risk of being automated. However, the real risk is that we do not have a system ready to equip people with the skills needed to fill millions of new and modified jobs that will result from the rise of AI.
