Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

AI literacy: An odyssey in need of a compass

AI literacy: An odyssey in need of a compass
Getty Images

Kevin Frazier is an Assistant Professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.

“Smart” people know all the answers, right? That may have been true decades and centuries ago when things were less complex. Today, it’s the opposite: certainty of any one thing is a sign of ignorance of many more. The smartest person these days knows that the odds of things remaining fixed and known diminishes with every new AI model, each trade deal, and all increases in interdependence among people, nations, and ideas.


The old definition of “smart” has worked its way into every facet of our culture. From pre-k to Jeopardy, we reward the kid or Ken who can produce the “right” answer. This sort of knowledge reflected the time a person spent studying the tools at our disposal: novels, textbooks, and other sources of information that remained—more or less—unchanged.

New educational tools, however, can render the whiz kids of one era the fools of another. Whether someone knew how to use an abacus, for instance, once marked intelligence. Now it’s mainly a sign of someone with some spare time on their hands. The people and communities that embrace these new tools have the best odds of leading the future and avoiding the turbulence of an ever more complex world.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

ChatGPT3 ushered in a new set of tools that require us to redefine “smart” to center on “curiosity” rather than “certainty.” As with any change, this one will induce pushback from those who benefit from the earlier set of tools and from certain ideas being regarded as fixed and frozen. Yet, just as water works its way through any rock, tools that expand access to knowledge eventually grind down (or simply outlast) their opponents.

The fundamentals of using AI tools should not be left to chance. “AI Literacy” should be a “thing.” In other words, every American should have access to AI tools and develop the understanding necessary to use them in a productive manner. A key part of that literacy must include an appreciation of the limits of AI tools. If folks don’t learn those limits then AI may foster a certainty mindset rather than one grounded in curiosity.

A lawyer who lacked AI literacy recently made this clear by assuming the AI tool had greater accuracy, using it to answer a question rather than help ask better ones, and failing to do background research on the tool’s limitations. This misuse goes to show that even highly educated professionals are ill equipped to use tools they don’t understand. No one’s an expert in the unfamiliar and unknown.

AI literacy efforts should complement and augment related drives to increase “traditional” literacy as well as digital literacy. These latter efforts have languished despite becoming all the more important in a world defined by content. Absent knowing how to read and write, how to safely and smartly use the Internet, and, now, whether and when to employ AI tools, folks will fall behind in the labor market, in the classroom, and in their ability to advocate for themselves and the causes they support. Progress in any one of these literacy rates should further progress in the others.

A major step toward AI literacy is possible sooner than later: AI developers should produce guidelines on how to use their products in a way that’s readily understood by people with varying degrees of “traditional” and digital literacy. Ideally, these guidelines would be translated into a multitude of languages and perhaps be accompanied with visual explanations.

Unleashing our collective curiosity could reshape how we work, govern, and build community. A first step toward that lofty goal is directing our social institutions and norms away from a “certainty” mindset. A second step is equipping people with the various types of literacy required to ask big questions and act on new information. AI won’t wait for us to catch up. Let’s not fall behind. Now's the time to define and develop AI Literacy initiatives.

Read More

Are President Trump’s Economic Promises Falling Short?

U.S. President Donald Trump takes a question from a reporter in the Oval Office at the White House on May 05, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker

Are President Trump’s Economic Promises Falling Short?

President Donald Trump was elected for a second term after a campaign in which voters were persuaded that he could skillfully manage the economy better than his Democratic opponent. On the campaign trail and since being elected for the second time, President Trump has promised that his policies would bolster economic growth, boost domestic manufacturing with more products “made in the USA,” reduce the price of groceries “on Day 1,” and make America “very rich” again.

These were bold promises, so how is President Trump doing, three and a half months into his term? The evidence so far is as mixed and uncertain as his roller coaster tariff policy.

Keep ReadingShow less
Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis.

Getty Images, MTStock Studio

AI Is Here. Our Laws Are Stuck in the Past.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future once confined to science fiction: personalized medicine accounting for your specific condition, accelerated scientific discovery addressing the most difficult challenges, and reimagined public education designed around AI tutors suited to each student's learning style. We see glimpses of this potential on a daily basis. Yet, as AI capabilities surge forward at exponential speed, the laws and regulations meant to guide them remain anchored in the twentieth century (if not the nineteenth or eighteenth!). This isn't just inefficient; it's dangerously reckless.

For too long, our approach to governing new technologies, including AI, has been one of cautious incrementalism—trying to fit revolutionary tools into outdated frameworks. We debate how century-old privacy torts apply to vast AI training datasets, how liability rules designed for factory machines might cover autonomous systems, or how copyright law conceived for human authors handles AI-generated creations. We tinker around the edges, applying digital patches to analog laws.

Keep ReadingShow less
Global Lessons, Local Tools: Democracy at Home and Abroad

Global Lessons, Local Tools: Democracy at Home and Abroad

Welcome to the latest edition of The Expand Democracy 5 from Rob Richie and Eveline Dowling. This week they delve into: (1) Deep Dive - Inviting 21st century political association; (2) Australian elections show how fairer voting matter; (3) International election assistance on the chopping block; (4) Checks and balances and the US presidency; and (5) The week’s timely links.

In keeping with The Fulcrum’s mission to share ideas that help to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives, we intend to publish The Expand Democracy 5 in The Fulcrum each Friday.

Keep ReadingShow less