Kevin Frazier i s 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.
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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.