Richard McKnight

Many readers have told me that my essays are uplifting and inspiring. I won’t get that feedback this time. Here, I take note of a moral outrage. Perhaps no advertisement more grotesquely captures our AI moment than the one pictured in the screenshot below. I am relatively slow to anger, but this has me boiling. It’s an ad for Splunk, a Cisco company, promoting its AI security products under the line “Trust AI at scale.” It’s telling us that AI makes mistakes so Splunk—itself a tech...

I GAVE A PRESENTATION THE OTHER DAY ABOUT CITIZENSHIP. Borrowing a line from Bill Clinton, I said to the one hundred people assembled that there is nothing wrong with our country that cannot be fixed by what is right with our country. Because it was on Zoom, I made a background for myself picturing a framed poster. On the poster were three words which, to me, are magic: Notice. Connect. Act. In the talk, as I do in my book, I distinguished what it means to be a citizen from what it means...

The Surprising Path Out of Civic Helplessness. Constant exposure to immense national problems can convince us that only sweeping reforms matter and that ordinary, local actions are inconsequential. The way back to hope is to think smaller: Focus on the people, organizations, and communities within our reach. By acting with others to strengthen one small part of our common life we recover agency and hope. HAVE YOU LOST YOUR ABILITY TO FEEL HOPEFUL about our country? If so, you may be able to...