In 2000, I wrote my MA thesis in Applied Linguistics on something that didn’t sound too groundbreaking: the case for teaching English as a Second Language to nine- and ten-year-olds through stories and fairy tales, rather than through a regular coursebook. To be precise, the title of my thesis was: “A Story-Based Design for Teaching English to 9-10 Year Old Children.” My argument wasn’t only about grammar. It was also about what a shared story does for a child at that age: the teacher’s voice, the group’s laughter and anticipation, the sense of community, being carried somewhere and brought safely home. In other words, the sense of belonging, and the shaping of a child’s view of self and world alike. Fast forward twenty-six years later, I find myself pondering a version of the same question, except now the “coursebook alternative” can generate an infinite, personalized story on demand. What does it mean to be human, and to become someone in a second language, in that world?

I chose nine and ten as my age group partly because across much of Europe at the time, formal foreign-language instruction typically began somewhere in the nine-to-eleven window. But it was also, my research found, the age when a child’s sense of right and wrong stops being fixed and starts being negotiated. Around that age, children begin to notice that other people hold different values than their parents do, that their own reasoning doesn’t always match everyone else’s, and that they get some say in which values they’ll carry forward.

What I observed, too, is that children arriving at that classroom door are not blank slates. They come in already equipped, with an established set of instincts, skills, and characteristics that help them learn a language, whether anyone designed a curriculum around that fact or not. They’re already skilled at using limited language creatively. They’re already good, as Halliwell (1992) pointed out, at interpreting meaning without necessarily understanding every individual word. They already have vivid imagination and a working sense of story. The teacher’s actual job, in that instance, isn’t to install something from nothing. It’s to build on what’s already there.

A story let a child try on values safely: courage, fairness, curiosity about someone unlike them. All of it inside a group, guided by a teacher who knew when to calm a room and when to let it get loud. I wrote, at the time, that children are already busy making sense of the world around them, and that play “stimulates and encourages the use of language in context” precisely because it meets them there. I regarded fairy tales, I wrote then, “not merely as children’s literature… but a key ingredient for language development” — didactic material I believed was superior to the textbook. I didn’t have the word for it at the time, but I realize today that I was really writing about trust, containment, and belonging. I thought then that I was writing purely about pedagogy.

Since 2000, some things have changed in the classroom. For one, technology has marked its presence and been integrated into the educational system. Learning languages has become easier, too. The development of mobile applications has given us the ability to tap into a foreign language instantly, just as travel has become more accessible. But there is more to it, and more to technology and language learning at an early age, or to learning in general. There is a new teacher in town. My old thesis and the same questions keep coming back: what does a child absorb alongside the vocabulary? Whose voice are they learning to trust? Who is actually in the room, deciding, on purpose or by accident, what gets modeled? And, now with a slightly different edge to it: is this new “teacher” building on what a child already brings, the way a good story does, or quietly overriding it?

This year, the room itself started changing shape. Humanoid robots, AI-powered, expressive, built to resemble a person, have quietly begun appearing as “teaching partners” in a handful of schools, on an experimental basis, with price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and headlines that can’t quite decide whether this is the future of education or an expensive, unproven detour. I want to be clear: I am not here to judge. I don’t have a verdict, and I don’t think one is due yet. What I have is the same old instinct to ask what’s actually being solved. And I dare say there are quite a few educators, parents, psychologists, philosophers, and policymakers pondering the same question. The system inside most of these robots is a chatbot a child could reach on any laptop. So, what does the body add? Warmth, the way a favorite toy earns a child’s trust? Or a more literal, still-unanswered version of the question my thesis never fully resolved either: what happens when the “voice you trust” belongs to something with no actual stake in who you become? In early reactions to these pilots, “creepy” comes up almost as often as “cool.” Children, even the ones adopting AI faster than the rest of us, tend to notice and say so without holding back when something resembles belonging without quite being it. The uncanny valley comes to mind.

Norway’s government this year drew a line at almost exactly the age I spent my thesis studying, though they arrived by policy, not classroom research. Starting this August, Norway is putting a near-total stop to generative AI for students aged six to thirteen, with supervised use only beginning at fourteen. As Norway’s Prime Minister put it: the most important thing in school is that children learn to read, write, and do math. I’m bringing it up not to argue whether Norway is right. I think it’s an interesting coincidence that a government, in 2026, draws its line at the exact developmental window where a child is actively forming judgment and identity through language; the same window I was passionately investigating twenty-six years earlier, studying research and writings by Bettelheim, Norton, Halliwell, and Kohlberg, among others. And let’s not forget my hunch about stories.

This spring, in Stanford’s Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy program at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, I got new language for the same old question. During the program sessions, as well as in a workshop and office hours with Manuela Travaglianti, Stanford’s Ethical Tech Strategist and Advisor, who spearheaded the creation of the Center’s Ethics Toolkit, I had the chance to name a value out loud, well-being, trust, dignity, autonomy, before assuming everyone in the room already agreed on it. What struck me, in conversation with peers whose work in AI looked nothing like mine, is how rarely harm comes from someone choosing a bad value on purpose. It usually comes from nobody stopping to name the value at all before putting “the thing” in front of us. Is it possible that this is the missing step in a lot of conversations about AI in the classroom? Is it possible that we’re focused on one question, whether the tool works, and ask far less often, out loud, what it’s quietly teaching a child to belong to while it does?

It’s pretty clear we’re at an early stage of this AI-classroom integration phase, so I want to be careful about sounding as if I have the answers or “have it figured out.” There are, for sure, a lot of opinions, LinkedIn alone is full of them. One report that has caught my attention recently is a global survey of higher education faculty that found opinion split sharply by region on whether AI poses a serious risk to intellectual development: a slim majority say yes in North America, less than a third in Asia-Pacific. UNICEF, in its most recent analysis, shared that evidence on AI’s effect on children’s cognitive development and emotional attachment is only just emerging. In their words, a generation is growing up inside a global experiment. An estimated 13 million children are already using AI for homework, and more than 2 million, about one in ten, for something more vulnerable: advice about the things that worry them. The numbers don’t tell us the ending. They tell us the experiment started without waiting for the ethics review. And here I go back to my conversations at Stanford, about the importance of values, AI ethics, and actionable guides and strategies to secure responsible, thoughtful innovation.

Mark di Suvero once said, of steel, that it’s “so often been nothing but an element of warfare and other terrible things”, but immediately added that this isn’t steel’s fault. It’s the fault of the humans who choose to use it that way. Could we borrow di Suvero’s words as a prompt when debating whether AI will be good or bad for children? Maybe the answer is: it won’t be either, on its own. It will be whatever the humans standing closest to it, teachers, parents, engineers, policymakers, and the occasional curious linguist with a twenty-six-year-old thesis in a drawer, decide, on purpose, to make of it.

Obviously, I don’t have this fully solved, and I doubt I ever will. But I knew what I was looking for back in 2000, before I had the words for it: not the perfect tool, but the sense of belonging that makes a child feel safe enough to learn anything at all, a language, a value, a self, a need to connect with another human, built on what they already bring, not in spite of it. That’s not something any robot or language model can give a child. It’s something only we can, and I think we owe them that, on purpose.

_Sources

• _{Halliwell, S. (1992); Norton, B. (1995); Bettelheim, B. (1977), The Uses of Enchantment; Kohlberg, L. — cited in Wioleta Kaminska’s MA thesis, A Story-Based Design for Teaching English to 9–10 Year Old Children (Warsaw University, Applied Linguistics, 2000)}

• _{McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University — Ethics Toolkit: [ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu](https://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu)}

• _{On humanoid robots piloted in classrooms: [Voice of San Diego](https://voiceofsandiego.org/2026/06/24/a-charter-school-spent-500000-on-ai-powered-humanoid-robots-was-it-worth-it/) · [The 420](https://the420.in/us-schools-ai-humanoid-robots-teaching-partners/)}

• _{Norway AI-in-schools policy: [Gulf News](https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/norway-nearly-bans-ai-in-elementary-schools-heres-why-children-under-14-will-lose-access-1.500580710)}

• _{Digital Education Council, AI in Higher Education Global Survey 2026: [digitaleducationcouncil.com](https://www.digitaleducationcouncil.com/resource-library-items/ai-in-higher-education-global-survey-2026)}

• _{UNICEF, “Children are adopting AI technologies more than three times faster than adults” (30 June 2026): [unicef.org](https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/children-are-adopting-ai-technologies-more-three-times-faster-adults)}

The last seven weeks have been rich in conversation: with Stanford faculty, prominent guest speakers, practitioners from across the tech sector, government, and civil society, all circling some version of the same question: what do we owe the future, what does it mean to be human, and how do we build something solid enough to hold it?

It feels especially urgent in higher education right now, where so much of what we’re holding feels like it could break in our hands.

At least sixteen U.S. colleges closed in 2025. A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, built on a machine-learning model trained on two decades of institutional data, estimated that in a worst-case scenario, where the so-called demographic cliff wipes out 15% of student enrollment between 2025 and 2029, roughly 80 colleges could close, affecting more than 100,000 students and nearly 21,000 staff.

Falling birth rates after 2007 are the headline reason. But increasingly, people researching this trend point to a second one: the rapid rise of AI and its presence in daily life, reshaping what students think they even need a degree for. I can’t help but wonder: is creative higher education becoming an endangered species?

This isn’t foreign to me. My own MFA alma mater, California College of the Arts, announced this year that it will close at the end of the 2026–2027 academic year. CCA was the last nonprofit art and design school left in Northern California. It joins a list that already includes the San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College, Bay Area art education, quietly disappearing campus by campus.

It would be reasonable to read this as a story of decline, but I think it’s far from that.

In 1957, Black Mountain College in North Carolina closed for good, buried under debt it never had the business model to escape. It had operated for less than 25 years. And yet the people who passed through it, like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, among many others, carried what they built there into the rest of American art and thought for decades afterward. The school is gone. The way of seeing it taught is not.

That’s the part of this moment I want to hold onto: an institution can close, and the community it built doesn’t have to close with it. The friendships, the shared language, the particular way of looking at a problem that a certain studio or lecture gave you, those stay with the people who carry them. CCA’s graduates, present and future, will go on to shape design and art in ways that have nothing to do with whether a campus still has CCA’s name over the door.

Looking back a little further into history, we find other instances where education, despite its fragility, played a vital role: holding space and giving hope to carry people through difficult times.

Just over two months after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Gestapo ordered every professor at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University to attend a mandatory lecture on “German plans for Polish education.” It was a trap. The moment the hall filled, German soldiers arrested everyone inside both professors and staff, 183 people in total. They were marched through a Kraków prison, then a detention center in occupied Wrocław, and at the end of November, loaded onto a train to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Some were transferred to Dachau that March. After international protest, led in part by the Vatican, the oldest professors were released in February 1940, though several had already died from the conditions, and the rest remained in the camps for months or years longer.

The ones who did return home didn’t stop teaching. By 1942, survivors of that arrest had built an underground university in Kraków, meeting in apartments and back rooms, at a time when education for Poles had been made illegal and being caught meant death. One of its students was a young man named Karol Wojtyła, who decades later became Pope John Paul II.

I share this story because it says something true and almost unbearable about what education actually is. It was never only about content delivery. It is the space itself: the place where people gather to think out loud, to be wrong together, to dream, to hope, to be encouraged by someone who believes in them past the end of the school year. People risked their lives to keep that room open, to hold that space. That tells you something about what’s actually at stake when we talk, today, about whether a school survives.

We didn’t need a world war to learn this lesson again. COVID-19 did it for us, in real time. Almost overnight, educators who had never run a class through a screen learned Zoom, redesigned syllabi, and kept the room open virtually, because the alternative was leaving an entire generation of students with nowhere to go. Nobody waited for a perfect policy memo. They adapted because the room mattered more than the format.

That’s the lesson I keep returning to as institutions consolidate, merge, and disappear: the structure around education is becoming more fluid, but the function of education, the holding of that space, doesn’t have to disappear with any single building. We just have to keep choosing to provide it.

And here, the deeper question comes up again, the one I think every educator and every student needs room to sit with right now, out loud, together: what does it mean to be human in an era of increasing automation?

The values we carry, the ones we discuss, argue over, and eventually choose to hold onto, are the same values we are quietly handing to the systems we build and the students we teach. We are shaping the world whether we mean to or not. The only real question is whether we’re doing it on purpose.

A recent World Economic Forum report on AI in education gets at this from a different angle: it argues that AI’s deepest risk to learning isn’t the technology itself, but the erosion of the human connection that learning was always built on, the trust, the attention, the relationships that no system can simulate. I’d add to that. In a moment of increasing, even encouraged, automation, we have an unusually great opportunity to ask what we actually want preserved. What do we want to instill in the next generation that no model can replicate? What kind of world are we, in effect, designing every time we choose what to automate and what to protect?

I came out of the Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners course, part of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, with one conclusion: in technology ethics, there is almost never a black-and-white response. Often I’d arrive at a session certain of where I stood and leave with an expanded horizon, plenty of food for thought, and a realization that what I’d been so certain about no longer held. That happened again and again, in cohort conversations with peers from different professional backgrounds, whose work in AI looked nothing like mine. It was further evidence, another reminder, that real understanding doesn’t come from content. It comes from sitting with other people in the ambiguity, together, holding that space in hope that something clearer emerges. That, as much as anything in the syllabus, is what education protects.

Here’s the part I want to say gently, because I think it matters more than the rest. Stakes are high right now, and there are a lot of opinions, at times disagreement, about what AI is doing to students, to assessment, to the whole shape of learning, about whether and how to use this fast-evolving technology. Those disagreements can also impact students, the way they think and move forward, or don’t…

I don’t think our energy should go into arguing. Educators hold a kind of power that’s easy to forget in the day-to-day: the ability to shape how a person thinks about their own mind, not just for one academic year, but for a lifetime. Used carelessly, that power can instill fear and a quiet, lasting loss of hope. Used with intention, it’s one of the most encouraging forces I know. This is not a time to turn on each other. It’s a time to come together, across disciplines and across disagreement, and figure out, deliberately, how to carry students through a transition none of us fully understand yet.

There is real, practical work in this, not just sentiment. Right now, adoption of AI across education is outpacing the structures meant to govern it. To my surprise, a recent EDUCAUSE study found that roughly 80% of faculty and staff are already using AI tools, while fewer than one in four are aware their institution even has a formal policy. That gap, between how fast we’re moving and how carefully we’re moving, is exactly where the real risk lives.

I think that’s part of why a tool as technical as UNESCO’s Ethical Impact Assessment resonated with so many people when I shared it a few weeks ago on LinkedIn, a post that quietly reached 8,000 views in three days, far more than I expected for something this specific. Professionals in this field aren’t short on urgency. They’re short on frameworks they can actually use. That’s the work I want to keep pursuing: concrete scaffolding, workshops, discussions, toolkits, policies, governance structures, built around that same question, what does it mean to be human, that institutions and educators can hold onto while everything else moves quickly underneath them.

Colleges are preparing students for jobs. That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. Colleges and educators instill values. They hand students a sense of who they are and where they want to be, and then send them out to shape the world accordingly, whether or not that world still has the institution’s name on it.

Education might look fragile right now, measured in enrollment numbers and closure announcements. But fragile and powerless are not the same thing. We have most of the resources we actually need: the space, the relationships, the long, stubborn history of people choosing to keep teaching and keep learning, even when it cost them everything. What we’re holding right now, as a sector, as educators, as a society moving faster than we can fully metabolize, is the future. It is genuinely fragile. That’s exactly why it deserves to be handled with care, not fear, by people who choose, on purpose, to come together and carry it forward.

^Sources

• ^{College closures in 2025: The College Fix}

• ^{NBER working paper on projected college closures: Kelchen, R., Ritter, D., & Webber, D. (2024). NBER Working Paper No. 33216. Read the paper · University Business coverage}

• ^{California College of the Arts closure: KQED · EdSource}

• ^{Sonderaktion Krakau (November 1939): Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) · Wikipedia overview}

• ^{World Economic Forum, Shaping the Future of Learning: Education Readiness for the Age of AI (June 2026): Read the report}

• ^{EDUCAUSE 2024 AI Landscape Study, as cited in The Education Magazine: EDUCAUSE study}

I started writing this story in December 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. The world had gone quiet in ways we hadn’t chosen — we were separated, stuck indoors, and technology had become the only thread connecting us to the outside world. We didn’t know then how long it would last, or what would remain when it was over.

A bird sang outside my bedroom window at 5 AM and I couldn’t remember the tune by morning. That small loss stayed with me.

I finished the story in April 2026 — in a world now full of different conversations: about AI, about how technology is impacting our everyday living, about our responsibilities to each other and to what it means to be human. The ending came to me in Forsyth Park, with EarPods in my ears and the hooting of a barred owl.

This is what happened in between…

I.

December 23, 2020

It is 5:00 AM when the bird begins to sing outside our bedroom window. The city is still mostly dark, just a few street lights casting their pale orange glow across the ceiling, and the sound arrives into all of that quiet, sudden, and completely unexpected.

The bird sings for a little while. An unhurried melody, as if it has all the time in the world. And then it stops. The silence that follows is so deep it has a weight to it, as if the sound had been holding the air up and now the air has simply collapsed.

Are you awake?

Yes.

Did you hear the bird sing?

Yes. It was beautiful.

What do you think it was about?

The bird must have had a bad dream.

No. The singing was so joyful. So carefree. Maybe it was a good dream.

Maybe, I say. And I mean it. Maybe it was exactly that.

We lie there for a while without speaking. A few minutes pass, or maybe more. It’s the kind of hour where time moves differently.

What are you thinking about? he asks.

I can’t remember the tune, I tell him. It just happened and already it’s dissolving, the way dreams dissolve in the first minutes of waking. It’s like you reach for them and find only the feeling of having had them, not the thing itself. I try to reconstruct it: the first note, where it rose, where it fell, whether it repeated. Nothing. Only the fact of it remains, like an outline with everything inside erased.

(I think, briefly: I wish I had recorded it. And then I think: what an absurd idea. It lasted only a few seconds, and I was so completely inside it that stepping outside to reach for my phone would have been like stepping outside of something I can never fully name. I wouldn’t have done it. I’m glad I didn’t.)

But you have a memory of the bird, he says gently.

Even that is fading, I tell him. Even that.

We linger in silence for a few more minutes. And then the city begins its morning routine; the trash truck somewhere down the block, more lights flickering on in the apartment building across the street, a neighbor’s dog barking in the distance. I listen for something underneath all of it, something small and alive.

No birds.

I get up and make coffee. I carry the cup to the green sofa in the living room and sit down, wrapping both hands around the warmth of it, and I look slowly around the room the way you do when you’re trying to locate yourself; the plants, the books, the particular slant of early light beginning to come through the window. It is 5:15 AM and the world is very quiet and still and I am trying to hold onto something that is already gone.

He comes through the living room eventually, still half asleep, and disappears into the kitchen. A few minutes later he comes back and sits in the chair by the coffee table, cradling his cup in his hands the same way I am cradling mine.

Can you imagine the city without birds? I ask, not looking at him.

I don’t want to think about it, he says quietly.

And we sit with that, in silence.

* * *

January 1, 2026

It is 12:00 PM and the recordings of bird songs blast through the loudspeakers in the streets.

I think about a close friend I lost about eight years ago. I still keep a few of her voice messages on my phone, and once a year I sit down and listen to them. Her voice is soft and kind, full of warmth and care, and she always ended every call the same motherly way: I love you. I cannot remember her voice on my own anymore; it has faded the way the bird’s song faded, faster than I expected and more completely than I was prepared for. But when I press play and hear her, the heart remembers. Something that had gone quiet in me comes back online, just like that.

I think about that now, sitting midday on the green sofa in the living room. And I think: it doesn’t work that way with birds. The recordings of bird songs, the ones they play in the city now, can no longer reach that place. People’s hearts have grown cold to them, and the city has grown cold too, and I don’t fully understand why, but I feel it. I have felt it for a while.

It’s already happening. The city is crying, I think. It feels withdrawn. Like it’s curled up in some dark corner and can’t find its way out.

II.

The city has a faint memory of birds, but it can no longer remember the singing. The memory is there in the way that the memory of a smell is there, or the memory of the taste of Proust’s Madeleines; you know that you knew it, you know that it mattered, but the actual sensation is gone, replaced by the knowledge of its absence. The void it has left behind is not empty. It is full of something that presses against the chest from the inside, something that has no name because no one has yet thought to name it.

People walk through it anyway. They have learned to.

By order of the local council, every day at noon and 6:00 PM, loudspeakers mounted on lampposts by the basketball and tennis courts and the sides of buildings around the squares in Savannah play recordings of bird songs. A northern cardinal. A mockingbird. A barred owl. Something that might be the brown-headed nuthatch. The recordings are technically perfect, clear and bright and exactly right in every measurable way. They last ten minutes. People in the streets pause when they hear them. Some tilt their faces upward. Some close their eyes. And then the ten minutes end, and they keep walking, and life goes on, and the absence settles back in around them like water filling a hole.

A man stops under a lamppost to listen one afternoon, his hands deep in his coat pockets, his head tilted in that particular way — the way you tilt your head at a painting in a gallery when you’re trying to feel something you think you should be feeling. It is the posture of effort. It is not the same as the thing itself.

The recording ends. He keeps walking.

* * *

III.

I don’t know exactly when I understood what I had to do. It didn’t come all at once. It arrived the way these things tend to arrive, gradually, then undeniably. First as a low hum of unease I couldn’t account for, then as a thought I kept returning to without meaning to, and finally as the only possible conclusion.

I am the last one left with a real memory of birds. Not a recording, not a photograph, not a description in a book. A memory, lived, sensory, unrepeatable. The bird outside the window at 5 AM. The tune I can no longer recall but whose existence I can still feel the way you feel a word that has slipped away from you: the shape of it, the weight of it, the certainty that it was there. That it was real.

If I forget, there is no more hope. The birds won’t come back. But if I can find the lost song, not record it, not store it in any device, but genuinely recover the living sound of it, they will return. I don’t know how I know this. I know it the same way I knew to get up and make coffee at 5:15 AM, the same way I knew to hold the cup in both hands. Some things don’t require explanation. They just ask you to begin.

So I begin to walk.

I move through the city the way you move through a dream you’re trying to re-enter, not frantically, not following any map, but with a kind of patient attention, the way you hold very still when a bird has landed near you and you don’t want to frighten it away. I am listening for something I cannot describe, because I can barely describe it to myself. A quality of air. A gap in the sound of things. The particular silence that precedes something alive.

I carry a notebook everywhere now. I write down small things: a tree whose leaves moved when there was no wind; a child who stopped mid-stride for no visible reason and looked straight up at the sky; a woman sitting alone on a bench whose face had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere far and interior and unreachable. I don’t yet know what I’m collecting. I collect it anyway, trusting that the pattern will eventually reveal itself — the way it always has, if you’re patient enough, if you stay curious enough, if you keep looking.

At night I come home. He is reading, or already asleep. I sit on the green sofa and read back through what I’ve written, holding the warm cup, and I try, one more time, to remember.

* * *

IV.

The playground near the school is rubber and painted metal, bright primary colors, designed for safety and durability. There are no trees. In the places where trees might once have been, there are structures shaped to suggest trees, smooth trunks, outstretched branches, everything rounded at the edges. The children climb them without thinking twice, because children climb what is in front of them, and what is in front of them is what the world is.

They are five and six and seven years old, and they are loud and full of the particular energy of children who have been sitting still all morning and have just been released. They chase each other across the rubber surface, fall, get up, keep going. They do not notice the absence of birds, because you cannot notice the absence of something you have never known. The absence is simply the shape of the world. It has always looked like this.

Inside the kindergarten, one hour every day, the children sit with small white devices fitted gently over their ears. The devices play bird songs, the same recordings that come through the lampposts at noon, the same northern cardinal, mockingbird, and barred owl and possible brown-headed nuthatch. There are also games: colorful, well-designed games that teach the children about birds, their habits, their habitats. Nests. Eggs. Migration routes drawn across illustrated maps. The children are good at these games. They can identify a robin by the markings on its chest. They know that swallows return each spring and leave each autumn and that this has always been the way of things.

They know all of this, and none of it is real, and they know that too, in the wordless way that children understand the difference between a thing and a picture of a thing, even when no one has explained it to them.

One girl, six years old, a gap where her front tooth was until recently, slides her headset off during the listening hour and holds it in her lap, sitting very still with her hands folded over it. Her teacher notices and comes over.

Put your headset back on, please.

The girl looks at the window for a moment. The street outside, the lamppost, the flat grey sky above the rooftops. Then she puts her headset back on and the bird songs resume, clear and technically perfect, filling her small ears.

But for that moment, she was listening for something else. Something she has no name for. Something she somehow knows she has not yet heard.

* * *

V.

The devices are elegant, small and white and designed to fit neatly over the ear with a satisfying precision. The local council distributed them in two waves: first to children, then to adults. The accompanying booklet, translated into fifty languages, explains that wearing the device for at least thirty minutes each day will restore memory and promote harmony. The cover of the booklet shows a small illustration of a bird on a branch. It is a nice illustration. It is very accurate.

I wear mine faithfully for three weeks. Then I stop.

The recordings themselves are not unpleasant. They are, in fact, technically perfect in every way that can be measured. But I find, sitting with it in the evenings, that what the device does is fill the space where the memory used to live. And a filled space, I have come to understand, is not the same as a recovered one. You can pack something full of the right sounds and the right frequencies and the right bird and still have only a full space, not the original thing. The original thing was alive. It moved through air. It came from somewhere and went somewhere. You cannot put that in a device.

The more faithfully you wear it, I tell him one evening, the less able you become to recognize the real thing. The recordings train the ear. And a trained ear will hear a recording even when what it’s actually hearing is the opposite — even when what it’s hearing is real.

He looks at me over his cup.

So if a real bird sang right now…

Almost no one would know, I say. They would hear it and think: that sounds like the recording. And they would feel, briefly, the thing the device is supposed to make them feel. And they would be satisfied. And the bird would go unrecognized.

He is quiet for a moment, turning this over.

Would you know? he asks.

I look at my cup. I think about the bird at 5 AM, the tune that dissolved before I could catch it, the outline with everything inside erased. I’m not sure, I tell him. That’s exactly why I’m still looking.

* * *

VI.

It happens in the early morning, before the city has fully woken up, which is the only time the streets are quiet enough to hear anything underneath the noise of everything. I have been awake since before dawn. I often am these days, and I am sitting on a bench in one of Savannah's squares near our building, the one with the rubber paths and the metal trees, with my notebook open on my lap and nothing written in it.

I have learned, over these weeks of walking and listening, that you cannot go looking for it directly. Looking is the wrong instrument. What you have to do is become very still and very open, the way you have to become still when you want a wild thing to come near you. You have to make yourself into the kind of place it might want to land.

So I am sitting there, not searching, and I am thinking about my friend who passed away over eight years ago; about her voice messages, about the way her voice returns to me when I hear the recordings, not just as a sound but as a presence, as the full weight of who she was; and I am thinking about how a voice carries something that a transcript never can, something that lives in the frequency of it, in the breath between the words.

And then.

One note.

And then a few more.

I stop breathing. I am afraid that if I move, it will stop. I am afraid that it is not real, that it is the device’s influence, that my trained ear is constructing a recording out of ambient sound and wishful thinking. And I am afraid that it is real and I will not be able to tell, and in the gap between those two fears there is something else entirely, something warm and enormous and quiet, something that feels like the opposite of every fear I have ever had. I don’t have a word for it. The word has been fading from me for a long time now, the way the tune faded on the morning this all started.

The sound is different from the recordings.

I know this immediately, and then I doubt it immediately, and then I know it again, and the knowing is steadier this time. The difference is not in the notes — a northern cardinal, I think, or something close to one. The difference is in what the sound does to the air around it. A recording fills space. This displaces it. This sound has a weight, has direction, arrives from somewhere specific and moves toward somewhere else. It is not a captured thing being played back. It is a thing that is happening, right now, in real time, in the particular 6 AM air of this particular city in this particular world.

I open my notebook. I do not write anything. I just hold it, and I listen, and I let it be what it is.

The bird sings for a few minutes and then stops. The silence that follows is different from the silence I have been living inside. This one has something in it.

I sit for a long time after. I am trying to hold the sound, knowing I will lose it, knowing that living things do not stay, that they pass through and leave only evidence of having been there, only some change in the air, some shift in the quality of the light, some alteration in the person who was sitting still enough to receive them. Not the tune. Not even the memory of the tune. But something behind it. Something that cannot be recorded, only felt, only carried.

The city is beginning to wake around me. I stand up, eventually, and I walk home.

* * *

VII.

He is still asleep when I get back. I move quietly through the apartment, make coffee, and carry it to the green sofa, where I sit in my usual spot with the cup in both hands and watch the light come in through the window at its morning angle, falling across the plants, across the books, across everything that is familiar and still here.

I don’t know if the birds will come back.

I don’t know if what I heard this morning was one bird or the beginning of many, whether it was a sign or just an accident, whether anyone else in the city was awake at that hour and still enough to hear it. I don’t know if the girl, the one who slid off her headset and looked out at the street and the sky, I don’t know if she heard something this morning, or is still listening for it, or will grow up knowing that there is something worth listening for.

I hope. That is all I have, and it turns out to be enough to keep moving. I hope.

When he comes out of the bedroom later, still creased with sleep, I hand him a cup without saying anything and he takes it and sits down in his chair and we are quiet together for a little while, which is one of the things I love most about our life; that we know how to be quiet together, that silence between us is never empty.

You went out early, he says eventually.

Yes.

And?

I look at the window. A truck passes somewhere below. Voices. A door. The city going on in its way, indifferent and alive.

I heard something, I tell him. I think it was real.

He looks at me for a moment across the steam rising from his cup. Then he nods, just once, quietly, and takes a sip of his coffee. He believes me. He has always believed me. That is the whole of it.

I hold my cup in both hands and turn back to the window.

I listen.

* * *

VIII.

April 1, 2026

It is late afternoon and I am sitting on my green sofa, leaning over the laptop on the coffee table, and I need to stop. My head is aching. I have been listening to bird recordings for over five hours today, longer than usual, trying to extract something from them, some essence I could press into the character I am writing, so that when she hears the real thing she will know the difference because I know the difference. That is how it works. The writer has to live inside the thing before the character can.

I close the laptop.

I have also been turning over a conversation I had with friends recently — a long, rambling, honest conversation about how quickly everything is shifting around us, the landscape of ordinary life quietly being rearranged by technologies that arrived so gradually and then all at once. We talked about what we are losing without fully registering the loss. About how you can be surrounded by the world and still, somehow, be inside a sealed room of your own making. Nobody had a solution. We just named it, carefully, and that felt like something.

I decide to go for a walk through one of Savannah's squares — the live oaks, the fountain, the particular quality of late afternoon light that Savannah does better than almost anywhere. I need air. I need to not be thinking about any of this for twenty minutes.

I step outside the building and reach into my pocket and take out my EarPods — small and white, exactly like the devices in the story I am writing, which I notice only now and choose not to think about — and I press them into my ears and turn on the music and start walking.

I am maybe two minutes into my first lap around the park when I feel it. Not hear it. Feel it first, the way you sometimes sense a presence before you can account for it. A low, resonant pulse of sound moving through the music, or underneath it, or around it. My body registers something that my ears, sealed inside their small white devices, cannot quite confirm.

A barred owl. Hooting.

There is no way. The EarPods are good at blocking the world out. That is the point of them. That is what I bought them for.

But the feeling doesn’t leave, and after a few seconds I do something I almost never do in the middle of a walk when the music is exactly right: I stop. I take the EarPods out of my ears. I stand very still on the path with the late light coming through the Spanish moss and I wait.

Silence.

The barred owl hoots.

Real, unmistakable, close enough that I can feel it in my chest as much as hear it — that low, carrying, almost conversational and ominous sound that barred owls make, as if they are asking a question they already know the answer to. I stand there for a while and just listen and the owl keeps going, unhurried, as if it has all the time in the world. And then, after a few minutes, it goes quiet.

I look down at the EarPods I am clutching in my right hand.

The irony is not subtle. I was trying to disconnect — but from what, exactly? I had sealed myself inside music to get away from my thoughts and my most immediate surroundings, and in doing so had nearly walked right past the thing I have been writing about for months, the thing I have been listening to bird recordings for five hours today to try to understand. The real sound was right there. I almost missed it entirely.

I stand there a little longer in the fading afternoon, holding the EarPods, thinking about the conversation with my friends, thinking about the story on my laptop, thinking about how fast we move and how much moves past us as a result. I think about the playlist of natural sounds that has always run underneath our lives — the birds, the wind in specific trees, the particular acoustics of a place that is actually outside — and I wonder how many tracks we have already lost without noticing, quietly deleted, the library shrinking while we were listening to something else.

How close are we, really, to losing the song?

I put the EarPods in my pocket and walk the rest of the way around the park without them. I watch dogs playfully chase each other. Squirrels run up and down the trees. Spanish moss sways gently in the live oaks. Somewhere nearby, fragrant jasmine is blooming.

Every evening at 6:00 PM a barred owl stops by a tree outside my bedroom window and starts hooting. I wonder if it has always been there, and I am just starting to notice it.

Rather than documenting any specific Blue Zone, this work treats the concept as a symbol for a personal refuge: a self-made interval of slowness, attention, and care that might last an afternoon, a few days, or simply the span of a single breath. Through the images, I invite viewers to consider how a “blue zone” can exist within and around them, in the pauses between daily tasks, in modest gestures of retreat, in the way light falls across a surface and creates a small clearing for reflection. The series asks: What if longevity is not only counted in years, but in how often we allow ourselves to step aside from urgency, to listen, to be still, and to recognize those slow and quiet moments of life as places important and worth returning to, again and again?

These images live on my website as an ongoing invitation. View the complete Blue Zone series here.

Recently, I attended a conference on artificial intelligence, a gathering alive with energy and possibility. As speaker after speaker took the stage, one theme resonated above all: speed. Conversations swirled around how quickly tasks could be completed, how efficiently decisions could be made, and how AI offers new ways to accelerate our ambitions. What stood out to me most, however, was not a critique of AI itself, but what our fascination with speed reveals about us. The rise of AI is not the cause of our accelerating pace. It is a mirror, reflecting our longstanding desire to do more, faster. Perhaps, in this moment of technological transformation, we are being offered a rare chance to pause and reconsider the tempo of our lives, and to ask whether our pursuit of speed is truly serving us, or if there is value in reclaiming moments for reflection and intention.

The Age of Acceleration

We are living through a period where technological progress unfolds at a breathtaking pace. AI’s rapid integration into business, science, and daily life is unprecedented, marking a turning point that rivals the transformative power of the steam engine or the printing press. This is not just about doing things faster; it is about reimagining what is possible and who gets to participate in shaping the future.

French philosopher Paul Virilio, in The Great Accelerator, observed that our era is marked by the relentless quickening of every aspect of life. He argued that we have moved from a world defined by the accumulation of wealth and knowledge to one defined by the “ACCELERATION of flows of all kinds,” where the very notion of accumulation now signals stagnation or delay. In Virilio’s words, “Speed is the new opiate of the masses.” This addiction to velocity, he warns, risks numbing our ability to reflect and make meaning, even as it promises progress.

The Culture of Perpetual Activity

Jonathan Crary, in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, explores how our pursuit of uninterrupted productivity and connectivity has created a world that never truly rests. Crary writes, “24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate.” The expectation to always be available, always responsive, erodes the boundaries between work and rest, public and private. AI, for all its benefits, risks intensifying this trend, making it even easier to fill every moment with activity and leaving little space for genuine pause or contemplation.

The Neglect of History in the Fast Lane

Virilio’s insights are especially relevant when we consider our relationship with history. In a world where, as he puts it, “the collapse of distance has led to the collapse of meaning,” the past can seem less and less relevant. The relentless focus on the next innovation, the next update, encourages us to overlook the lessons and context that history provides. Yet, as both Virilio and Crary suggest, this disregard for history is not progress, but a kind of regression; a loss of depth and perspective that leaves us vulnerable to repeating old mistakes.

Reflection as Ethical Imperative

Virilio famously cautioned, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” Every advance, he reminds us, carries with it new risks and unintended consequences. Crary, too, argues that the erosion of sleep and reflection is not simply a byproduct of technological progress, but a profound ethical issue. Without time to pause and consider, we risk being swept along by forces we do not fully understand or control.

Rethinking AI Ethics in an Accelerated World

The rise of AI brings these questions into sharper focus. It is not enough to ask how fast we can go or how much we can automate. We must also ask: What are we accelerating toward? What are we leaving behind? As Virilio puts it, “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” Embedding ethics and reflection into our approach to AI is not a constraint on innovation. It is the only way to ensure that our advances truly serve the human condition.

Personal and Collective Responsibility: Our Role in the Accelerated World

At this crossroads, it is important to pause and ask ourselves: what role do we want to play in this unfolding drama? Are we content to be extras, following the script handed to us, or do we want to step forward as main characters, shaping the story with intention and care? The stage is set, and the casting has begun. Each of us has a part to play, not just in how we use technology, but in how we choose to reflect, remember, and act.

Toward a Thoughtful Future

If we are to thrive in the age of acceleration, we must reclaim the value of reflection and historical awareness. This is not a call to slow down for its own sake, but to move forward with wisdom, purpose, and a sense of shared responsibility. The drama of acceleration is not just about speed; it is about the choices we make, the stories we tell, and the roles we are willing to inhabit.

When I ask myself, “What is my role in this rapidly accelerating world?” I imagine life as a vast movie set. There are main characters, those who drive the story, make bold decisions, and shape the direction of the plot. There are extras, following cues, blending into the background, their actions scripted and their choices limited. And then there are those who drift in the periphery, barely noticed, their presence acknowledged but their influence minimal.

Sometimes, it is tempting to remain an extra, safe, inconspicuous, simply following the script handed down by the directors of technology and culture. Other times, I wonder if I am just a face in the background, swept along by the momentum of the scene, my role undefined and my voice unheard.

But what if I chose to step forward, to become a main character in this unfolding story? That would mean embracing responsibility, questioning the script, and helping to shape the narrative. It would mean pausing to reflect, insisting on ethics, and making intentional choices about the world being created around me.

Ultimately, the movie of our accelerated age is still being written. I have to decide: Will I be content as an extra, or will I dare to take on a leading role, one that calls for reflection, thoughtfulness, and a willingness to shape the story for the better?

I was born in Poland and, from an early age, craved learning about others, and understanding their languages, cultures, habits. The reason for that was pretty simple: human connection.

I’d describe myself as a lifelong learner, and I think that trait was obvious from my early childhood. When I was five, my dream job was to be… a detective. Why? I wanted to solve mysteries. That urge to solve mysteries showed up in my passion for math and physics in elementary school and kept going through my secondary education.

Another way my curiosity for solving mysteries, and putting puzzle pieces together, showed up was in my love for foreign languages and cultures.

Patterns, Puzzles, and Language Acquisition

The first second language I learned was Russian. Besides picking it up at school, I got the chance to connect with a native speaker: my pen pal, Misha from Saint Petersburg, which was called Leningrad at the time. I remember it like it was yesterday: my elementary school Russian teacher walked briskly into the classroom and announced, “Who wants a pen pal?” The words were barely out of her mouth when my hand shot up like a comet. “I want a pen pal!” I said. I realized, immediately, that I had no idea what a pen pal was, but I avoided embarrassment because my teacher explained it right away: my pen pal would be a boy named Misha, a native Russian speaker, and we would write letters (yes, actual letters, not Facebook, not Instagram, not even cell phones) to learn about each other, our cultures, and also I would have an opportunity to practice my Russian.

What followed was two years of friendship, writing letters and postcards with Misha, and practicing my Russian. We swapped stamps from our collections (mine was pretty impressive back then). Misha loved sending postcards and booklets about the Hermitage Museum, and we discussed its architecture and interiors without even realizing that was what we were doing. Misha also sent magazines with flexi discs, those flexible blue records. I remember always waiting for a letter from him, and the excitement of opening them. Eventually, our correspondence came to a natural end, but my Russian thrived.

Then I started secondary school. Besides Russian, I also began learning English. At that time, getting into secondary school in Poland meant you needed high grades in elementary school and had to pass entrance exams. Because I’d scored high in math and physics, I was assigned to a math and physics track: more classes and more extended learning material in those two subjects. Our professors really were dedicated (sometimes I thought they were too harsh, pushing us to solve problems above our grade), but they took math and physics seriously, and so did I. That’s where my detective dreams and pattern-seeking instincts came in. I used the same approach in my history classes, and, more than anywhere else, while learning this new language that fascinated and terrified me: English.

Building Language Skills Through Immersive Experience

English stole my heart on the first day. I loved it, but I was also terrified. I grew up speaking Polish and enjoyed writing essays in my mother tongue. I’d already learned Russian. But English? So new and mysterious. I was so deep in my head, so worried I wouldn’t get it right (typical perfectionist…), that when my strict English teacher asked me to repeat a few simple sentences, I froze. But I was determined to solve the puzzle. I knew there was a pattern to crack, a code I could decipher in time. Determination was my fuel.

As usual, my mother supported my latest mission. I remember coming back home from school to discover access to satellite TV, with a few English channels. For a while, BBC was my favorite. I spent hours listening to the news and taking notes (or so I thought, I barely understood the words at first). I’d write down sounds, not just words, copying what I heard even if I didn’t know the meaning or spelling. That was my first attempt at phonetic transcription, drawing out the sounds of English.

My English teacher noticed that, although I wasn’t a natural at speaking, I was determined. She lent me a VHS tape about Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare. The documentary made me want to visit Shakespeare’s place of birth (and I did, a few years later). I’d replay the tape for hours, writing out every word, mimicking every sound that fascinated me. If I didn’t know how to spell a word, I’d jot down the sounds. I lived and breathed English. One day, washing dishes after dinner, I caught myself thinking in English. That was it. I’d cracked the code. From then on, learning English wasn’t just easy - it let me express myself in new ways. It was freeing.

The Role of Persistence in Mastering Language

I’ve been stressing my love for foreign languages, but I also love my mother tongue. Polish is considered one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn. In high school, I loved writing essays in Polish, long, poetic sentences, and then switching to English: shorter sentences, often with one word replacing several Polish words, yet still conveying the message. It makes me think of model training, or even prompting AI. Translation isn’t enough; you need context - the book, the characters, culture, and the story. Otherwise, the English translation lacks the same emotional connection. We get a “correct” output, but something is lost. This reminds me of today’s conversations around AI, prompts, and the importance (or lack of it) of prompt writing - the input and the output. Does being a master prompt writer automatically make you an AI “expert”? Will it allow us to create masterpieces, the most beautiful experiences, just by mastering prompts? Or, maybe, now more than ever, we need to return to basics: slow down, consider what makes us human, and focus on strengthening the ties that connect us while creating a new language that’s already shaping our culture. What other skills do we need to enhance when learning this very new to all of us language, the language that is in its constant fluid form, as I call it – AI, the language in flux.

When secondary school ended, it was time for the Matura exam. To graduate and move on to university in Poland, passing the Matura was mandatory. My track meant I had to take written and oral exams in math or physics, plus Polish and a foreign language. If you passed the written part and had good grades, you qualified for the oral section, again, in your major subjects and a foreign language.

The year I took my Matura, the requirements changed: for the first time, students could take their written exams in a foreign language instead of math or physics. English and other language exams were just being integrated into the system, at different levels. My teacher warned the handful of us (maybe five altogether) who wanted to try. We were cautioned: What if you’re not ready? What if you fail? The risk was high - nobody had done it before. But I took the leap. I remember our small group in the classroom, with my English professor and a local reporter snapping photos. We were pioneers (or maybe just young fools). But we took the exam, and … we passed.

Comparing Native and Foreign Language Complexities

After that, I went on to study for a BA in ESL teaching and an MA in Applied Linguistics at Warsaw University. I learned German, explored Latin. My love for English never faded. At that point, it was less about love and more about relentless code-cracking. I discovered that once you break the code in one language, given persistence, you can use that to communicate in everyday life, in any culture or language. It’s all about recognizing patterns, complexities and their common threads. I think of that as similar to how neural networks work, connecting pieces to make sense of the whole.

During my studies, besides classes on grammar, phonetics (I always loved the look of transcriptions), and language acquisition, I dove into British and American history and literature, as well as cross-cultural studies. These classes focused on building intercultural competence through language-culture interaction, communication styles, and experiential learning, like tandem language projects. The goal was to build awareness, sensitivity, and communication skills - taking a social constructivist approach that encouraged collaboration and reflection on cultural differences and similarities. Empathy comes to mind here.

The literature classes were unforgettable. I’ll never forget reading Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in Middle English at twenty. I couldn’t fully decipher it, but with my background in British history and literature, I could guess, so I didn’t need to check every word like I had with those VHS tapes in high school. Besides Graham Green’s “The Quiet American,” Chaucer became my favorite. I laughed at Chaucer’s language play, admired his blending of Old English and French vocabulary, his keen social observations, irony, and playful wit. Today, I think Chaucer would have made a great AI model designer (though he’d definitely need a reminder about bias and the risk of poking fun at humanity). I’ve read “The Canterbury Tales” twice in Middle English. But when I picked up a modern English translation years later, I didn’t laugh and reflect as much. Was it age? Experience? Or was it something lost in translation - something that affected not just connection to the story, but to the storyteller himself?

These types of questions dogged me during my studies. The big one: how do we learn languages? Do our methods affect our success and our attitudes toward not just the language, but the people who use it? Can learning a foreign language reveal or shape our biases?

Learning as Pattern Recognition and Neural Connections

All these questions led me to my master’s thesis; the culmination of my MA in Applied Linguistics. In my thesis, I argued that children’s literature, especially stories and fairy tales, can not only provide authentic input for language development, but also serve as didactic material superior to traditional textbooks. While researching both cognitive and emotional development in children, I explored the role of play, imagination, and creativity in language learning. I noted in my thesis that “since children delight in imagination and fantasy and are busy making sense of the world around them, play has a very powerful contribution to learning, for it stimulates and encourages the use of language in context.”

Social Constructivism and Empathy in Language Education

This is something I still explore in my classroom today when discussing technology with my students and colleagues, especially technologies that are emerging rapidly, like AI. It seems that all of us, regardless of age, are trying to make sense of the world we live in, a world now heavily shaped and defined by new technologies; a new language we are all just beginning to learn. My approach to this new language is the same as always: I put on my detective hat, look for patterns and common threads, and, hopefully, eventually, crack the code. I’m far from it, for sure. But, like everyone around me, I have a lot of questions. I observe. I look into linguistics, and especially foreign language acquisition, for answers. Can we apply the same approach to learning and teaching this new language and build confidence and comprehension by providing learners with meaningful context and fostering a shared social experience, just as we do in foreign language teaching for young learners?

Ethics, Bias, and Social Development in Language and AI

What about our concerns over good and bad actors? With so many subtleties, how do we ensure that we don’t misuse this new language, and how do we teach others about the differences between right and wrong? For example, take generative AI: what does it mean to create an image in someone else’s style, like using Studio Ghibli’s distinctive look? And then, of course, there’s the question of bias.

That brings me back to my applied linguistics thesis and the chapter on social and emotional development, where I discuss how, around the age of nine or ten, concepts of right and wrong start to become more flexible. At this age, experiences and books help children relate to different points of view. They begin to realize that there are attitudes, values, and standards out there that are different from the ones their parents emphasize.

As we navigate this new world shaped by AI, I wonder if perhaps our most important responsibility, just like with language learning in childhood, is to stay curious, question our assumptions, and remember that the way we use this technology will help define what “right” and “wrong” mean for the next generation.

Challenges and Opportunities of Language in Flux

Besides questions about “right” and “wrong” in context of AI, we ask more and more when and why to use AI. A big question in academic setting is “Will AI impact our creativity in a negative way?”

A few years after earning my master’s degree in Applied Linguistics, I studied interior design. When I started, we were still encouraged to do hand drafting. I remember long, sleepless nights leaning over my drafting table or building models. Hand drafting was meditative, at least during the first hour. After that, not so much; especially if the pencil wasn’t very sharp and kept smudging the drafting paper.

Creativity and Technology: Human-Centered Collaboration

In my second year, we started learning AutoCAD. I remember it wasn’t very intuitive for me. I dragged my feet about going to the computer lab to use it. If only there had been an easier way to bring my measurements, floor plans, and overall ideas to life more quickly, and in a more rewarding way…

A few years later, I had a similar experience learning Rhino and KeyShot during my MFA Design studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. I remember feeling frustrated with the new software and not yet proficient enough to fully convey my ideas for a staircase and a nature-inspired whistle I was designing. During that time, I also developed a concept I called the Lingua Franca Project: a physical space where visitors could connect with others and develop their own language as a result of traveling through space and time; a common language shared by those present in the space at that moment. This language would never die or be threatened with extinction. I created a basic sketch of my initial idea and focused on writing about it.

Years later, just last week, I rediscovered my sketch and writing and thought, "What if… what if that space could come to life?" And, for now, it has, at least in image form, thanks to OpenStudio, an AI creative suite that favors geometry over “harvesting your creative output.” Seeing my concept brought to life visually opened up new ideas and considerations. OpenStudio allowed me to breathe life into an old sketch, reigniting my excitement for the project and the possibility of moving it into development.

Lingua Franca Project - sketch (on the left) by Wioleta Kaminska, renderings with OpenStudio

Did AI impact my creativity? No. Did it help me? Absolutely. Now, if I were to move forward with the project, I’d need to collaborate with engineers, architects, interior designers, and a whole team. I’d definitely bring IDEO and their human-centered approach on board. But most importantly, after years of contemplating the project and doing rough sketches, seeing OpenStudio’s rendition gave me new energy. It made me enthusiastic, encouraged me to share and pitch the idea, and, most importantly, helped me envision the Lingua Franca space.

Foundations of Creativity Remain Key

I strongly believe that design thinking, critical thinking, basic sketching skills, understanding composition, and the elements and principles of design are more crucial than ever.

And again, the question about AI destroying our creativity, or even our humanity, comes to mind. I think about an interview with Mark di Suvero that I quoted in my MFA thesis. In “Mark di Suvero’s Path to Steel,” the sculptor talks about the dark side of metal: “Steel has so often been nothing but an element of warfare and other terrible things.” But he immediately adds, “It’s not the fault of steel. It’s the fault of human beings who use it that way.” This reminds me of many conversations I had with friends, CCA instructors, and fellow students about our fast-paced technological culture and its impact on our lives. Like Mark di Suvero, we often concluded that it’s not technology itself that causes harm, but us, human beings, and the way we choose to use it.

Responsibility and Choice in Technological Use

Is it possible to think of AI the same way? There’s both excitement and fear. Some take strong stances on one side or the other. There’s justified skepticism, environmental concerns, and societal and cultural questions, but there is also hope that, if guided consciously, ethically, and responsibly, AI can serve the common good. AI is definitely a hot topic of debate. There are many opinions, which can feel overwhelming, especially for those of us still early learners of the AI language, including many who create the models and are surprised by black box hallucinations or inexplicable model advances.

Fostering Curiosity and Caution in AI Adoption

What’s great is that we’ve started talking, expressing opinions, initiating conversations, and holding heated debates. There’s a rise in AI-focused courses and certifications offered by various platforms and organizations. Increasingly, individuals and groups are calling for guidelines, policies, and regulations.

We often hear, “There are no AI experts,” though LinkedIn profiles with “AI expert” titles are popping up everywhere. Posts, conferences, and discussion panels about AI are everywhere; I even organized one last week.

As an educator, I believe my role is to stay curious, be cautious, keep observing the world, continue researching, and create safe spaces where both enthusiasm and concerns about AI can be expressed and discussed. At the same time, my job is to guide students through this new language acquisition process, with ethics and a human-centered approach as a compass. The goal is to help students grasp the basics of this new language, even though most of us are still early learners.

Final Note: Human Authorship and AI Tools

This article was written by Wioleta Kaminska, a human. I did ask Perplexity.ai to check my grammar. On two occasions, Perplexity tried to slightly alter my sentences in ways that would have changed the meaning. It reminded me of a professor I know who hides a fun word in their syllabus just to see if students read the whole thing. Nice try, Perplexity. But you should know you’re dealing with… a self-proclaimed detective. I made sure the writing is mine and that it conveys my message. I am a human who chooses how to use my tools, whether it’s a pen, a satellite dish, or a language model assistant, the detective work (and the final word) is always mine.

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On a crisp Tuesday morning, Savannah, a city more accustomed to sultry summers than winter wonderlands, found itself blanketed in a delicate layer of snow. After five years of calling this Southern gem home, I finally witnessed the city's transformation into a magical, frost-kissed landscape.

The National Weather Service reported downtown Savannah received approximately three inches of snow, turning familiar streets into unrecognizable scenes of pristine white. Neighborhoods like Southwest Savannah and Northeast Savannah were similarly draped in winter's unexpected embrace, with snowfall ranging from 2.5 to 3 inches.

Residents emerged from their homes, cameras and smartphones in hand, capturing the surreal moment. Social media buzzed with images of this rare meteorological event, each photo a testament to the city's momentary metamorphosis. Dogs played, children laughed, and adults stood in awe; a collective pause in our usual routine, united by this extraordinary day.

The city responded with care, declaring a State of Emergency and closing administrative offices to ensure residents' safety. Warming centers opened, providing refuge for those needing shelter from the unexpected chill.

As the snow gently fell, Savannah, typically known for its warm hospitality, showed another side of its character: a quiet, ethereal beauty that reminded us how extraordinary the ordinary can become.

For the next five days, as Winter Storm Enzo lingered, I would bundle up and go on afternoon walks to enjoy this unusually cold Savannah weather. The Winter Storm Warning predicted continued challenging conditions, with temperatures expected to remain near freezing and potential wind chills dropping to as low as 10-15 degrees.

During my walks, I couldn't help but wonder about the impact on local wildlife. One particularly poignant moment came when I discovered a frozen lizard on an ice-covered sidewalk; a stark reminder of nature's fragility in unexpected conditions. But, is “unexpected” the right word here?

Back home with a cup of hot tea, the frozen lizard's image fresh in my mind, I found myself immersed in a research paper from 2009 about planetary boundaries. The quote from the Ecology and Society website resonated deeply: "The Earth has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene, where humans constitute the dominant driver of change to the Earth System."1

As Savannah transformed into a temporary winter wonderland, this rare meteorological event became more than just a picturesque moment. It was a subtle reminder of the delicate balance between human experience, environmental systems, and a fundamental question, “What role do I play in it all?”

Savannah, GA, January 2025