Keep that Brain

April 10, 2025

One day in the spring of grade 12, my English teacher, in a last-ditch effort to cram in life advice to us graduating seniors, interrupted his own Shakespeare lecture to launch into an impromptu lecture about cheating. "Cheating is giving away your brain," Mr. Marcus said. We all just stared at him. "Learning is for you, not for some teacher or degree. When you substitute someone's thinking for yours, you're sacrificing the most important asset you have." More blank looks, so he amplified: "You saw what happened when Othello trusted Iago: Bad things happen when you let someone else do your thinking for you."

Those words have echoed behind me through the decades, and I discovered they apply in circumstances way beyond school: at the doctor's office, for example, or when choosing friends. They're resonating especially loudly these days as we watch artificial intelligence gaining traction in our culture. Of course, there are wonderful aspects to AI; in fact, it's helping KidsOutAndAbout scale up in ways I could never have imagined when I launched the platform, and I'm excited about what it means for our mission to connect families to opportunities in each community. But even as AI widens the horizon on what's possible, it comes with its own risks, and in some circumstances, it can bring temptations to cheat, to cut corners, to pretend someone else's work is one's own.

Each week since April of 2001, I've wrestled with ideas, trying to convey the lessons that adults and children and life have taught me in a way our subscribers will find meaningful. Multiply 52 weeks per year by all those years, and that's a lot of me out there in the universe, but every single time, it's a struggle. I'm sure Mr. Marcus never envisioned a time when we'd wonder whether the words in front of us were shaped by a person or a program, but thanks to AI, that's here to stay. So I just wanted to say: This column... It's still just me and always will be. Me with my coffee and my keyboard, thinking hard about what matters, and doing my imperfect best to speak human to human, brain to brain. Thanks for sticking with me!

—Deb