INSIDER'S DROP —
INSIDER'S DROP —
Edward Hudgens shares first-hand experiences and newsworthy insights highlighting the real-world challenges and paths forward toward our best future, with a focus on Policies on AI/AGI, longevity, including governance worldwide; Exponential Technology Policies; Futurizing Education, and Cultural trends and attitudes impacting humanity’s tech 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 future.
June 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 O’Neill confirmation”
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!