2026

New Year’s Priority

By Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Humanity+ Board Member & Founder of the Human Achievement Alliance

It’s crucial to explain the benefits of artificial intelligence to the wider society across ideological and party lines. It’s not Right wing or Left wing but Up wing! That’s what I tried to do recently at the Moms For Liberty annual summit, attended by some thousand women and associated guys in Orlando, Florida.

Troubles with schools and tech.

Conservative women in this group are concerned about our schools’ failures to educate our kids in the basics and in critical thinking. They also fear that schooling too often focuses on indoctrination rather than education, undermining moral character, personal responsibility, and our civilization’s principles.

Many moms I talked to at the conference understood the promise of technology; indeed, many took part in a workshop on using AI in advocacy.

But many also voiced serious concerns about AIs and associated tech. AIs can create deep fakes. Excess smart phone screen time contributes to the mental health crisis among young people. Chatbots allow for cheating on school assignments. Chat-GPT and other Als can offer users information that they think the user wants to hear rather than all the facts. Several teens have committed suicide at the urging of chatbots.

Converging on AI.

Yet I see several factors that converge on a central role for AI in education.

To begin with, the current schooling system is a century-old, one-size-fits-all, assembly line model that was meant to offer minimal training for industrial workers. But it is certainly out of date for the needs of a future when brains and entrepreneurial mindsets are what will create the most value, to say nothing of personal flourishing.

Further, more states are expanding the liberty of parents to use tax credits, vouchers, and education savings accounts to allocate the funds earmarked for their children’s schooling to alternative educational institutions, a policy strongly supported by Moms. In Florida, for example, some 50 percent of kids access charter schools, private schools, or home schooling rather than specific government schools mandated by their zip codes.

So how do failing schools and parental choice point to AI?

Four factors favoring AI in education.

In the debate at the Moms summit, I took the affirmative for AI in classrooms, offering four reasons for how it can “future-proof” our kids.

1. First, kids need to understand AI because it is here and radically transforming the economy, social institutions, public policy, and culture. They need to understand how AI works, the trajectory of its evolution, and its implications for all aspects of our society. And they will need to understand it so they can develop ways to overcome the downsides that are concerns to Moms and many others.

2. Second, kids will need to use AI in their careers and in every aspect of their lives. They can be curing diseases, extending healthspan and longevity, creating new efficient products, services and whole sectors, terraforming Mars, and unleashing an unimaginably bright and prosperous future. Such purpose-driven lives require the moral character and personal responsibility favored by Moms.

3. Third, kids need to understand the synergy between AIs with their associated tech and the individual liberty so favored by Moms. Liberty has been essential for innovators creating these technologies and these technologies expand our own opportunities to follow our own dreams and enjoy our own lives.

4. Fourth, AIs will be essential for replacing the current assembly line schooling system with individualized education. There’s a reason why the Google co-founders, why Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and why so many other tech entrepreneurs went through the individualized approach in Montessori schools. With expanding school choice, parents will seek out such tailored education, and to scale up to meet the demand, alternative schools and perhaps even government schools will need to employ AIs that can help students learn at their own individual paces, using interactive discussions, and leveraging the unique ways individual kids learn—some more visual, some more text-oriented, some more hands-on. In fact, the Kahn Academy, innovators in online learning, does just this with their Kahnmigo AI teaching assistant!

The feedback from my remarks were thoughtful, some moms still skeptical, many more positive, seeking additional information. And outreach to groups like Moms is crucial for creating the understanding necessary for a humanity plus future.

NEW YEAR’S PRIORITY

A seemingly bleak beginning of the New Year actually offers a happy opportunity. Let me take you step by step to a top priority for our future!

First, in our very culturally and politically polarized era, the very foundation of our modern world is being eroded. Reason is our capacity to use our minds to understand the world outside of us and in us, and to change both for the better. Yet for more and more individuals and communities, the will to truth is less and less a value or practice. Self-deluded dogmas or a “That’s your truth not my truth” mindset make it extremely difficult for us to come together in efforts for our individual flourishing and social betterment.

Second, we see deep frustration with our failing schooling system. The U.S. and many other countries have a century-old, one-size-fits-all, assembly line template. Teaching to the average often means that the many kids not average are either lost or bored. Yet the best ways to learn are unique to each individual. That’s why, for example, the co-founders of Google, the founder of Wikipedia, and so many other achievers who’ve transformed our world went through Montessori schools that educate the individual, not the group. And in our future world, the economic premium will be on brainwork. Even individuals working in manufacturing will need to understand robotics and advanced tech.

Third, in the U.S., more and more states are allowing parents to send their children to special charter schools or private alternatives rather than to the government schools to which their kids would be assigned based on where they live. And the funds that would be spent on their kids in the government schools are allocated to those alternatives. For example, in Florida, half the kids are in schools of their parents’ choosing. Other financial mechanisms for expanding parental choice are in place or are being developed.

Fourth, with the expending market for alternatives, there’s an opportunity both make education for a future dominated by exponential tech central for such alternatives. For example, the Kahn Academy has been the most successful non-profit offering top-quality online educational materials and videos. Its Khanmigo now offers individualized AI tutors and teaching assistants for kids. And parents, concerned that their kids will have good career prospects as well as satisfying careers, are becoming more conscious of the need for their kids to be a part of a future based on exponential tech; indeed, to have their kids be the creators of that future and that tech.

Fifth, here’s our big opportunity and priority. We need to engage with education innovators to develop and implement “Think like a futurist!” curricula and teaching methodologies, focusing on students as unique individuals. This will involve understanding the philosophical and liberty foundations that have given rise to our current modern world. It will involve instilling in students a commitment of truth, the value of reason, and the scientific approach to knowledge as habits of mind and morality. And it will involve replacing the pessimism, nihilism, anger, boredom that infects our culture with optimism, purpose, joy in achievement, and excitement about creating a future of prosperity and long, healthy lives for all, a world as it can be and should be.

So there’s a priority for the coming year and a hope to see happier and happier new years to come!

January 2026

Balloons Lifting 3 Billion Folks To Internet Access

By Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Humanity+ Board Member & Founder of the Human Achievement Alliance

Balloons could soon provide your Wifi! You see, I caught up recently with telecom and pioneer Walt Anderson at a reception honoring space commercialization pioneer Jeff Manber. Among other things, Jeff was founder of Nanoracks (now Voyager Technologies) and ran it from 2009 to 2021, providing hardware and services to allow private companies to access the International Space Station, flying some 1,200 commercial missions of various types to date.

Before this enterprise, in1999, Walt tapped Jeff to run MirCorp, funded by Walt to lease the aging Russian Mir space station for commercial uses. Sadly, they weren’t able to overcome government barriers to purchasing and saving the station from finally being deorbited.

But Anderson, with his current company Avealto, is still busy reaching for the sky.

Internet for 3 billion needed.

Instant, high-speed communications to and from every location and individual on the planet are crucial for our exponential tech future. Anderson is a new entrant who could soon disrupt a sector currently dominated by fiber, microwave, and satellite tech.

Anderson understands that some 3 billion individuals and enterprises in less developed countries and isolated areas have limited or spotty access if access at all to reliable internet and telecom services, at reasonable costs. Thus, they miss out on the opportunities for a prosperous, healthy future that requires email and data exchanges, video meetings, conversations and conferences, AI, and much more. The more productive these 3 billion become, the more we all benefit.

Anderson’s Avealto enterprise seeks “to design, build and operate a fleet of high-altitude Wireless Infrastructure Platform vehicles (“WIPS”), also often called High Altitude Platforms (“HAPS”), in order to help close the global Digital Divide.”

Airships to the rescue.

The vehicles would be cutting-edge airships, about 300 feet in length. They’d be stationary in the lower stratosphere, about 12 miles high. This would reduce latency delays that can be a problem with satellites in Earth orbit at least 300 miles if not tens of thousands of miles up. The airships would cover a ground area of about 150 miles across. Anderson aims to have Avealto service costs 75 percent lower than the costs of satellites, which are still expensive to launch.

Over the past year, Avealto received patents in the U.K. related to its Novel Antenna System and to its Airship Control System to AVEALTO. Malaysia will likely be the first

customer when the Avealto system is ready to deployed, and other Asian countries are interested.

Sky-high competition.

Will Walt’s system beat out satellites and other infrastructure? We don’t know. But don’t bet again him. In 1988, Anderson co-founded International Space University now training generations of space activists and entrepreneurs. And in the late 1990s, he sold his companies Telco Communication Group and Esprit Telecom each for some billion dollars.

But the real lesson here is that competition in free economies, not only for goods and services but also for entire systems, is key to disruptive innovation. Such competition over the past half century has already transformed the world, and if economies remain free, the best is yet to come!

November 2025

Moms for Artificial Intelligence?

By Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Humanity+ Board Member & Founder of the Human Achievement Alliance

It’s crucial to explain the benefits of artificial intelligence to the wider society across ideological and party lines. It’s not Right wing or Left wing but Up wing! That’s what I tried to do recently at the Moms For Liberty annual summit, attended by some thousand women and associated guys in Orlando, Florida.

Troubles with schools and tech.

Conservative women in this group are concerned about our schools’ failures to educate our kids in the basics and in critical thinking. They also fear that schooling too often focuses on indoctrination rather than education, undermining moral character, personal responsibility, and our civilization’s principles.

Many moms I talked to at the conference understood the promise of technology; indeed, many took part in a workshop on using AI in advocacy.

But many also voiced serious concerns about AIs and associated tech. AIs can create deep fakes. Excess smart phone screen time contributes to the mental health crisis among young people. Chatbots allow for cheating on school assignments. Chat-GPT and other Als can offer users information that they think the user wants to hear rather than all the facts. Several teens have committed suicide at the urging of chatbots.

Converging on AI.

Yet I see several factors that converge on a central role for AI in education.

To begin with, the current schooling system is a century-old, one-size-fits-all, assembly line model that was meant to offer minimal training for industrial workers. But it is certainly out of date for the needs of a future when brains and entrepreneurial mindsets are what will create the most value, to say nothing of personal flourishing.

Further, more states are expanding the liberty of parents to use tax credits, vouchers, and education savings accounts to allocate the funds earmarked for their children’s schooling to alternative educational institutions, a policy strongly supported by Moms. In Florida, for example, some 50 percent of kids access charter schools, private schools, or home schooling rather than specific government schools mandated by their zip codes.

So how do failing schools and parental choice point to AI?

Four factors favoring AI in education.

In the debate at the Moms summit, I took the affirmative for AI in classrooms, offering four reasons for how it can “future-proof” our kids.

1. First, kids need to understand AI because it is here and radically transforming the economy, social institutions, public policy, and culture. They need to understand how AI works, the trajectory of its evolution, and its implications for all aspects of our society. And they will need to understand it so they can develop ways to overcome the downsides that are concerns to Moms and many others.

2. Second, kids will need to use AI in their careers and in every aspect of their lives. They can be curing diseases, extending healthspan and longevity, creating new efficient products, services and whole sectors, terraforming Mars, and unleashing an unimaginably bright and prosperous future. Such purpose-driven lives require the moral character and personal responsibility favored by Moms.

3. Third, kids need to understand the synergy between AIs with their associated tech and the individual liberty so favored by Moms. Liberty has been essential for innovators creating these technologies and these technologies expand our own opportunities to follow our own dreams and enjoy our own lives.

4. Fourth, AIs will be essential for replacing the current assembly line schooling system with individualized education. There’s a reason why the Google co-founders, why Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and why so many other tech entrepreneurs went through the individualized approach in Montessori schools. With expanding school choice, parents will seek out such tailored education, and to scale up to meet the demand, alternative schools and perhaps even government schools will need to employ AIs that can help students learn at their own individual paces, using interactive discussions, and leveraging the unique ways individual kids learn—some more visual, some more text-oriented, some more hands-on. In fact, the Kahn Academy, innovators in online learning, does just this with their Kahnmigo AI teaching assistant!

The feedback from my remarks were thoughtful, some moms still skeptical, many more positive, seeking additional information. And outreach to groups like Moms is crucial for creating the understanding necessary for a humanity plus future.

September 2025

Artificial Intelligence Eating Your Homework!

I saw how infotech and AI are challenging our schooling system on my parents’ night visit to my newly-minted 9th grader daughters’ high school. I followed their schedules, spending a few minutes in each class where teachers described curricula, grading, and various practices. The pros will truly outweigh the cons when there’s an education revolution as transformative as the infotech and AI.

On the techno “pro” side, each student is assigned a Chromebook. Teachers might post assignments there or curated readings or learning materials, e.g., Kahn Academy videos. Google can be used for certain assignments. There might be online tests that register answers that are automatically submitted to the teachers. Websites not relevant to the school’s efforts are blocked.

On the techno “con” side, several teachers complained about students using Chat-GPT to do homework—students caught using it get a zero for the assignment—but they said that for now, they can spot awkward AI-speak. One teacher requires students to write assignments by hand, which cuts down on cut-and-paste homework cheating. An English teacher requires essays to be written in class where he reviews and make suggestions for each draft. The Spanish teacher does not assign homework since kids would use online tools to complete assignments rather than actually learning Español.

But it’s not just specific classes that need to adjust to infotech and AI. The entire schooling system needs to transform for our exponential techno-future.

Our current century-old system is based on the assembly line model, with one-size-fits-all, sage-one-a-stage curricula and standardized tests that was meant to give the average student just enough schooling to work on manufacturing assembly lines. Yes, most school today have tweaked systems with honors classes and the like.

But children are unique individuals and their ways of learning vary. One antithesis for the current system was also originated a century ago by Maria Montessori. Google’s AI tells us that her approach “emphasizes hands-on learning, self-directed exploration, and independence within a thoughtfully prepared environment. Children make choices in their learning activities, which are guided by teachers who act as observers and facilitators rather than lecturers. This whole-child approach fosters cognitive, physical, social-emotional, and linguistic development, nurturing intrinsic motivation, self-discipline, and a love of lifelong learning by providing a nurturing, respectful environment.”

It's no accident that Montessori students include Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, and Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. In the book Rewiring Education: How Technology Can Unlock Every Student's Potential, author John Couch, Apple employee #54 and its former education VP, with Jason Towne explain how individualized education needs to supersede the current antiquated schooling system to integrate and utilize future tech in educating “digital natives” for our techno-future.

So let’s juice the education revolution to ensure that future!

August 2025

A Win for Proactionary AI Policy

In a just-fought battle over the future of artificial intelligence, the Proactionary Principle racked up victory over the Precautionary Principle.

Here in the U.S., the administration releasing Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan and will work through executive action to implement it.

It offers a ringing optimistic vision that AI “will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people. AI will enable Americans to discover new materials, synthesize new chemicals, manufacture new drugs, and develop new methods to harness energy—an industrial revolution. It will enable radically new forms of education, media, and communication—an information revolution. And it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”

The context of this Action Plan is that so far this year, over 1,000 mostly precautionary proposed regulations have been put forward mostly in state legislatures. Most are innovation-killing, for example, requiring annual safety inspections with vague and contradictory standards or guarding against alleged “algorithm discrimination,” whatever that means. California, New York, and Illinois are the three states most active in pushing European-style, innovation-killing restrictions. The latter, for example, has just banned the use of AI in therapy. AI companies could not adhere to a patchwork of 50 different sets of standards, so they would likely have to kowtow to the legal restrictions of the largest states, i.e., the three mentioned above.

There are, of course, serious challenges emerging from AI, for example, how to deal with deep fakes, intellectual property, and security. But a Proactionary approach means letting AI-creating and -adopting companies experiment with various approaches to these challenges, letting the competition play out. Look back 50 years: Apple offered a tightly-integrated hardware-software closed ecosystem, eventually adding new products and services. Microsoft offered operating systems to all computer hardware manufacturers. At various stages, Microsoft was winning in the market, at other stages it was Apple, and now both prosper and still compete, especially in AI. Policymakers need to allow the same dynamism in AI.

The administration’s plan will still come into legal conflict with innovation-killing state restrictions. And that plan is not perfect, but that’s okay because it’s open discussion, experimentation, and competition that will unleash our AI-enhancing futur

July 2025

US Department of Health & Human Services

This month, after several Senate confirmation hearings, Jim O’Neill has been sworn in as Number Two at the Department of Health and Human Services. This department oversees the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, Medicare, Medicaid, and much more!

Jim’s ascent is an opportunity to mainstream an understanding that aging, with its many mental and physical afflictions, need not be our fate.

Jim also served at HHS from 2002 to 2008, so he knows the ins and outs of this government department of 62,000 employees. But most important, he served for years as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation. As most friends of Humanity Plus know, SENS was the premiere group developing, as its initials stand for, Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence. Jim understands that rather than simply developing treatments for cancers, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other ravages of aging once they afflict us, it is best to attack aging itself.

But science and technology are not enough. We need to raise the consciousness of the public and policymakers so they understand that we each can have truly long, vibrant lives if we make slowing or stopping aging a top goal. Jim in his perch at HHS, with the help of the longevity community, to meet this challenge!

June 2025

LONGEVITY POLICIES

“Braining COVID Vaccines and Longevity”

As countries around the world begin to develop policies for longevity, it’s clear that we’re at a pivotal moment in healthcare. If we’re to move from “sickcare” to healthspan and longevity, we must rethink and rewire the thinking processes of both the public and policymakers.

First, longevity education efforts should be elevated above political and partisan differences as much as possible. This is a universal challenge that transcends borders and ideologies.

Second, open and honest discussions are essential, with no room for censorship or dogma. Global collaboration requires transparency and an exchange of ideas that welcomes all perspectives.

Third, we must help public and policymakers understand that the discoveries and technologies applied to longevity are experimental, evolving, and often uncertain. But rather than being deterred by uncertainty, this should inspire action. Proaction—trying, failing, learning, and trying again—will bring us closer to a future where the ailments that have always plagued humanity can be vanquished.

Let’s cultivate futurist minds and technologies, not just for our generation but for generations to come. The future of longevity is global, and it’s time to build it together.

READ MORE ON BLOG. Longer piece focusing on What is happening in Washington, DC with “Braining COVID Vaccines and Longevity” and the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary insider’s view featured on the BLOG!