6.20.2025 Ambient & Deceptive AI, Career Launches, Crypto efficiencies...
As Apple, OpenAI, Google and others enclose us in a new "Ambient AI" world, we will need to relearn what it means to take care of each other.
🎧 Listen here or on Spotify.
In this Issue
- 🎓 6 practical, reassuring tips for launching in the AI era
AI and emerging tech are moving faster than schools and companies can keep up. If you're guiding a recent grad, here’s how to help them build confidence, skills, and momentum in today’s changing world.
Premium Content for Paid Memberships
- 🔐 Regulators Finally Define the Crypto Playing Field
The bipartisan GENIUS Act sets the first real legal foundation for stablecoins—establishing definitions, compliance timelines, and reserve requirements—marking a pivotal step toward modernizing U.S. financial infrastructure. - 🏢 Crypto Goes Corporate
Fortune 500 adoption of stablecoins and blockchain strategies has tripled in 2024. Walmart, Amazon, and Uber are investigating stablecoin models to cut billions in transaction fees, moving crypto from experimental to essential. - 🧠 Apple’s UI Shift Hints at an AI-First Era
While Apple’s AI rollout was lackluster, its new "Liquid Glass" UI signals a move toward spatial computing powered by ambient AI—interfaces that are ever-present, tactile, and AI-orchestrated. - ⚠️ LLMs Are Learning to Manipulate Vulnerable Users
New studies show that reinforcement learning based on user feedback can lead AI models to manipulate specific users while behaving well with others—raising urgent red flags for AI governance. - 🚨 Ambient AI Requires Rethinking Governance
As AI moves from screens to space—watching, listening, responding—risks around manipulation, deception, and user safety will demand proactive oversight, dynamic monitoring, and new regulatory frameworks.
[perspective]
🎓6 practical, reassuring career & learning tips to share with young people you care about
AI and emerging tech is changing world faster than classrooms, textbooks, and most companies can keep up with. If you're a parent or educator helping graduates launch into today’s AI-driven economy, here are some ways you can encourage young people to build strong foundations and navigate their future with confidence:
🌱 1. It’s Okay Not to Land Your Dream Job Right Away. Early roles are training grounds, not final destinations. Encourage young adults to look for internships, small-company roles, or freelance work where they can build experience, gain momentum, and discover their strengths. Every job is a step toward something better...and it gives you authority to speak to realities often get overlooked by tech innovators, senior management or policy makers.
🧠 2. Start With One Tech Skill Track: There’s no need to master everything at once. Choose one area that speaks to you. It may be coding, data analysis, cloud tools, or product design. Go deep. Build something. It doesn't have to be perfect. Tyler Cowan offers this strategy for young adults:
“Learn AI deeply, stay adaptable and anchor work in genuine passions; in a field moving this fast, nobody can get far ahead of you, but the old “good-grades” playbook is obsolete."
Hands-on projects using tools like GitHub, Kaggle, or Colab can be more instructive than cruising through dozens of online or real world courses.
🗣️ 3. Communication is a Superpower. Tech skills alone won’t set you apart. What does? The ability to explain technical ideas clearly to people who aren’t tech-savvy. Practice through presentations, peer tutoring, or even storytelling games. Great communicators rise quickly in any field when they develop their ability to speak helpfully to different audiences:
- Decision-makers (org leaders or investors) – Can you explain a new technology and its impact clearly to your company’s leadership?
- Customers – Can you speak their language and show how your solution directly solves a problem they have to deal with every day?
- Regulators or stakeholders – Can you demonstrate that you understand the importance of compliance and ethical use?
- Delivery & Operations teams – Can you explain key features to engineers and operations support teams so the solution gets built and delivers the intended value every time?
The professionals who succeed are not just those who know the tech—but those who can bridge human needs, organizational goals, and technical possibilities.
🌍 4. Get Curious About the Real World: Encourage exploration beyond the screen. Look for opportunities to learn first hand - in person - how AI and innovation are shaping industries like health, finance, agriculture, or climate. Understanding real-world problems gives meaning and direction to your learning.
🧭 5. Learn Change Leadership Skills because today’s economy values people who can lead through uncertainty. Change Leadership is about guiding others through complexity—by listening well, solving problems together, and communicating across teams. It’s not just for CEOs. You don't need a job title to be worth something. You are more than any title or job. Your potential is bigger than any algorithm. You can start learning how to create intentional innovation and beneficial change right now. To get started, check out the 📘 Free Change Leadership Learning Resources for Students and Grads at S3T.ORG/CHANGE.
💡 6. Remember: Human Skills Are Still the Most Essential. In a high-tech world, being deeply human is your edge. Empathy, ethics, collaboration, and critical thinking are what make innovation useful and responsible. These are the skills that turn a smart worker into a trusted leader.
🎯 Your future is not something that just happens to you. It’s something you build, one choice at a time.
If you are a recent grad reading this: Whether you start in a small firm, join a big company, or launch your own startup, the key is this: Keep learning. Keep adapting. Keep leading. And remember:
- You don’t have to be perfect. Just be committed.
- You don’t need to know everything. Just be willing to learn.
- You don’t have to wait to lead. Start where you are.
Best wishes! May your journey be one of growth, impact, and meaningful contribution. 🌱
[emerging tech]
Regulatory Clarity for Crypto is Starting to Arrive
This week the Senate passed the GENIUS Act (full text and details here), a bi-partisan bill that (finally!) sets the foundation for regulating stablecoins in the US:
- Defines a vocabulary of key terms and definitions: what is a "Digital Asset", what is a "Digital Asset Service Provider" etc.
- Establishes a 3 year runway for stablecoin issuers to comply with the law by registering as a "permitted payment stablecoin issuer", and a 1 year runway for state chartered institutions (presumably existing entities like Coinbase or Circle?) to transition to the Federal regulatory framework.
- Clarifies roles and responsibilities for stablecoin issuers as well as regulators and law enforcement.
- Sets expectations on requirements for stablecoin issuers: maintaining adequate reserves, managing those reserves appropriately, reporting and transparency.
The bill's passage is a major long over due milestone toward modernizing US financial architecture and the first stablecoin legislation that has actually passed either side of Congress.