The five essential readings for the AI chaos era

Beneath the Schomburg Center's lobby, Langston Hughes's ashes rest under a cosmogram in the heart of Harlem. It is a fitting place, it turns out, to talk about AI.

This week I attended a talk there featuring Dr. Ruha Benjamin and Dr. Kamau Bobb. in a conversation about AI through the lens of power, access, and representation: what kinds of people, histories, and imaginations make our technologies possible in the first place, and what futures they'll help us build, or foreclose.

As Benjamin put it: "An algorithm is only as good as the story embedded in its inputs."

The solution to a better future is not a better machine. We need, instead, better stories, reflecting the dreams, memories, and imagination of the people, all of us.

Three of our SEUT Scholarship Finalists wrote about what ethical use of tech and AI means in fields as far ranging as marketing, disaster response, and cybersecurity. One commonality is that they each saw a problem to improve, and did something about it.

Announcing the winner of SEUT’s 2026 Scholarship, Marcus Castillo.

Thoughtful reflections by a high school SEUT member about Princeton University’s Envision Conference about the future of AI, led by students.