As someone who spent 20+ years in IT technical support and has now transitioned into AI Enablement, I see real value in AI and its wider use for the general population.
AI should be used in schools. Just not before high school.
The Fear
If we had a massive EMF event or a multi-day power outage, here’s what worries me about today’s youth:
- They cannot do basic math without a calculator, phone, or computer in hand.
- They cannot write a sentence on paper, spelled correctly and fully spelled out, without slipping into “chat language.”
- They cannot read a printed or handwritten document with confidence.
- They cannot problem-solve without a coach walking them through it.
These are the fundamentals I learned before college. In High School Algebra 2, I earned the right to use a calculator only after I could solve the quadratic equation by hand. I learned basic math through shopping, buying groceries, and balancing a checkbook. I learned to read my own handwriting, both print and cursive, along with my classmates’.
AI can replace all of that because it has been taught and fed every basic function there is. But AI requires power. What happens when there is no power to run the systems it depends on? Cuba has spent stretches of 2024 and 2025 living that question for real, with island-wide blackouts lasting days at a time.
The Fix: Media Literacy, Now
Media literacy needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Kids today are growing up fully connected and fully attached to their devices. Cell phones, social media, news, TV. These are addictions, and they are not being treated as such. Life before these inventions was simpler, quieter, and more human-focused.
AI requires human intervention. The knowledge at your fingertips comes with mistakes, bias, opinion, and stories that are not verified or confirmed as fact before you’re expected to believe them. AI is a wonderful tool, and its uses are expanding fast, but you have to take ownership and confirm the output is accurate before you trust it. Otherwise we end up with a society that cannot reason out truth from multiple sources, cannot determine what a fact is, and cannot think for itself.
The Bottom Line
We have to become leaders who use AI responsibly. That means stepping in and teaching the next generation what to use and how to use it. Because when the power fails, and Cuba has shown us it does, how will our younger generations process anything if they cannot write on paper, cannot do math, and cannot tell true from false without a screen to check?
In business, as AI gets adopted into more environments, we keep human in the loop first. Our youth are the future, and we have to prepare them to make decisions with every tool available. Paper, computers, AI, and their own critical thinking. Computers will not exist without power. Our youth need to be well-rounded, and free of biases they never chose for themselves.