Protect Your Inbox: How to Avoid Email and Text Scams

In today’s world, protecting your personal information feels like an uphill battle. With the rise of sophisticated email and text scams, it’s no wonder that many of us are worried about our private messages—whether they are sensitive emails, medical records, or bank statements—falling into the wrong hands. Although the number of fraud reports in 2024 was little changed from the previous year, more people lost a lot more money to fraud. Among the one in three who reported fraud, the overall loss amounted to $12.5 billion (up $2.5 billion from 2023), according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than $3 billion of this was lost to scams that started online, particularly on social media. By comparison, approximately $1.9 billion was lost to more “traditional” contact methods, like calls, texts, or emails. However, people lost more money per person (a median of $1,500) when scammers on the phone contacted them,

Of those who reported losing money, 79 percent—who sustained a total of $2 billion in losses—were lured into making bank transfers or direct payments in the false belief that they would profit from an investment. The median loss in these cases exceeded $9,000. Cryptocurrency investments were second among the successful scams (leading to an overall loss of $1.9 billion in 2024). Fake employment offers were another source of loss between 2020 and 2024; reports of such scams nearly tripled, and losses in that period grew from $90 million to $501 million. Victims tended to be younger (those aged between 20 and 29 reported losing money more often than did those over 70), but older adults continued to lose more money to scammers than did any other age group.

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to be a tech expert to guard your privacy. Simple changes to the way you send and receive messages can make a huge difference in protecting your information.

Why Your Messages Are at Risk

Every day, you likely send personal emails or texts containing photos, receipts, or other sensitive documents. You might share your tax files with an accountant or send a prescription record to your doctor. But just like postcards that travel through the mail, digital messages are not always as private as you might think. The reality is that without proper protections in place, these messages and their attachments can be intercepted by people you wouldn’t want to see them.

Take John, for example. He received a text that appeared to be from FedEx, notifying him of a delivery. Intrigued, he clicked on the link in the message. Within hours, unfamiliar expenses appeared on his credit card. The link he clicked had immediately installed spyware on his phone. Scams like this are becoming increasingly common, with 3.4 billion phishing emails sent daily around the world. The danger is real and growing.

“Scammers want you to panic and act fast. That’s their game,” State Senator Marty Flynn of Pennsylvania says. “Always take a moment to verify the information. If you are unsure, go directly to a trusted source … or app before taking any action.”

Scammers are increasingly using text messages to scam consumers. Reports to the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network provide encouraging news for the scammers: text message scams soared in 2024, resulting in overall losses of some $470 million, more than five times what was reported in 2020. Because the reports probably represent only a fraction of the incidents, the actual losses are likely to have been much greater.

How Scammers Target You

Scammers use a variety of strategies to exploit their victims. One common tactic involves the use of public Wi-Fi networks—like those in coffee shops or airports—to “listen in” on emails being sent over the air. If you’re not careful, they can easily grab your sensitive information.

Then there are phishing attacks. These are emails that look real, sometimes even appearing to be from your bank or Netflix, which can trick you into revealing your password or downloading malicious software. In fact, 94 percent of malware is delivered via email attachments, so opening a seemingly innocent file can be dangerous. Scammers have two basic objectives: either to steal your personal information or to install malware on your device. Phishing is the most common form of cybercrime, with an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails sent daily, and about one-fifth of these originate from Russia. In 2021, one out of every five internet users was victimized by phishing attacks. When a database is breached, hackers often sell it on the dark web, where cybercriminals can purchase and then exploit it, using the leaked addresses for further phishing attacks. The incidence of phishing has only increased since 2021.

Because LinkedIn is used by more than 850 million people across more than 200 countries and regions, it has become a primary target for email phishing attacks: 42 percent, compared with 20 percent for Facebook (Meta) and 9 percent for X (formerly Twitter) in 2021.

Phishing is also the principal delivery method for ransomware. In a typical ransomware attack, a computer or network of computers in an organization is encrypted, preventing the user from accessing data until a ransom has been paid, often in cryptocurrency, to the hacker or hackers responsible. The user is tricked into opening a so-called Trojan (deriving its name from the legendary Trojan Horse, which was used by the ancient Greeks to invade the city of Troy) in the belief that it is a legitimate file, which then triggers the malicious software. Health firms, hospitals, health insurance organizations, and even small cities in the United States have been targeted. The ultimate costs reached a peak in 2023—a record $1.25 billion—only to fall off sharply to $813 million in 2024, according to blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis. This suggests that the hackers no longer regarded this particular crime as being among the most potentially lucrative.

Individuals are frequently targeted by hackers claiming to have compromising information and photos and threatening to send them to the victims’ friends and families unless they pay up. “It’s just personalized enough to make you stop … no matter how savvy you are, you’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute, is this real? Is this me?’” says Dan Ackerman, editor-in-chief of Micro Center News. In a 2024 interview with CBS News, Ackerman pointed out that scammers typically send out hundreds of thousands of emails. He advises potential victims to watch for three signs in particular: urgent deadline, awkward wording, and generic language.

“It never says what you’ve been doing in your house, on your webcams, on what devices. [There are] no specifics like that, and that’s how you know they’re not real. They’re usually not written very well.” In such cases, he advises people not to reply, not to pay any money, and to report the email.

Another risk is sending information to the wrong recipient. A single typo in an email address can expose your private details to unintended recipients.

Easy Ways to Protect Your Privacy

There are a few simple steps you can take to keep your information secure.

First, password-protect your files before you send them. If you’re sharing sensitive material like bank statements or legal documents, add a password to the file. For Word documents, go to “File > Info > Protect Document > Encrypt with Password.” For PDFs, tools like PDFtk or Adobe Acrobat work well. Even images or folders can be zipped and protected with passwords. Just don’t send the password in the same email; text or call the recipient with it instead.

Next, consider using cloud links instead of attachments. Upload your files to a secure cloud service like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or OneDrive and share a view-only link. These services even allow you to add password protection and expiration dates.

Nonetheless, scams targeting cloud storage are still prevalent. Scammers sometimes send messages claiming that your cloud storage is full, pressuring you to click a link and “resolve” the issue. Here’s how to spot such scams and stay safe. An email or text that appears to be from Apple, Microsoft, or Google, claiming you’re out of storage, should be treated with skepticism, even if the message looks legitimate. First, ensure you have cloud storage with the company that appears to be emailing you. If you do have such an account, contact them directly. But don’t click the link in the message. Instead, use a number or website you know to be real, or log into your cloud account to see if you really need more cloud space. Otherwise, the message might be a phishing scam that you should report and delete.

Take a cue from Kevin, a college student, who shared his scholarship paperwork with his advisor using OneDrive, a cloud-based service. He could track when the file was opened and even revoke access if needed. It’s a safer, smarter way to share files in the cloud. The same precaution holds in working on a Google Doc. In one Google Docs phishing scam, users were tricked into clicking fake document-sharing links that spread malware. If someone invites you to edit a file in Google Docs, don’t open it—it may be spam from a phishing scheme. As detailed on Reddit, the attacker sends targets an email invitation from someone they may know, takes them to a real Google sign-in screen, and then asks them to “continue to Google Docs.” What the victims don’t know is that by doing this, they’re giving permission to a (malicious) third-party web app that’s simply called “Google Docs,” which gives phishers access to their email and address books.

If you suspect a phishing scam, forward the email to the Anti-Phishing Working Group at [email protected]. Report phishing text messages in the messaging app you use or forward the text message to SPAM (7726). You can also report the phishing attempt to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Another helpful tip is to switch to privacy-focused email services. If you’re concerned about security, consider providers like ProtonMail, which offers end-to-end encryption; Outlook Encryption; or iCloud Mail, which automatically protects your messages on Apple devices. With services like these, you can even unsend messages or set them to expire after a specific period, giving you more control over your communication. Organizations like Altra Credit Union have avoided data breaches through cloud-based email encryption, which has built customer trust and security.

Before hitting “send,” take a moment to double-check. Ask yourself if you’re sending something sensitive. Are you sure the recipient’s email or phone number is correct? Would you be okay if this information became public? If something feels “off,” trust your instincts and verify the sender’s identity before you act.

And don’t forget the basics: keep your devices updated. Hackers love exploiting outdated software, so make sure to turn on automatic updates for your computer, phone, and apps. Also, use strong, unique passwords for each account, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible to add an extra layer of protection.

“Using only one factor—say, something you know, like a password—to log in to your account is like having one lock on your front door. And not a very secure one,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. “Using two-factor authentication is like using two locks on your door—and is much more secure. Even if a hacker knows your username and password, they can’t log in to your account without the second credential or authentication factor.”

What to Do if You’re Hacked

If the worst happens and your information is compromised, don’t panic, but act quickly. Begin by updating your passwords on critical accounts, such as email and banking, as well as any other services that share the same password. Then, warn your contacts. Let them know that your account was hacked so that they don’t fall for follow-up scams. Finally, monitor your accounts closely. Regularly check your credit card and bank statements for suspicious activity, and consider setting up fraud alerts through services like Credit Karma or Experian.

Real-Life Examples

A few real-world cases will illustrate how these protections work. Take cloud-storage security. Scammers often trick users into clicking on fake links to Google Docs, spreading malware across devices. But with the proper security practices, cloud storage can be a safe way to share files.

In the case of ProtonMail, a software company, which, in contrast to other email services such as Gmail and Microsoft, promises users privacy, asserting that it is free from surveillance. Similarly, companies like Altra Credit Union have been able to protect their clients by using end-to-end encryption, keeping sensitive customer data safe from prying eyes. By integrating these privacy measures, they’ve built trust with their clients and safeguarded their personal information.

Proton has also established a reputation for security with the introduction of Lumo, a privacy-first artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. In contrast to other AI platforms introduced by companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, Proton’s AI system was trained on publicly available sources, including books, articles, and websites, up to October 2023, which the company maintains minimizes the possibility of hallucinations (false information) and protects privacy, since it doesn’t store logs of conversations on its server, even though it cannot browse the web, use conversations, or update information.

You don’t have to be a tech wizard to protect your privacy; just follow these simple steps, and you’ll be ahead of the game. Remember, if something feels off, don’t click on it. Take a moment to verify the sender’s identity before taking any action. After all, your privacy is worth the few extra minutes it might take to protect it.

Rules vs. Reality: How Competing Views Shape the Way We Use Language

What is language, why do we use it, and how did it evolve? These are questions that language researchers are still working to answer. From a basic standpoint, a language is a shared system of symbols that we use to transmit information between a sender and a receiver. On a social level, we use language to convey ideas, build community, and resolve conflict. We also know that language is a psychological phenomenon; we use language to think and talk to ourselves and to express our identity.

There are many definitions of human language that outline key features distinguishing it from other forms of communication. For one, “human language is distinct from all other known animal forms of communication in being compositional. … [This] gives human language an endless capacity for generating new sentences as speakers combine and recombine sets of words into their subject, verb, and object roles,” stated Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, in BMC Biology in 2017. Human language sets itself apart through its property of limitlessness: It possesses the ability to convey virtually any idea or experience in limitless ways.

This property of limitlessness is similarly apparent through its hallmark of recursion, perhaps one of the most intriguing features of language. In terms of grammar (or more technically, what linguists call syntax in this particular case), recursion allows for the ability to create an infinitely long sentence. Think about how you could keep adding to this sentence without ever starting a new one: “Yesterday around noon, I spoke with an old friend on the phone who knows someone from a neighborhood nearby who told them that… .”

Scientists have differing theories about how long humans have been using language. This type of question is difficult to trace, compounded by the fact that there are different forms of communication, with gestures and non-speech vocalizations dating back further than spoken and signed languages, and written language emerging even later. George Poulos, researcher and professor emeritus at the University of South Africa, states in a 2022 article in the Conversation that the first speech sounds emerged around 70,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, a March 2025 article by MIT News proposes that “our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.” According to Shigeru Miyagawa, linguist, MIT professor, and co-author of the meta-analysis discussed in that article, “the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds; it is when humans had the cognitive ability to develop language as we know it, combining vocabulary and grammar into a system generating an infinite amount of rules-based expression.”

Today, it is estimated that there are more than 7,000 languages in use worldwide. Many of these languages are endangered, at risk of extinction. “More than half of the world’s approximately 7,000 signed and spoken languages are currently endangered. … Regions where all Indigenous [languages] are endangered—including parts of South America and the United States—face the greatest consequences,” states a 2023 article on the Yale News website.

Language is not a static or steadfast system. It changes over time. These changes are shaped by sociocultural, geographic, historical, political, economic, and technological influences, highlighting that language is a social phenomenon. With the rise of a more globally interconnected world and easier access to information, communication, and movement of people, building our understanding of language is now more important than ever.

New insights into how language works can help us enhance language learning methodologies, develop language technologies, and build bridges with other cultures and communities—a big endeavor, to say the least. With applications such as these in mind, a question that often comes up is: Are there correct and incorrect ways to use language?

Descriptivism and Prescriptivism

A common framework in linguistics is the distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism. Descriptivism is concerned with language in use. It seeks to describe language as it naturally occurs. From a descriptivist approach, there is no right or wrong; there just is. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, makes assertions about language as it “should be.” It sets out how language ought to be used, implying that there are both correct and incorrect choices when it comes to language use. This latter concept may raise some questions.

In 2020, the Académie Française, a moderator of the French language, ruled that the word COVID was feminine. Unlike English, nouns in French follow a binary gender system that classifies them as feminine or masculine. In this case, the organization asserted that because the primary word “disease” (“la maladie”) in “coronavirus disease” (“la maladie du coronavirus”) was feminine, the acronym COVID should follow suit as “la COVID.” As a new word, it appeared that COVID needed to be assigned a gender. Or did it? Apparently, many French speakers had already been referring to it as “le COVID” (using the masculine form).

This type of language moderation is a classic example of prescriptivism, and it surfaces important questions, such as who gets to make decisions about language use? Do people in positions of power and authority have the final say, or does this debate get settled through more organic and less concrete mechanisms?

We also see a prescriptivist approach in dictionaries, although this language resource comprises both prescriptivism and descriptivism. Dictionaries define how words should be used. They include rules of standardization, such as how words should be spelled and pronounced, and whether they should be classified as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc. At the same time, dictionaries account for the words in use and the meanings they carry among those who use them. Dictionaries are a survey of a language’s lexicon as it currently stands.

In March 2025, the Oxford English Dictionary added entries for the words collab, n.; collab, v.; grawlix, n.; guyliner, n.; judgey/judgy, adj.; lumpia, n.; para-athlete, n.; unfollow, v.; and vape, n., to name just a few. New words come into existence through various means, including contact with other languages and the demands of new environments, behaviors, or social practices. Words can be shortened, merged, or moved into new word categories (for example, combining two separate words or adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word root).

Given these considerations, dictionaries are largely the result and responsibility of their authors. Lexicographers must be diligent about following and analyzing emergent word usage patterns to maintain dictionaries that accurately reflect (i.e., describe) the current state of a language’s lexicon—in other words, how people use it.

On the other end of the spectrum are much clearer examples of descriptivism. One of the clearest ways to learn about this approach is to examine the tools that researchers use to study language.

Ethnographic studies of language offer firsthand insight into the people and culture that use said language in everyday life. They only describe, as their goal is understanding the complex interplay between language and its social motivations.

The domain of corpus linguistics seeks to understand language use through quantitative methodologies. In linguistics, a corpus is a dataset of spoken or written language. Many are quite large, and most cater to language professionals, with built-in capabilities for advanced search functions and statistical analyses. COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, for instance, is a collection of more than 1 billion words from spoken and written samples of text from 1990 to 2019. Other corpora, such as Google Books Ngram Viewer, are much more accessible. This tool offers a quick and user-friendly way for anyone to look at word usage trends over time (from a multi-language corpus of books that totals approximately 500 billion words), dating back to the 1500s.

While corpora provide valuable insights, it is important to remember that these tools are still limited, even though many contain millions, if not billions, of words. It is more helpful to think of them as snapshots that are relatively narrow within the vastness of all that a language includes. Any given corpus is a collection of text that is specific to a certain stretch of time, the genre(s) and environment(s) in which its text was produced, and the people who generated the language samples. The key here is not to overgeneralize from how language is used in a specific context.

Beyond Right and Wrong: Rethinking How We Judge Language

Many people might think that prescriptivism has no usefulness since descriptivism is a more neutral approach, free from bias and control, an attitude that allows language to exist naturally without any judgment or constraints. Others might say that there are times when language choice should be corrected. I believe that there are, in fact, some useful contexts for the latter.

Second language learning, for example, is a situation where building a solid foundation and adhering to rules is essential for understanding and effective communication. For instance, it would benefit an English language learner to know the difference between “let’s meet there at six” and “let’s meet there in six”—not just because the prepositions “at” and “in” have different meanings, but also because “at six” implies at six o’clock and “in six” implies in six minutes, which could lead to mix-up about the time to meet up. (Granted, this is much easier to catch in writing if the person distinguishes between a numeral and a written-out number, but if they do not, or if the message is spoken, then this extra clue is absent.)

As another example, if a student is writing an email to their professor to ask for a deadline extension, using a formal introduction is more effective than using an informal one. Learning a language is not just about building vocabulary or knowing how to conjugate the correct verb form; it is also about understanding how someone would speak in different situations with different people that call for varied levels of formality or informality.

Similar to how it can be useful to prescribe rules of formality to a language learner, we could also make a case for taking a prescriptivist approach toward language use in formal writing, although this can be a slippery slope. Genres such as textbooks, research reports, newspaper articles, and official letters use more formal language and mostly follow the prescriptive instructions of language style guides.

While it may seem overly authoritative to have usage rules for things like capitalization or punctuation, this kind of standardization can contribute to the readability of written information. When information is presented in a more uniform, organized manner, it is easier to digest. For areas such as academic and scientific writing, rules around language use ensure that information is objective, specific, succinct, and hedged when necessary. Despite these benefits, scholars urge that pushing for language standardization, even in written language, perpetuates gatekeeping and discriminatory attitudes about language and “can unfairly limit people’s access to opportunities, including in educational and professional realms,” according to a 2023 article published in the journal Daedalus.

Another way to consider our language choices is to reframe the question around appropriateness and respect. When was the last time you encountered an example of politically correct language? This type of prescriptivism, also known as inclusive language, aims to respect the way we refer to people, often in terms of identifiers such as gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. While some may argue that extreme forms of politically correct language verge on being controlling or euphemistic, its core intent is rooted in showing respect—both to one’s audience and to the communities being addressed.

Within this context lies the purpose of many language movements: to create meaningful connections through education about and acknowledgement of identity. Examples of this are the gender-focused movements, such as preferred personal pronouns and gender-neutral terms like flight attendant over stewardess. We also see this in person-centric constructions like a person with a disability instead of a disabled person. In written language, guidelines for capitalization can also serve as powerful acknowledgements of identity, such as Aboriginal, Black, Indigenous, and Latine.

In short, prescriptivist approaches to language use are not always dogmatic. In these examples of second-language learning, formal writing, and politically correct language usage, prescriptivism should still be approached with caution, but it can serve as a beneficial communicative tool. Of course, there are far more circumstances where a descriptivist approach is the better (and more ethical) option. These situations where it would not be helpful to correct someone’s language choices are, arguably, vastly more numerous. For instance, pointing out a text message typo with “your” versus “you’re” in a sentence such as “your late.”

What this boils down to is that consideration of the people, context, and long-term implications matters. Both prescriptivism and descriptivism can be useful, but appropriateness depends on a multitude of factors. So if you find yourself taking a decidedly prescriptivist attitude toward someone’s language choice, stop and ask yourself if you understood the sender’s intended message, despite any standardized rules that language authorities have declared or opinions you have about how the message “should” have been conveyed.

A clear understanding of the speaker’s intended message is a major component of successful communication. If it still bothers you, consider the context in which the message was produced, along with any beliefs you might have about a person or community in connection with how their language use differs from yours. These kinds of questions can help shape a better-informed opinion about language choice.

So, is there a better approach? Depending on your answers to the considerations discussed here, some level of prescriptivism may be appropriate and meaningful, but it is also important to remember that descriptivism honors the diversity of language—and, by extension, people.

Why Food and Nutrition Deserves Its Own Public School Curriculum

Overconsumption and consumerism have thrown up new social, environmental, and economic challenges. There is an urgent need to course-correct by changing how we use our limited resources. One important step would be to teach children the importance of mindful living by grounding their education in the fundamentals of human ecology.

A national human ecology curriculum that focuses on food education could play a crucial role in addressing pressing issues, from climate change to inequality, by teaching students how to care for themselves and others while being aware of how their actions impact the planet and nonhuman species.

“The problems that today’s college-going generation will face in the future are enormous… Climate change, fossil-fuel constraints, rotting infrastructure, collapsing ecosystems, and resource scarcities all loom large. Meeting those challenges will require both abstract and practical knowledge,” stated the Chronicle of Higher Education 2012 article.

Food education is critical to navigate this changing landscape. “It’s time to situate the food crisis within childhood education, not only to help young people better understand where their food comes from, but to build the leaders the 21st century’s food system will so desperately need,” stated the charity Sustainable Food Trust.

How Sharing Meals Builds Trust, Connection, and Well-Being

The act of sharing a meal brings happiness and is crucial in fostering a sense of community and trust, which is essential for overcoming the challenges human beings face today. According to a 2017 study by the University of Oxford, communal meals foster a sense of connection and well-being and help people feel more rooted in a community setting.

The 2025 World Happiness Report highlights that the act of sharing a meal is one of the strongest predictors of “well-being.” “The report finds that people in countries with high rates of meal sharing also declare stronger social support and lower levels of loneliness, suggesting that the decline in communal meals in more industrialized societies is more than a lifestyle shift; it’s a public health concern,” stated a 2025 article in National Geographic.

Social meals activate the brain’s endorphin pathways, which are associated with oxytocin and dopamine—neurochemicals that foster bonding, pleasure, and trust, according to a 2017 study published in the journal Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. This biological response makes communal eating a particularly effective way to gain trust and confidence, which can take place at home and school.

Further, a 2017 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology revealed that sharing the same food—not just eating together—enhances trust and cooperation. Sharing the same meal means people are more likely to cooperate with and trust each other, even in business or negotiation contexts. This is especially pronounced when people lack prior relationships in our transitory world, making food a unique tool for building basic trust across political and cultural divisions. This effect is more substantial than with other forms of similarity, such as wearing clothes of the same color. In essence, communal eating leverages cultural rituals, psychological comfort, and physical health to create a trusting environment, even among strangers.

Reclaiming Community and Well-Being in a Culture of Isolation

Over the years, the United States has evolved from a country that fought to defend human life and welfare to one where capitalism has become the guiding principle shaping every aspect of life.

This has resulted in a loss of things that matter: family, how to eat and live to ensure a healthy life, and the importance of building community.

“One in four Americans now eats every meal alone, a 53 percent increase since 2003,” stated the National Geographic, pointing out how dire the situation has become “[i]n more recent decades, the digital revolution—coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic—has accelerated this fragmentation, with meals increasingly relegated to a fleeting necessity between Zoom calls, desk work, and social media.”

There is an urgent need to teach children to sustain life as part of their educational curriculum, if we want to reform how we live and create a future based on nurturing young minds and bodies so they have the tools to make better choices.

To take corrective steps, we need to change the current reactive practice of waiting for social problems to develop and then rushing to the rescue. A 21st-century transformation begins with the adoption of a human ecology program in every public school and reorienting human values and care in this highly capitalist society. The transformation needed to counteract the current culture will take the length of mandatory education, beginning with the study of food.

Learning about food is more than just nutrition or sustenance—it’s about how personal food sovereignty helps reweave the social fabric, and how “nested” skills (advanced skills that build upon foundational ones) play a role in strengthening human capital. By prioritizing food education and food-centered community initiatives, we can mend social trust, strengthen community bonds, and lay the groundwork for a more connected and resilient future.

Food Education as a Path to Empowerment and Equity

Teaching about food empowers students with practical skills that life demands, such as knowing how to cook and maintaining a safe and healthy lifestyle. This became a live lesson for me when I chaired the Consumer Arts and Science Department at City College of San Francisco and saw our community college students bloom in the food classes. They began to realize that they would be alright, no matter what, and that they could take care of themselves and help others. Their confidence and control over food security freed them to think further ahead and plan their lives.

In fact, one of my former students, a combat veteran who joined our program, loved the life that learning to cook gave him so much that he eventually opened up a restaurant in Napa Valley.

By addressing food insecurity through education and promoting food literacy, communities can challenge systemic inequalities and create a more resilient and inclusive society. That is precisely what happens in a school food lab in real time, where small groups of students are taught to make a dish to be shared with everyone else. Food education fosters a deeper understanding of finite community and national resources, climate change, economics, and even politics, in a meaningful human way.

Speaking on Oregon State University’s “The Farm to School Podcast,” in November 2024, Emelia Miguel of Food Lab, from Pacific Elementary in Davenport, California, said, “[T]hese kids really learn such incredible skills, like those soft skills, like leadership and teamwork. And empowerment in the kitchen. And obviously, they learn their kitchen skills. But I think that it really is a well-rounded education that we give them and… they’re working on their math skills, their English language, [and] arts skills. It all comes together in that kitchen in such a real way. And I really think it’s so valuable that more schools really need to do this.”

Students are also challenged at an ethical and moral level as they consider who has enough food and who does not, and the reasons for this on the local and global scale. Food education, within a human ecology program, frames a human-centered mindset for decision-making throughout life.

Although food is foundational to all societies, few U.S. schools offer a food class in a dedicated food lab. As students transition to college, many lack food knowledge and practical skills, as they may have been accustomed to being served at home or in restaurants.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that in 2020, 3.8 million college students faced food insecurity. Based on the 2024 GAO report, the Food Research and Action Center said that “Food insecurity is more prevalent among students with the following characteristics: had a disability, were 24 years old or older, single parent, or were financially independent from their parents.” This not only affects the academic performance of college students but also their overall physical and mental health.

Building a Continuous Food Education Curriculum From Kindergarten Through College

Public schools need to integrate a formal human ecology educational program into the K-12 curriculum, alongside the other equally core education subjects. Ideally, they should extend the age range to community colleges, where delayed maturity is making independent living and food security a significant challenge.

Food education is not a one-time starter lesson focused on learning to cook, but a continuous thread that spans from elementary grades to graduation and college. Teaching an age-appropriate foods course involves both lecture and lab components. It follows Bloom’s Taxonomy, the standard educational program planning sequence:

  • Basic knowledge and resources (what is food?)
  • Application (how do we prepare it?)
  • Serving (what are the cultural differences, protocols, and etiquette?)
  • Analysis (what are its nutritional components?)
  • Needs of human life phases (how does age dictate choice and preparation?)
  • Evaluation (how do we choose and purchase healthy options?)
  • Creation (how do we resource and innovate in national food systems?)

Each level progresses in complexity as students mature and their world broadens. Every school district’s program can be designed to reflect the local culture (rural or urban), climate, community size, and available resources. The universal adoption of human ecology, meanwhile, will ensure that human life values become commonly held; the lessons inform future voters about human needs and sharing, and by doing so, they create a national cohesion that celebrates and protects life.

Preparing Students for Food Challenges in a Changing Climate

Beyond having a meal together in class, the big picture is not looking rosy, and students need to be prepared for future realities. Global threats are likely to reduce dependency on imports and inflation, necessitating new strategies to grow more food locally and independently. This will also require developing new traditions when popular foods become scarce due to climate change, rising costs, or vanishing supply lines.

With the climate crisis worsening, global warming will have devastating effects on crop yields and quality while also leading to the drying up of water supplies and degradation of supporting ecosystems.

Massive “heat domes,” such as the one we experienced in the U.S. in the summer of 2025, will continue to put more pressure on food prices and choices. Food education could encourage more young scientists to work on this problem.

Local schools can play their part by working toward preventing future food insecurity and increasing quality of life, by teaching their students how to prepare their food, imparting the knowledge of human nutritional needs throughout the different phases of life, along with an understanding of preserving and storing food to ensure local families will have enough each season and during emergencies.

Why Universal Human Ecology Is Integral to the Education of Children

While this deep dive into the importance of teaching food to prevent social decline focuses on food itself, there are other critical basic components of a comprehensive human ecology program, like reducing homelessness. Educational leaders and policymakers must recognize that the study of food is not a niche subject; it is a vital academic area of study, a complete human ecology program for our time, encompassing all aspects of life.

Beyond the lessons on physical survival, students also need to learn the “soft” side of human ecology, which includes the psycho-social aspects of “fitting in,” becoming socialized, etiquette, professionalism, and discovering their path or passion. Through human ecology, students begin to realize that communal interest is, in reality, self-interest: a win-win.

The need for a mandatory, universal human ecology program is undeniable. The need to educate future decision-makers about the fundamental basics of human life is critical. Human ecology should be at the heart of our educational vision and the core of every child’s education. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.”

Additional Resources

Necropolitics and the Language of Death: How Military Talk Turns Recruits Into Killers

Editor’s Note: This article, by nature of the topic, may include language that is considered sensitive and/or vulgar to some readers.

Night after night, the buses pull up on the tarmac outside the Parris Island Marine Corps recruit training center in South Carolina. Usually, they are full of young men—still boys, by some measures—with a nervous feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They will have sensed the air getting heavy and sticky, and they might have noticed a swampy stench. They’ve seen enough movies to know what comes next, but they still find it startling.

A drill instructor storms the bus, shirt tight around his muscles, belt seeming to float around his flat abdomen, roaring at the neophytes from under his circular hat brim.

“SIT UP STRAIGHT! From this point forward, you will only answer me with a YES, sir, NO, sir, AYE-AYE, sir. DO WE UNDERSTAND?”

“YES, SIR!” yell the recruits.

“Now get OFF MY BUS! NOW, NOW, NOW!”

The young men hustle to plant themselves on a row of yellow footprints painted on the road. The yelling follows them, an acoustic assault so thick and fast and strangely inflected that each recruit has to listen hard and use herd behavior to know what to do next.

They know they’re about to be transformed, but they are unlikely to recognize all the subterranean dynamics of this change and how the acoustic qualities of boot camp will reshape them into hardened killers. These qualities will also model the disintegration of their personhood and their necropolitical abjection—that is, their killability in the eyes of the state.

Military Language

In the face of war’s brutality, language might seem like an incidental detail. But United States combat veterans who pay attention to it will attest that embodied ways of speaking—from yelling to cursing to joking, and beyond—can be intimately bound with experiences of kinetic violence.

By attenuating thought and agency, yelling can alter recruits’ sense of self. Drill instructors in the Marine Corps also tinker with recruits’ idea of selves by announcing shortly after their arrival that “the words ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ are no longer part of recruits’ vocabulary. Instead, they are to refer to themselves as ‘recruit [last name]”. Drill instructors agree this lexical system is designed to foreclose egocentrism and stop recruits from thinking of themselves as individuals.

In 2016, Sergeant Jennifer Duke explained to PBS NewsHour, “We need to break down these individualities that they come with, of self and ‘me’ and ‘I.’ We need to break them down to basically nothing so we can build them back up… as one team, one element, to join our Marine Corps. It’s not my Marine Corps, or his Marine Corps, it’s our Marine Corps.”

In Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s terms, we could say that recruits must “self-interpellate” as cogs in the military machine. Drill instructors never use recruits’ personal names; instead, official regulations permit them to call recruits “recruit [last name]” or to address them by their billet or job, such as “scribe” or “guide.” This practice carries a whiff of military necropolitics, whereby each individual serves a role in the military machine and is easily replaced if they become ineffective or are killed.

To facilitate state necropolitics, U.S. military culture is saturated by “kill talk” among those who serve as instruments of combat. The defining feature of kill talk is its refusal to acknowledge the full relational humanity of and the terrible loss suffered by those on whom potentially deadly violence is inflicted.

I think of kill talk as a kind of linguistic infrastructure—a loose collection of disparate verbal strategies that guide soldiers in how to perceive, feel, think, and ultimately act in combat. This infrastructure underpins the experience of having what the philosopher Judith Butler calls a “frame of war,” which, in simplest terms, is a structure that selectively carves up experience, fostering indifference to certain deaths.

These patterns of language matter partly because they make war more doable. Military combat asks too much of a human being. People’s minds are not well equipped to assimilate the full implications or the moral depth of killing or being killed; such a reckoning could debilitate one’s ability to live, let alone function on behalf of the military machine.

As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton puts it, “There has to be some level of detachment”—some “psychic numbing”—to apply one’s technical skills in war. Military language offers a supreme instrument to facilitate this detachment. Such detachment can potentially enhance military force—the volume of fire in a firefight, the relentless pressure applied during a siege, and so forth—while offering a kind of rescue for the combatant. But there is a terrible cost to this facilitation: If kill talk makes violence more feasible for combatants, it spells more death, mayhem, and misery for the individuals and societies targeted by such violence, and sometimes for the combatants themselves.

While kill talk may feel to combatants like a necessary kind of detachment, it can be jarring—even incomprehensible—to civilians. Just consider, for instance, the public disturbance in 2023 when Prince Harry described his mindset in his memoir as he killed 25 Taliban. He served as a forward air controller and then an Apache helicopter pilot in Afghanistan during his two tours. “You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people,” he stated in his book Spare. “They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.”

The international shockwaves from this statement suggested many were stunned to hear his account, which seemed to contravene not only popular fantasies of the genteel royals but also the very liberal humanism Harry and his U.S. allies were supposedly fighting for. But from Harry’s point of view, this conceptual framing apparently made the difference between being able to do his job and not.A young Iraq veteran I call Levi offers further insight into how wording can play a crucial role in a soldier’s ability to perform otherwise unthinkable acts as he recalls his experience during deployment:

“This wasnʼt an ‘enhanced interrogation’; this was a fucking torture. Right? Or—like—I didnʼt just ‘see my buddy take out an insurgent’; I saw him execute a man, right? When we sanitize that language, it fucks with our heads, because we have this deep-down, inherent aversion to killing—our own kind, especially, right? And so when you can indoctrinate somebody to override that barrier that we have, part of how we get them to do it is dehumanizing and by sanitizing, right? You switch that language and all the rhetoric around, becoming something other than what it actually is. So then we use those other words—those euphemisms—for those things, and detach ourselves from it.”

How do combatants learn to assimilate violence into their inner lives so they can willingly anticipate the act of killing and swallow the possibility of dying? As I listened to American veterans describe their military training, and observed glimpses of Marine Corps boot camp, it seemed that necropolitical abjection and the willingness to kill were conditioned not just physically, but semiotically—that is, by way of meaningful signs, in language, and other symbolic forms—before anyone went into battle. In both obvious and subtle ways, language helps combatants imagine themselves as killable killers and manage the moral, emotional, and conceptual implications of this role.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that violence is “mute”; it “begins where speech ends,” after the rational capacity for dialogue fails. Nevertheless, war’s violence is always mediated by language.

The concept of a “linguistic infrastructure” in kill talk directs attention more precisely to language and to combatants themselves. Imagine this infrastructure as an invisible patterning force that begins with the (re)socialization of those entering the military and continues to evolve in military speech communities during combat. Working in tandem with the political ideologies, military directives, and psychological mechanisms that facilitate inhumane deeds, this linguistic infrastructure offers new modes of consciousness and shared ways of being in the world. It directs and shunts, but rather than steering water, electricity, or vehicles as a city infrastructure does, its contours and dead ends encourage certain flows and stoppages of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting.

Kill talk aspires to block empathy for “the enemy” and to dull the combatant’s sense of self-pity; it channels and champions the performance of aggressive military masculinity; it embraces the moral void of war so that combatants might not be grief-stricken and incapacitated by it. This infrastructure helps create conditions of possibility for the deadlier aspects of military experience while shifting combatants’ sense of what is thinkable and doable.

By the end of basic training, Randall, an American veteran of Vietnam and Parris Island Marine Corps boot camp trainee, says, “You get programmed. It’s like housebreaking a dog.” He came to accept that he was “a GI, ‘government issue.’ You belong to the USA.”

The bodily entrainment of Marines and other U.S. soldiers is plain to see, from their skills with weaponry to their taut control over their movements. However, the necropolitical role of language in combatants’ experience has scarcely been explored by linguistic anthropology or related disciplines. Randall, for one, understood the point of all the drills, fitness exercises, and weapons training, but he also sensed that something hard to articulate was happening to him during all that yelling, verbal abuse, and mind-game-playing he experienced during Marine Corps training. The way language was being used seemed to offer a connection to the disposability of bodies and erasure of souls. But how, exactly?

Kill Chants

Marine Corps training uses an especially transparent linguistic method to shunt empathy away from the suffering of those targeted in war: frequent repetition of the word “kill.” The first time I heard about this, I was speaking to Jay at a veterans’ writing workshop. A gifted artist and writer, Jay regrets having joined the Corps and now wears creative outfits like colorful bandannas and leggings with pink on the left side and blue on the right. He tells me that in hindsight, he considers boot camp morally appalling. “You can’t believe the things they try to put into you. Like, we greeted each other by yelling ‘Kill!’ You’d just pass someone on the path and you’d both yell, ‘Kill!’ and it was, like, just another Tuesday.”

As if normalizing the concept by merging it with their identity, Marine Corps officers and recruits sometimes use the word “kill” in banal contexts, as in the ritualized greeting described by Jay above. In “The Oaths We Keep”, an account by Jason Arment, who served as a U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner in the Iraq War, recruits were sometimes required to yell “kill” as an affirmative response (e.g., if they wanted to eat at the chow hall). “KILL,” he adds, “was the word companies of Marines shouted at their command when they knew they were supposed to say something but didn’t know what.”

Marine Corps veteran Patrick Turley describes his drill instructor directing a squad to “attack the Chow Hall,” meaning go to the dining hall to get a meal. As they entered, they were enjoined to sit down and “Kill 37,” another platoon in their company. They wound up chanting, “Kill, kill, kill ’em all!” as they marched past the other platoon to eat. During a military history lesson, Turley’s staff sergeant would ask a question, and when a recruit stood to answer, his platoon-mates would shout “Kill!” to motivate him. If the recruit got the answer right, the congratulations would take the form of (you guessed it) “Kill!”

And in her 2015 dissertation, Rachel Lynn Bowman reported that a non-commissioned officer at Parris Island “used ‘kill’ as a throwaway affirmative in a conversation with my escort lieutenant… [T]he term meant ‘great’ or ‘got it.’” At one point in the documentary Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click, recruits clean the floor while chanting, “sweep, kill, sweep, kill.” Here, “kill” is nested into a rote chore, perhaps both being all in a day’s work. When a term is used so casually and associated with so many purposes, it blends into the landscape of cultural expectations.

As kill talk extends into combat, it takes a range of forms. Infantry on ground missions often use bloodless, impersonal jargon when communicating with superiors or when adopting a professional stance. Phrases like “engaging a target,” “neutralizing a threat,” and “conducting a clearing operation,” for instance, can refer to violence while bypassing the fleshy reality of human bodies and their suffering. At the same time, however, a transgressive linguistic register flourishes in the theater of combat. It includes taboo slurs and epithets for the enemy and extravagant profanity that signals the speaker’s military masculinity while symbolizing, in microcosm, the shocking bodily ruptures of kinetic violence.

Dehumanization: Slurs, Epithets, and Profanity

Although military culture prides itself on being distinct from civilian culture, it still has to respond to some winds of change in the wider world. To be sure, gender-based insults and other demeaning terms have remained a core structure of the formative language used in the military. At the same time, while racism and ethnic discrimination remain forces in the military just as they are in the wider society, the Department of Defense has—until Trump’s re-election, anyway—made sustained efforts to crack down on racism in training. All members of the military are supposed to be hard (and hence masculine), but the military needs bodies of all ethnic and racial extractions. Military branches have also seen the growth of Defense Equal Opportunity Institute-designed trainings around racial and ethnic sensitivity and diversity. Contemporary drill instructors know that racist and ethnic insults pose a particularly high risk to both morale and their own careers.

At the same time, service members have experienced a long-standing tension between ideologies of racial inclusiveness and actual verbal practice. In the Marine Corps, the official line since the Vietnam era has been that the Corps “does not see race,” instead perceiving all Marines as “green” by virtue of their uniforms. John Musgrave, who enlisted in 1966, reported all kinds of demeaning feminization, infantilization, and other put-downs in boot camp. But his drill instructor liked to say there should be no “racial crap” in the Marine Corps, for there are “only two colors [:]… forest green, the color of your uniforms, and red, the color of your blood.”

Yet historically, there have been many reports of service members of color being treated as materially and symbolically “less than,” and many who served in Vietnam reported blatant discrimination that reflected the broader culture of racism. One Vietnam veteran I spoke to says, “It was a racist system, and many of the trainers were white guys from down South… They would use all those ugly words you would expect on us.”

The insults drill instructors direct at recruits set the stage for the dehumanizing language combatants use in referring to the enemy. When trainers use “ugly words” to debase the recruits they wish to control, they model what it looks like to erase the personhood of the other—and this becomes immediately relevant in combat.

Just as drill instructors are formally prohibited from using racist language, they are also not permitted to use profanity during training. Nevertheless, some persist in doing so. The tension is evident in the 2005 documentary Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click, filmed at the San Diego Training Depot. In one segment, the camera follows a platoon on a training hike. It’s hot, it’s dusty, everyone is heavily laden, and the recruits are clearly on their last legs. Several drill instructors can be heard trying to motivate them. The profanity rains down—“fuck,” “puss,” “damn,” “shit.” There’s no one reason profanity like this is common; there are countless reasons for drill instructors to use it. Drill instructors might use profanity because they instinctively grab the most emphatic words at their disposal to transmit their urgent affect to recruits. Profane language also mirrors the harsh realities they want Marines to get used to. The use of profane insults might count as an example of what I call “semiotic callousing,” the dynamic in which harsh signs (in this case, profanity) supposedly inure people (in this case, future soldiers) to onslaughts of whatever kind. Bombarded with harsh language, recruits should learn to inure themselves to feeling hurt, responding with action rather than nursing their wounds.

Furthermore, since dirty words refer to shared and sometimes taboo experiences of the body—sex, genitalia, and excretion—they belong perfectly in the military, where privacy is hard to come by and bodies are often filthy or desecrated. Unadorned and profane language also tends to be associated with those with less class privilege, in contrast with the refined or respectable language people use to self-elevate. Finally, at the semantic level, profanity often fixates on things entering or leaving the body—a crude analog of violence itself.

The forms of kill talk described—slurs and profanity, kill chants, euphemisms, and more—help create a social and psychological context in which taking lives in war becomes easier. But they also carry a cost. Those who find themselves broken by remorse after service are sometimes not merely guilty about what they (and the entire military apparatus) did to others, but also how they labeled and conceptualized those others. Wartime epithets, for instance, seem to have collateral damage—civilian lives, yes, but also, more subtly, some of the service members who did this cruel labeling. When they look back in hindsight, some are appalled by their deeds and their own past mindset. Recovery thus requires new language, new stances, what social theorist Alfred Schutz called a “Thou-orientation” that grasps the human existence of the people once so vilified.

Language plays an essential role in transforming a person into a combatant, helping subsume their purpose in the broader framework of military necropolitics. Part of the military contract—especially for those destined for close combat—involves a process of resocialization that sidelines individuality, desensitizes the self, and alienates the person from thoughts and feelings that once felt authentic. To militarize the self is, in part, to become callous to the feelings of certain others.

Gratitude Journaling: A Guide for Caregivers

Informal, unpaid caregivers play a vital role in society by attending to those who require care due to age, illness, disability, or psychiatric disorder. According to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 63 million caregivers in the United States provided care for another adult or child with special needs in 2025—a dramatic 45 percent increase from 2015. Among the 59 million caregivers of adults, 24 percent devoted a staggering 40-plus hours a week to caregiving. In addition to looking after a loved one, many caregivers also face the pressures of working and raising children. Moreover, most caregivers lack relevant medical skills training, which can make their roles even more taxing. As a result, caregivers experience chronic stress, exhaustion, anger, depression, anxiety, and guilt. This can deteriorate their physical and mental health, their relationships with others, and their overall quality of life.

One way caregivers can reduce this burden is by cultivating gratitude, as research in the field of positive psychology shows that gratitude can have a powerful impact on people’s overall well-being. Robert Emmons, professor at the University of California, Davis, and the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude, contends that gratitude consists of a two-part cognitive process. First, it is a recognition that there are positive things and blessings in our lives. Second, it is an acknowledgment that these blessings come from sources outside ourselves. These sources may include the people in our lives or even a higher power.

One popular means of expressing thanks is through gratitude journaling, which is the practice of writing about things one is grateful for. This type of journaling can be a convenient way for caregivers to cultivate gratitude, as it can be private, flexible, and cost-effective, while also offering numerous health benefits.

Gratitude Journaling

Studies show that gratitude journaling can serve as an outlet for individuals to enhance mindfulness, gain insight, boost mood, and increase overall happiness. This is because it fosters an appreciation for the positive things, people, and experiences in our lives. It shifts our focus from what we lack to all the blessings that surround us.

In his book, Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity, Emmons contends that writing about our blessings instead of simply thinking about them enables us to acknowledge them more and strengthens their psychological impact:

“Writing helps to organize thoughts, facilitate integration, and helps you accept your own experiences and put them in context. In essence, it allows you to see the meaning of events going on around you and create meaning in your life. Gratitude journaling may help you bring a new and redemptive frame of reference to a difficult life situation.”

But writing about our blessings offers other advantages, too. Many of the studies that have explored the positive effects of gratitude journaling revealed that those who practiced it consistently experienced physical health benefits, as they:

The studies also revealed that individuals who kept gratitude journals experienced psychological benefits, as they:

Lastly, the research showed that gratitude journaling had social benefits, as those who practiced it:

How Caregivers Benefit from Gratitude

Some researchers have specifically focused on the impact of gratitude on caregivers. One such study, conducted in 2015 in China, explored the relationship between gratitude and coping mechanisms among caregivers of individuals with dementia. The researchers found that caregivers who experienced gratitude were more likely to use higher levels of psychological resources, including their own caregiving competence and social support networks, when facing challenges. These caregivers were also more likely to use emotion-focused coping strategies, including acceptance, humor, and positive reframing. Using psychological resources and positive coping mechanisms—rather than dysfunctional ones like denial, disengagement, and self-blame—was associated with lower levels of caregiver burden and depression.

A 2022 study investigated whether spousal caregivers of older adults with chronic illnesses or disabilities benefited from feeling appreciated by their partners. The researchers found that those who experienced higher levels of perceived gratitude had better mental health, while those who experienced higher rates of role overload had worse mental health. They also determined that greater perceived gratitude decreased the impact of caregiver role overload on anxiety levels and psychological well-being.

A 2024 study investigated the impact of gratitude on family caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers concluded that caregivers experiencing burden were more likely to find meaning in life if they cultivated gratitude. They further explained that having a sense of meaning can benefit caregivers significantly, as it can help them view their role as less distressing and enable them to experience better psychological well-being.

Mechanisms That Make Gratitude Beneficial

Studies have shown that experiencing gratitude can impact our brains in positive ways, including by stimulating the production of “feel-good” chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. It can also regulate the production of the “stress hormone” cortisol, restructure cognitive processes by helping us shift from negative to positive thinking, and strengthen neural pathways associated with positive feelings.

According to neuroscientist Glenn Fox, gratitude’s impact on the medial prefrontal cortex can partly explain why grateful feelings lead to positive health outcomes:

“This area of the brain is associated with understanding other people’s perspectives, empathy, and feelings of relief… The regions associated with gratitude are part of the neural networks that light up when we socialize and experience pleasure. The regions are also heavily connected to the parts of the brain that control basic emotion regulation, such as heart rate and arousal levels, and are associated with stress relief and thus pain reduction.”

Such findings and others have led to the development of additional theories as to why gratitude produces benefits. The schematic hypothesis proposes that grateful people have cognitive schemas that lead them to interpret situations in a more positive light, which impacts their emotional responses and contributes to their well-being. The coping hypothesis contends that grateful people seek out instrumental and emotional social support, cope actively, and positively reinterpret situations. The positive affect hypothesis proposes that gratitude, as a positively valenced emotion, can lead to greater positive affect, protecting individuals from mental health disorders and contributing to life satisfaction. Lastly, the broaden-and-build theory suggests that positive emotions like gratitude, joy, interest, and love broaden people’s thought-action repertoires and build their psychological, social, cognitive, and physical resources. This can improve coping abilities, boost awareness, and increase resilience, thereby contributing to well-being.

Gratitude Journaling Tips for Caregivers

Choose your journal: Select a medium you’re comfortable with, whether it’s a new journal, an old notebook, your laptop, or a writing app on your phone. Thnx4.org, a project of the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, offers a digital gratitude journal you can try out.

Establish a habit of writing: Choose whatever time works best for your schedule, whether it be morning, afternoon, or evening. You can set a reminder for yourself or place your journal in a spot where you’ll see it routinely. You may also find it helpful to write in your journal while practicing an existing habit, like drinking your morning coffee.

Determine how much and how often you want to write: Most researchers recommend reflecting on three to five things you’re grateful for every time you write. Since there are no strict rules about this, it’s important to test it out to see what works best for you.

In terms of frequency, Emmons recommends writing in your gratitude journal once or twice a week. This is because there is evidence that writing too often may lead to habituation, which can reduce its positive impact. Because everyone is different, it’s essential to experiment and find a frequency that suits your goals and preferences.

Find ways to make journaling easy and sustainable: Don’t overthink it or be too strict on yourself. Just write whatever comes to your mind. Also, remember not to worry about spelling or grammar, as you’re writing for your eyes only. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, try experimenting with these 100 gratitude prompts by Joel Wong, professor of counseling psychology at Indiana University Bloomington.

Be specific: Describing a positive experience in depth is more impactful than writing a long, shallow list of positive things. Specificity is crucial because it encourages us to pay more attention to the details and circumstances of our positive experiences and not take them for granted. When choosing someone or something to write about, Emmons recommends breaking it down into several components and contemplating each one.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing about how thankful you are to the nurse who paid your loved one a home health care visit. Are you grateful that her visit allowed your loved one to receive care from the comfort of his own home? Are you thankful for the compassion she showed, the medical supplies she dropped off, and the much-needed treatment she provided? These are the types of thoughts and feelings you should reflect on.

Focus on people: Gratitude journaling is more effective when you write about people instead of things. When doing so, it’s important to reflect on the blessings you have received from those people. Emmons claims this is beneficial because it takes the focus off materialism and places it on relationships. This can promote deeper bonds with anyone in a caregiver’s life, including friends, relatives, and health care practitioners. It can also foster empathy and goodwill toward others, which may lead to more positive interactions.

Relish surprises: In their book, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, authors Andrew Ortony, Gerald L. Clore, and Allan Collins discovered that positive experiences that are also surprising elicit stronger emotional responses than those that are expected. This element of surprise can prompt stronger feelings of gratitude. This is why Emmons claims it’s important to write about novel or unanticipated blessings. This will also keep your writing interesting, engaging, and inspiring.

View positive things as gifts: In his book, The Gratitude Factor: Enhancing Your Life through Grateful Living, psychologist Charles Shelton recommends referencing the things, people, and experiences you’re grateful for as “gifts.” Doing so can prevent you from taking the gift for granted or feeling entitled to it. It may also allow you to appreciate the source of the gift, which can encourage reciprocity. Moreover, it promotes enjoyment, as things that are viewed as gifts are more likely to be savored. “As we document our gifts, we no longer take them for granted. We take them as granted, as they were intended to be. We begin to be grateful for the ability to feel gratitude,” says Emmons.

Imagine your life without certain blessings: Envisioning how your life may have turned out if a positive experience had never happened—also known as “mental subtraction”—can enable us to experience a heightened sense of gratitude for such events. In fact, a series of studies conducted in 2008 found that performing this exercise led to increased levels of thankfulness and positive affect in participants. Emmons claims this technique is beneficial because it helps us counter the tendency to “adapt” to our fortunes. You can practice this in your journal by asking yourself questions like, “How much more stressful would my life be if I had never adopted my comfort dog?” instead of reflecting on general statements like, “I’m so thankful I adopted my comfort dog.”

Be grateful for the negative situations you escaped or reframed into something positive: Thinking about near misses can help you acknowledge how many things go well in life and remind you of how blessed you are to receive such gifts. According to psychologist Mike Brooks, “Shifting perspective from regretting the positives that could have been to celebrating the negatives that weren’t can powerfully affect our outlook on life.”

For instance, let’s say you almost forgot to give your loved one their medication. You can write about how thankful you are that you remembered it at the last minute; otherwise, there could have been consequences for the patient’s health. You can also reflect on any positive outcomes or lessons you learned. For example, perhaps you decided to prevent a future recurrence by setting reminders for yourself.

Explore a new angle on a “gift” you’ve already written about: If you write about a specific topic more than once, it’s essential to explore a different aspect of that topic. Emmons claims this can give a fresh perspective on what you’re grateful for, which can prevent monotony and help you sustain your interest in journaling while also fostering deeper self-reflection.

Explore the Positives of Caregiving Through Gratitude Journaling

The caregiving journey is often filled with anxiety, exhaustion, sorrow, and heartbreak. Fortunately, reflecting on one’s blessings through gratitude journaling can be a transformative coping mechanism for caregivers experiencing burden. Gratitude can allow a caregiver to see the abundance that surrounds them. It can turn anguish into peace, loneliness into belonging, and fear into courage.

So if you’re a caregiver, go for it. Grab your journal, put pen to paper, and see where your blessings take you. With time, you may find that your burden has eased and that your life is filled with more treasures than you ever imagined.

Healing Through Words: How Creative Writing Empowers Caregivers

“There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” —former First Lady Rosalynn Carter

Caregiving is a fundamental aspect of human history. Deeply rooted in the fabric of society, it crosses continents, countries, cultures, and religions. In simple terms, a caregiver is someone who meets the daily needs of another person who can’t care for themselves due to age, disability, illness, or mental disorder. Caregiving is a complex field that encompasses professional caregivers, including nurses, home health aides, and certified nursing assistants. It also includes a crucial group—informal caregivers—who are unpaid and are often related to the recipient or are part of their close network.

Some common conditions that informal caregivers provide care for include dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, COPD, stroke, developmental disabilities, and mental health and psychiatric disorders. Responsibilities may include feeding, bathing, dressing, running errands, performing household chores, assisting with mobility, providing transportation, administering medication, and coordinating with health care providers.

Although informal caregiving can be personally rewarding, its potential negative impact on caregivers’ finances, family relationships, and personal well-being is undeniable. According to a 2020 report conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 53 million people in the United States provide unpaid care to an adult or child with special needs. Of the 48 million who care for an adult, 61 percent also work full-time or part-time. Many such caregivers eventually take a leave of absence or reduce their work hours.

Furthermore, 30 percent of caregivers belong to the “sandwich generation,” meaning they care for their aging parents in addition to raising their own children or grandchildren. Informal caregivers of adults provide care for an average of 24 hours a week and spend over $7,200 annually on caregiving costs, comprising 26 percent of their income. Perhaps most shockingly, the economic value of unpaid family caregiving is an astounding $600 billion per year.

Unfortunately, as studies show, Americans will only become increasingly reliant on caregivers. By 2034, the U.S. population will include more adults aged 65 and older than children under the age of 18, says AARP. Worryingly, the number of potential caregivers is predicted to decline while the number of people who will require care is expected to increase.

The criticality of informal caregivers was illustrated in the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife and caregiver, Betsy Arakawa, who were found dead in their home on February 26, 2025. It was later concluded that Arakawa had died around February 12 due to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. Ninety-five-year-old Hackman, who was unable to care for himself, died around a week later due to cardiovascular illness complicated by advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Authorities added that, given his cognitive impairment, it was possible he was not aware that his wife was deceased during his final days.

Emma Hemming Willis, who has been a vocal advocate for caregivers since her husband Bruce Willis was diagnosed with aphasia in 2022, said of the deaths, “I do really believe that there is some learning in this story… and that is that caregivers need care too and that they are vital, and that it is so important that we show up for them so that they can continue to show up for their person.”

She’s right. Informal caregivers—who are often referred to as “invisible patients” because their needs and well-being are frequently overlooked—need care too, as many experience a deterioration in both physical and mental health. This is largely because most informal caregivers are thrust into their role with little or no skills training. Competencies that caregivers commonly need but often do not receive adequate preparation for include medical and nursing skills, functional rehabilitation skills, and safety supervision skills. As a result, many caregivers are not equipped to perform complex and high-intensity caregiving duties for their loved ones. This gap in skills can lead to significant stress, contributing to caregiver burden.

Consequently, many caregivers report feeling burnt out and physically exhausted, which can lead to feelings of depression, anger, worry, guilt, anxiety, and grief. Some caregivers also experience post-traumatic stress disorder when caring for loved ones with severe medical illnesses. Other symptoms of caregiver stress include fluctuations in weight, changes in sleep habits, social withdrawal, and loss of interest in activities.

Caregivers may also abuse alcohol or other drugs, including prescription medications. Unfortunately, caregivers often don’t find the time to address their health issues, which leads to prolonged illness. Tragically, studies also reveal that caregivers are an at-risk group for suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide.

Creative Writing: A Coping Mechanism for Caregivers

Many caregivers choose to cope with their daily challenges by visiting therapists or joining support groups. However, research has also shown that creativity can be an effective way for caregivers to reduce stress and improve mood, as it provides opportunities for them to be reflective, learn new skills, and nurture a sense of accomplishment and purpose. This can help them experience empowerment, flexibility, self-efficacy, and optimism, which, in turn, can allow them to gain new perspectives on their caregiving challenges and find effective coping strategies. Creative activities often recommended for caregivers include painting, dancing, singing, gardening, cooking, and crafting.

However, one coping mechanism that has emerged as particularly powerful is writing. Many caregivers pursue writing because it can be a low-cost, flexible, and private activity that is free from the social constraints that may arise with therapists or support groups.

Moreover, the health effects of writing on the brain are well known. As neurologist Judy Willis put it:

“The practice of writing can enhance the brain’s intake, processing, retaining, and retrieving of information… it promotes the brain’s attentive focus… boosts long-term memory, illuminates patterns, gives the brain time for reflection, and when well-guided, is a source of conceptual development and stimulus of the brain’s highest cognition.”

But how can writing help people cope and heal? A growing body of research in the field of positive psychology has found that writing about gratitude and positive experiences—also known as “gratitude journaling”—can help people feel more optimistic and enhance their overall well-being. It can also reduce depression, stress, and symptoms of physical illness. This is largely because experiencing gratitude can restructure cognitive processes that help individuals shift from negative to positive thinking, leading to enhanced well-being.

“Actually sitting down and thinking about someone or something that happened that day makes me realize how many things for which I am truly grateful,“ wrote commenter Andrea Nancy Fox on the gratitude journal webpage of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “Writing it down helped to make me think about it more.”

In contrast to the approaches taken in positive psychology, much of the existing literature has focused on the healing power of reflecting on one’s negative experiences through writing. In fact, studies show that individuals who have written about distressing life events through “expressive writing” have reported experiencing an impressive range of physical and emotional health benefits. Although expressive writing is frequently practiced in journaling, it can also be tied to memoir writing and fiction writing. These forms of creative writing can serve as constructive outlets for caregivers to actively engage with their emotions, process grief and loss, cope with adversity, and begin the healing process. Each type of writing can enable caregivers to experience these benefits in various ways:

  • Expressive writing can help caregivers explore and process emotions about painful experiences, which can increase self-awareness, reduce stress and depression, enhance overall psychological well-being, and improve physical health.
  • Grief memoirs can help writers extract meaning from their experiences and adopt new life perspectives, allowing them to rebuild their identities in the wake of loss.
  • Fiction writing gives authors the freedom to create more empowering narratives and explore their identities, while also allowing them to process their emotions and grief at a safe distance.

While each form of writing may be different, the act of writing itself can be a life-changing tool for self-discovery and self-empowerment, allowing caregivers to reclaim their unique narratives and envision new futures for themselves.

Expressive Writing

James W. Pennebaker, social psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, was the first to conduct pioneering research into expressive writing, which requires individuals to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings on negative, distressing, or traumatic experiences. This is intended to help the writer process difficult emotions, reflect on their challenges, gain insights, foster self-awareness, and enhance personal growth.

Studies have shown that it can also enable the writer to experience a shift in perspective, allowing them to consider other people’s viewpoints, which is a key factor in the processing of negative emotions. This type of deeply emotional and personal writing has been closely associated with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, as the author employed introspection and insight to reflect on her fears and traumas while living through the horrors of World War II.

In his first experiment in 1986, Pennebaker asked participants to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings regarding a significant emotional issue that had impacted them. Participants were instructed to connect the topic to their childhood, their relationships with others, their past, present, and future. They were also informed they could write without concern for spelling or grammar, and that their writing would be confidential. He found that participants who wrote for 15 minutes a day over four consecutive days reported improvements in physical health six months post-test, with fewer doctor’s visits and sick days.

Pennebaker’s groundbreaking work spurred many other researchers to investigate expressive writing using variations of his protocol. In such experiments, writing groups were typically asked to practice expressive writing for three to five sessions, often over consecutive days, for 15 to 20 minutes. A comprehensive academic review of such studies showed that most participants experienced immediate increases in distress, negative mood, and physical symptoms. However, at follow-up, they reported both physical and emotional health benefits. The physical health outcomes included improvements in immune-system functioning, blood pressure, lung function, and liver function. The emotional benefits included improvements in mood, psychological well-being, depressive symptoms, and post-traumatic intrusion and avoidance symptoms. The studies also revealed various social and behavioral outcomes, including reduced absenteeism from work, quicker re-employment after job loss, and improvements in academic performance, sporting performance, and working memory.

Some researchers have specifically examined the impact of expressive writing on caregivers. A 2017 study found that depression was significantly reduced in spousal caregivers of cancer patients after they took part in expressive writing exercises. Furthermore, a 2008 study concluded that expressive writing reduced post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in caregivers of people with psychosis.

But what are the underlying mechanisms that make expressive writing beneficial? There is no one answer, as studies have shown mixed results for several theories.

One possibility is that the individual experiences catharsis, or a release of strong or repressed negative feelings. Another possibility lies in the interplay between emotional inhibition and confrontation. Repressing thoughts about traumatic events can lead to physiological stress, ruminations, and longer-term illness. In contrast, confronting a trauma may decrease physiological stress and facilitate cognitive integration and understanding. Thirdly, repeated exposure to the traumatic experience through expressive writing may reduce negative emotional reactions to it. Lastly, expressive writing can enable the development of a coherent narrative through cognitive processing.

Pennebaker’s studies found that those who benefited the most from expressive writing were those who used more positive-emotion words, a moderate amount of negative-emotion words, and an increased number of words showing causation and insight, including “because,” “reason,” “understand,” and “realize.” The use of cognitive words indicates the writer is actively structuring, interpreting, and making connections about their negative experience. Creating a coherent narrative of an event can lead to more adaptive internal schemas and a more integrated understanding of it. It is widely argued that this narrative formation is essential for expressive writing to produce benefits.

Many caregivers have practiced expressive writing in their journaling routines. Lisa M. Shulman, professor of neurology at the University of Maryland, started journaling when she was a caregiver for her husband, who passed away from cancer 18 months after his diagnosis. In her book, Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective on Loss, Grief, and Our Brain, Shulman linked her healing experience to the aforementioned theories. She explained that practicing expressive writing in her journal entries allowed her to confront and examine what the loss of her husband meant to her, how it affected her identity and future, and what aspects of it were so painful. Seeing her experiences on paper demystified the distressing events and decreased the negative impact they had on her.

She writes in the book’s preface:

“In the early months of writing, I contemplated turning my journal into a book. As I moved into the second year without Bill, I questioned whether I had anything original to contribute and whether the time had come to look forward, not back. Yet the urge to document memories and insights had its own life. Notes scribbled by day and night piled up around me. And with time the book’s purpose came into focus. The goal is less memoir, more guidebook, to shed light on common experiences of traumatic loss and how our brain responds and heals.”

Furthermore, continuously writing, reading, and re-reading her entries helped her emotions become more organized and coherent. This allowed her to examine them from new perspectives and give them new meanings, which enabled her to create new interpretations of her experiences and fit distressing memories into her life narrative. She argued that grieving individuals need these new interpretations to redefine themselves and reshape their identities after loss, as doing so can help them envision new possibilities and plan a new future.

Shulman concluded that journaling gave voice to her turmoil, integrated loss into her life story, and was an essential tool in her healing process. It was both creative and therapeutic, with powerful effects on the brain:

“Journaling and other meditative practices are potent tools to buffer the emotional charge of traumatic loss. Our decision-making and behavior are strongly influenced by this emotional charge. The amygdala, nestled deep in the brain, assigns an emotional weight to events, tagging experiences with their emotional power, their intrinsic positive vs. negative quality, their relative attractiveness or aversiveness. This assigned emotional valence has strong effects on our decisions, actions, and behavior. Judicious decision-making depends upon our capacity to buffer loss’s emotional charge; we need personal strategies like journaling to transform the emotional power of loss.”

Caregivers who are interested in expressive writing can get started with Pennebaker’s Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering From Trauma and Emotional Upheaval. He also provides some insightful guidance in his brief interview with Nelda Yaw Buckman.

Memoir Writing

Given that expressive writing can have healing benefits, some studies have investigated the therapeutic effects of writing grief memoirs. Although empirical research into the topic is limited, some have argued that longer form emotional writing with a beginning, middle, and ending—that is not conducted under the time restrictions of Pennebaker’s expressive writing protocol—can help the writer construct narrative coherence, find meaning, reclaim agency, and rebuild their identity in the wake of distressing life events.

In her 2006 book, The Caregiver’s Tale: Loss and Renewal in Memoirs of Family Life, Ann Burack-Weiss provided a qualitative analysis of more than 100 caregiver memoirs. She found that many authors based their memoirs on their journal entries, and that most memoirs were written after the care recipient had passed away. She discovered that the memoirs shared numerous universal themes, as they described the emotional toll of caregiving, the struggle to make tough decisions, the caregiver’s insecurities, and the search for meaning in suffering. She concluded that the main overarching story was that of the caregiver who undergoes a journey that begins with sorrow and culminates in a life-transforming experience of self-discovery, in which they redefine their priorities and gain a new perspective on life.

As Burack-Weiss put it:

“Looking backward, after time has distilled the significance of the event, allows individuals who have provided care to uncover the thoughts and feelings that exist below the radar of scientific inquiry, to reflect upon the impact of the situation on the rest of their lives, and to extract meaning from the experience… and to shape the narrative to their own voices.”

In fact, Burack-Weiss found that by the end of most caregiver memoirs, the authors have learned to make peace with the past, let go of resentment, come to terms with unresolved emotions, discover purpose and pleasure in life, and emerge from the shadow of paralyzing anguish. The reader understands that the author’s life continues and that the caregiving experience has taken on new meaning for them.

In her 2020 article, researcher Katrin Den Elzen connected grief narrative with memoir writing through the work of leading bereavement scholar and practicing clinician Robert Neimeyer, who claims that meaning-making is at the core of grief dynamics. His model proposes that the bereaved can make sense of their loss by building new narratives that combine the loss into their life story. They must also bridge the past to the present and the future by maintaining a continued connection to what was lost. By actively engaging with their pain, the bereaved can find meaning and experience a transformation of their grief, which may lead to personal growth, resilience, and wisdom.

Neimeyer posits that the narratives of our lives comprise three storylines: the external narrative (the objective story), the internal narrative (the inner emotional story), and the reflexive narrative (the meaning-making story). Many memoirists’ depictions of the situation, the events, and the story align with this model.

In fact, Den Elzen included these three storylines in her memoir entitled My Decision, which details the story of how her husband had a brain cyst and became fully paralyzed for eight months before his death. Her memoir’s external narrative depicted her husband’s affliction, while the internal narrative depicted her emotional response to it. In the reflexive, meaning-making story, one of the topics she reflected upon was her frustration with the hospital system, which viewed her husband as an illness rather than a human being. Writing the reflexive, meaning-making story was what enabled her to find the more profound emotional truth in her recollections.

In addition, throughout her writing process, she drew upon the principles of the dialogical self theory, which proposes that the self is not a singular being but instead encompasses numerous “I-positions” that engage in an inner dialogue. In her memoir, these identities included I-as-wife and I-as-widow. Exploring and reconciling these conflicting pre- and post-loss perspectives allowed her to construct narrative coherence, rebuild her identity, and find renewed purpose.

Den Elzen added that redrafting painful experiences multiple times over several months was beneficial because it helped her gain distance from the events, allowing her to externalize them. In the context of narrative therapy, “externalization” is the process by which the grievous event becomes separate from the individual. For Den Elzen, this repeated exposure meant she no longer relived the events every time she thought of them. This change in perspective led to a major shift in her relationship with loss, resulting in immense healing, inner peace, and a sense of freedom.

Budding memoir writers can learn from Jessica Handler’s book Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss, or follow tips from Marion Roach Smith, founder of The Memoir Project.

Fiction Writing

However, some caregivers might not feel comfortable writing a memoir if they’re still too close to the anguish or don’t want to expose or upset loved ones. This may explain why some caregivers have become fiction authors, with many centering their novels on fictional accounts of the caregiving experience.

One example is author Irene Frances Olson, who was a caregiver for her father when he had Alzheimer’s disease. She drew upon some of her own experiences while writing her novel, Requiem for the Status Quo. The book tells the fictional story of Colleen, who becomes a caregiver for her father, Patrick, who, like Olson’s father, has Alzheimer’s disease. When family members who are in denial about his condition are unwilling to help her provide care, she is forced to tap into her inner strengths and abilities, leading to moments of self-discovery and victories for both herself and her father along the way.

But what is it about writing fiction that may help caregivers cope and heal? Fiction writing, in the context of narrative therapy, enables the writer to recount their story in a way that allows them to take control over the narrative. Repurposing personal experiences into fiction can empower the writer to shift their harmful storylines and thought patterns toward more positive and constructive ones. Fictionalizing events can also allow a stepping back from painful experiences, which may enable an examination of traumas or repressed thoughts at a safe distance. This can help increase self-awareness, redefine one’s identity, enable meaning finding, and promote healing.

For instance, a caregiver facing various anxieties, frustrations, and stressors may create a character who is undergoing similar hardships. One such example is Colleen, the fictional protagonist created by Olson. Fictionalizing such a character can help the author externalize distressing situations, explore their emotions, and identify their own resilience, strengths, and unique qualities. Furthermore, through character development, the author can expand on the protagonist’s values and motivations, which may allow more favorable storylines about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations to emerge. Fiction writing can also be done in first person or third person, the latter of which can create a psychological distance that allows the author to bypass their inner critic and shift their narrative toward more positive outcomes.

Through such exploration and retelling, the author can make sense of their life and reframe problematic storylines and negative “identity stories.” As a result, a caregiver who initially viewed themselves as a victim may ultimately reframe themselves as a survivor, healer, warrior, or hero, thereby constructing a more empowering narrative about their life.

Jessica Lourey, author of the book Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction, wrote her first novel in 2006 as a coping mechanism after her husband’s death. Since then, she has written more than 20 novels, which has allowed her to heal across decades continuously. As she put it:

“The healing I experienced makes sense when you consider Dr. Pennebaker’s discovery that two elements above all else increase the therapeutic value of writing: creating a coherent narrative and shifting perspective. These are not coincidentally the cornerstones of short story and novel writing. Writers call them plot and point of view… Writing fiction… lends empathy to your perspective and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel…”

Other bereaved individuals choose to privately write fiction in their journal entries instead of publishing book-length novels. In her 2021 research article, Angela Matthews, a former lecturer at the University of Michigan, described how she used journaling to cope with the loss of her son. She initially recorded good and bad memories with him, which helped her accept her loss. However, when she found it difficult to express some of the darker memories with her son, she revised her journal entries, rearranged the order of events, gave people pseudonyms, combined scenes, added fictional experiences, and wrote in the third person. “I found that writing some of my most traumatic experiences as fiction helped me acknowledge and process my grief but still maintain a protective distance from it,” she writes. “Fictionalizing my story also allowed me to look at my experiences in a new way.”

Rewriting themes, characters, and plots through fiction can be a cathartic part of the healing process that helps caregivers feel less lethargic, angry, or depressed. It can provide a space to think about painful moments while also acknowledging them in relation to the larger landscape of traumatic loss. This can be a crucial step in the transformation from grief.

Those aspiring to write fiction can read Jessica Lourey’s Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction, or get inspired by the moving presentation she gave at TEDxRapidCity.

Start Your Healing Journey Through Writing

Caregivers enrich the lives of their loved ones by helping them navigate life’s roughest seas. They bring light into their lives during the darkest of times. They uplift them when they feel weighed down by the burden of illness. What caregivers contribute to the world is invaluable.

As vital and heroic as they are, caregivers are only human, and without self-care, they can feel broken and exhausted amidst a whirlpool of conflicting emotions. But the evidence is clear: Writing can have healing powers. So if you are a caregiver, go for it. Pour your heart onto a page. Create a window into your life. Build a safe place to process, examine, and reflect. You might find yourself at the beginning of a healing journey.

The Evolution of Mankind’s First Voice: How Drums Shape the Human Story

From the earliest beats of human civilization to the electric pulse of modern music, no instrument has carried the weight of human experience quite like the drum. It is one of the oldest instruments known to humankind, a vessel for rhythm that transcends borders, cultures, and centuries. Unlike string or wind instruments, whose melodies require delicate skill or intricate craftsmanship, the drum speaks a more primal language—the heartbeats of every living organism, thunderclaps in a storm, the rhythmic pounding of waves, and other patterns of timed sounds and silences.

Throughout history, drums have occupied a unique place in the cultural, psychological, and social lives of societies. They are tools of ritual and celebration, instruments of war and peace, and mediums for storytelling and spiritual transcendence. The human fascination with rhythm is an integral element in humanity’s pattern-identifying abilities—abilities that have enabled our species to evolve apart from other organisms. Nowhere is this curiosity for sound-patterns more apparent than in the omnipresence of drums—from the gentle beat of a hand against a taut skin to the thunderous roar of modern drum kits.

The magic of the drum lies not just in its social role but in its very design. Scientifically, a drum produces sound when a stretched membrane, typically made of animal hide or synthetic material, vibrates after being struck. This vibration sends pressure waves through the air, creating sound that varies depending on the drum’s size, shape, material, and tension. These seemingly simple instruments are capable of a vast range of tones, from sharp, cracking snaps to deep, resonant booms. It is this dynamic versatility that has helped the drum endure as an essential part of the human story.

A Sound Born in Prehistory

The drum’s origins stretch back into prehistory, with archaeological discoveries suggesting that early humans were making and playing drums as far back as 6,000 years ago, on the cusp of the Neolithic period. These early and rudimentary percussion instruments marked a profound development in human culture. Often fashioned from hollowed-out logs or gourds and covered with animal hides, these drums were a collection of materials that early humans could readily gather and make.

Paintings and hieroglyphs found in ancient Egyptian tombs dating to around 3000 BCE depict drummers participating in religious ceremonies and celebrations. In ancient Mesopotamia, drums were used for religious and military applications. Similarly, archaeological evidence from China indicates that drums were used as early as 2000 BCE. This suggests that their influence spread quickly and organically, as cultures recognized their power to carry messages, accompany rituals, and unify communities.

It is easy to understand why drums emerged as a prominent instrument. The rhythmic beating of a drum mimics the innate biological patterns of life itself—the human heartbeat, the steady patter of rain, the cyclical crash of waves. “The brain rhythms of musical performers and their audiences have been measured in concert settings,” writes Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University and author of the book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World. “The brain rhythms tend to synchronize, and the more synchronization between performer and listener, the more listeners report enjoying the performance.”

In societies without written language or electronic communication, drums were also practical and effective tools for signaling, whether calling warriors to battle or gathering people for communal rituals. The drum’s sound traveled across distances with a clarity that few early instruments could match, making it invaluable for both practical and spiritual purposes.

Rhythm Across the World

As human civilizations grew and diversified, so too did their musical instruments, including drums. Distinct forms of the percussive instrument appeared in every inhabited corner of the globe, each shaped by the culture, beliefs, and available materials of its makers. In Africa, for example, often considered the cradle of drumming traditions, instruments like the djembe, dunun, and the talking drum played central roles in daily life, religious rites, and oral storytelling. The talking drum, in particular, was designed to mimic human speech, capable of conveying complex messages across vast distances.

On the other hand, Native American cultures revered the drum as a sacred object, using large, communal drums in powwows and smaller water drums in ritual ceremonies. The steady, repetitive rhythm of these instruments was believed to connect the physical and spiritual worlds, creating a link between participants and their ancestors.

In the Middle East, drums such as the doumbek and frame drum held an equally sacred place, appearing in religious ceremonies and court entertainment as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. Across Asia, Japanese taiko drums echoed in Shinto rituals and festivals, while in India, the complex rhythms of the tabla and mridangam expressed and preserved classical music traditions.

Meanwhile, in Europe, drums initially served military and signaling purposes. Medieval armies used snare and bass drums to communicate orders and rally troops, while Renaissance courts gradually introduced percussion into their music. Over time, the drum’s role expanded from the battlefield to the stage. People who have used the drums have maintained the rhythmic authority that these instruments produce from their sharp, powerful echoes and booms.

Drummers and percussionists are also transformed by the rhythms they create. As Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart said, “A good groove releases adrenaline in your body. You feel uplifted, you feel centered, you feel calm, you feel powerful. You feel that energy. That’s what good drumming is all about.”

Drumming Into the Modern Era

As the modern world emerged, so did new forms of the drum. The drum kit, a staple of today’s pop music, was popularized in the early 20th century in the United States. Previously, percussion parts were typically divided among multiple musicians, each playing a single instrument. The invention of the bass drum pedal around 1909 allowed a single drummer to combine bass, snare, tom-toms, and cymbals into a compact, multi-functional setup. With its various instruments and assembly, the modern drum kit forever changed the musical milieu with its panoply of percussive parts.

With the rise of jazz in the early 20th century, drummers such as Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich transformed percussion into a lead instrument. They introduced syncopated rhythms, dynamic solos, and expressive improvisation, using the drum kit not just as a timekeeper but as a voice in its own right. “Buddy was known to use pretty high tension on all of his heads, as that helped give his sticks more rebound and the higher frequencies cut through the horn section,” writes Chris Wakelin, a product specialist at Remo, a California-based drum manufacturer.

As rock and roll exploded in the 1950s and ’60s, drummers such as Ringo Starr of The Beatles and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin redefined what percussion could be, providing the pounding heartbeats of songs that would come to define generations. The raw energy of punk rock in the 1970s introduced another evolutionary leap, with drummers embracing speed, aggression, and minimalism to match the genre’s rebellious ethos.

Meanwhile, in funk and hip-hop, drummers like Clyde Stubblefield—renowned for his groundbreaking rhythms with James Brown—laid down grooves that would underpin decades of popular music. Electronic drum machines and digital sampling would later reshape the sonic possibilities of drumming, yet the essential principle—striking a surface to create rhythm—remained unchanged.

Today, the drum kit stands alongside ancient percussion instruments in a fascinating coexistence of the old and the new. Musicians frequently blend traditional hand drums, such as djembes, congas, and bongos, into modern compositions, hybridizing the technology of the modern era with conventional folk rhythms and styles.

Timeless Voices of Tradition

Despite these transformations, many drums—much like horseshoe crabs—have remained essentially unchanged in their influential and simplistic forms. In Japan, the taiko drum is still handcrafted using ancient methods and remains a vital part of both religious ceremonies and theatrical performances. West Africa’s djembe continues to play its ancestral role in social gatherings, rites of passage, and healing rituals, its powerful resonance as meaningful now as it was generations ago.

In Ireland, the bodhrán—a handheld frame drum—persists as a central element in traditional folk music, while in Nigeria, the talking drum still “speaks” at festivals, funerals, and celebrations. These drums are more than instruments: They are carriers of history, embodying the voices of ancestors and the spirit of place.

“One of the unique features of the talking drum instruments is their [ability to closely imitate] the rhythms and intonations of the spoken language,” writes Ushe Mike Ushe, a lecturer at the National Open University of Nigeria in Lagos, in the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. ”The drums reproduce the sounds of proverbs or praise songs through a skilled performer or specialized ‘drum language.’ The specific pattern of drumming and rhythms is closely linked with spiritual beings or Ogun associated with the traditional Yoruba belief system.”

An Enduring Beat

The history of the drum is ultimately the history of human connection. It predates written language, has traveled through the rise and fall of empires, and continues to shape our present. From ancient ritualistic ceremonies under open skies to modern stadium concerts illuminated by dazzling lights, the drum remains a constant—a beating heart in the collective body of humanity.

As musical traditions continue to evolve, so too will the drum. Yet it seems inevitable that this most ancient of instruments will endure, its primal rhythms forever resonating in the human soul. Wherever people gather to dance, mourn, celebrate, or protest, there will be rhythm, and at its core, there will be the steady, undeniable voice of the drum.

Why Every Student Needs Human Ecology Education Now

Human ecology education is a transformative program that focuses on the interplay between humans and our human ecosystem. It is an interdisciplinary educational field that combines physical and psycho-social life skills, including daily life skills, social presentation and protocol, cultural differences, and ethical decision-making, to develop positive relationships for living in our world.

By first teaching the science and responsibilities of caring for each life, human ecology education empowers individuals to build collective human sustainability. Because the lessons are lived daily, the healthy rhythms and habits of life within family and community are learned, repeated in different contexts, shared for life, and naturally inherited by the next generation, making the impact of human ecology educational programs exponential and generationally ongoing.

Human ecology education emphasizes reciprocal influence and interdependence—the “we, us, and our” of our lives. It enables us to identify with others as fellow humans, rather than just their characteristics, such as race, age, height, gender, or ethnicity. It goes beyond self-focused professional education by considering human relationships in the context of the other sixteen hours of the day.

To quote Anna Trupiano, writing for the Michigan Daily, “The fact of the matter is, nothing truly prepares us for college, and a lot of us end up ‘winging it’ just as I have. And once we’re in college, we are met with the same dilemma—college doesn’t equip us for the rest of our lives.”

A continuous K-12, age-related human ecology program equips students to transition to adulthood with the maturity and skills to live independently while navigating complex social systems at all scales. Graduates will have learned precisely what sharing means and how and why it ultimately benefits them, and they will know how to be self-sufficient and resilient as they face changes in their life stages, unforeseen events, or when personal or local resources diminish.

Evolution of Human Ecology Education

The roots of human ecology education can be traced back to the early Bildung folk education movements in Europe, which share common roots with many human-centered social and political movements worldwide. In 1862, during the early years of the Lincoln administration and the Agricultural Age in America, the Morrill Act was passed. This act traded federal land for the establishment of new state colleges, which offered instruction in agriculture, what came to be known as home economics, and other subjects.

Subsequently, mandatory home economics programs were introduced in the lower grades in public schools for girls, as were the industrial and technological courses for boys. As the Western states developed, the Act enabled homesteaders and rural residents to acquire essential life skills and crop information for achieving self-sufficiency. In the Bildung tradition, practical home economics lessons evolved to include social skills, finance, and civic participation.

Then, in a history-changing moment, during the 1940s, an American, Myles Horton, having become familiar with Danish Bildung education in Europe, established the Highlander School, a folk school in Tennessee, to teach the concepts of the Bildung social agency and empowerment. There, many of the future civil rights leaders of the South, such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, developed their initial ideas of nonviolent protests for civil rights; they learned how to use their personal agency for public social progress, much like the European peasant class had done in Europe. For two centuries, spreading from Denmark, the Scandinavian countries have prioritized this education in their public schools. They also consistently rank at the top of global national happiness and well-being ratings.

The lessons build trust in personal agency, generate empowerment, and drive confidence in moving forward and taking constructive action. Learning in a diverse group environment, such as a school, fosters collective trust and long-term community resilience. As Fortune 500 coach Peggy Klaus writes in her 2008 book, The Hard Truth About Soft Skills, “Soft skills encompass personal, social, communication, and self-management behaviors. They cover a wide spectrum of abilities and traits: being self-aware, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, adaptability, critical thinking, attitude, initiative, empathy, confidence, integrity, self-control, organizational awareness, likability, influence, risk taking, problem solving, leadership, time management, and then some.”

The Gender Thing

Although women have made significant gains throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the gender roles in home economics and agriculture remain essentially unchanged from those of the Agricultural Age. Even though improvements in health (both physical and mental), sanitation, and life span for all people occurred when home economics education was required for girls, the gender disparity between home and work that disadvantaged women earlier still exists today. This is made clear in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024.

Home economics remained an “only girls” program until the 1970s and 80s, then diminished as women worked outside the home and rebelled against the “stir and stitch” image of the unpaid, homebound “happy housewife.” However, as women entered professions by choice or necessity, the quality of home life, health, and household management suffered for many families. Men, focused on their professional lives, were not inclined to share the unpaid workload. Children have paid the price.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Home Economics programs were removed from schools, and their classrooms and funding were redirected to new technology labs in an act of educational eminent domain. Alas, it was an era when administrators were predominantly male. Thereafter, whether cause or correlation, more families began to fragment, child care became a national problem, and more children became physically and mentally disadvantaged.

We are now in the second generation since home, family, and living education were eliminated from schools. We see the fallout in erroneous beliefs about sustaining health, like vaccinating, obesity statistics, shorter life spans, and child depression and violence. The U.S. lags behind other advanced nations in its citizens’ mental and physical health, poverty rates, and life expectancy. Unfortunately, these losses are more impactful because now, society is more complex and challenging. Many fall behind by default. Only recently has personal financial literacy regained some traction in elementary and secondary schools. In the U.S., we follow the money first.

Cornell University met these challenges by developing its human ecology program to rectify this missing life and living education. It also broadened the discipline to address 21st-century human challenges, including limited resources, a growing income disparity, and climate adaptation. Essentially, Cornell combined the practical living knowledge of Home Economics with the self-actualization of Bildung education. They utilized Home Economics’ foundational physical and home health content, and added more interdisciplinary pedagogy in sociology and psychology to address the realities of urbanization and increased population diversity.

Human ecology education is scarce at all levels of the U.S. education system. The Society for Human Ecology recognizes only 43 colleges and universities in the country for their programs, and few of those have departments explicitly named “Human Ecology.” At the secondary level, human ecology is only offered in two public high schools—Syosset and Niskayuna, both in New York—and at Cornell University. While several private schools and international institutions include human ecology content under other titles, one U.S. college, the College of the Atlantic in Maine, considers it so essential to human life that it offers just one major: Human Ecology.

Key Values of Human Ecology Education

Abraham Maslow identifies and prioritizes the stages of shared human needs in his pyramid chart, the “Hierarchy of Needs.” This chart illustrates the human life stages and how each stage corresponds to human growth, from basic life needs to professional esteem and accomplishment, culminating in self-actualization.

While Maslow faced some criticism for how cultural differences influence the hierarchy sequence, human ecology education programs, culturally tailored to fit, provide the ideal vehicle for accomplishing the stages in Maslow’s learning pyramid, from self-sufficiency and resilience to social integration, esteem, and personal empowerment. This sequence is particularly important when applied to children.

Human ecology education guides students through all the complex physical and psycho-social development elements before graduation and adulthood, like navigating social systems, resource management, professional growth, and social ethics. It provides the life knowledge needed at each stage and develops commonly shared social perceptions early on that help bind communities together in adulthood. For each individual, human ecology programs serve as a buffer against the lifetime stress that builds from disadvantage and/or discrimination, leading to health problems and long-term care needs.

Like a ship’s rudder, human ecology education helps students develop an internal decision-making framework during their formative years. In early grades, the focus is on meeting individual needs, such as the knowledge and skills needed for food, clothing, and shelter, to ensure personal health and safety. These are called ‘negative needs’ since we cannot survive without them, but we don’t think about them when they are met.

Human ecology lessons, encompassing both the physical life skills that meet basic needs and the ‘soft’ psycho-social skills, are experiential, allowing students to see and feel the benefits realistically. The classroom and lab activities instill teamwork and spark students’ interest in science, math, economics, and human health. Each sequential course becomes more complex as students mature, their world widens, and they transition to adulthood.

Several organizations offer curricula that help individuals navigate the human ecosystem and develop critical skills, ranging from home and family survival to social mobility and environmental preservation. Examples include Learning Mole, Notes From a Kitchen, and Teach Simple for survival and quality of life skills, ARISE Foundation for social mobility skills, and PBS Learning Media, which is excellent for helping with the great outdoors and climate resilience.

As young adults, students emerge from high schools with human ecology programs resilient and able to recognize opportunities, know where to seek resources, intelligently weigh the pros and cons, and distinguish between short-term and long-term goals. They understand cause and effect, accept responsibility, and welcome change while maintaining their integrity and that of their families. Knowledge of time and task management, consumer protection, law, finance, health, housing, communication, transportation, and navigating our complex state and national social systems is critical for independent living at any age in this multicultural, transitional world. It’s complicated.

These are complex areas of life with high risks; that’s why, beginning early, each person needs formal education on how to navigate their way through this stormy human sea. The alternative, depending on social osmosis or trial and error, is simply dysfunctional. Because many young people lack this life education, more are failing to “launch” their lives. It is often impossible to make up for lost progress later.

Community college human ecology courses are life-savers for first-year students without a K-12 human ecology education, who may be on the doorstep of living alone. New CC students are more likely to be from marginalized groups, complex urban environments, or lower-income levels; many are single parents, new immigrants, formerly institutionalized, veterans, or are simply eighteen and on their own for the first time. These students must quickly learn how to assimilate, become independent, and plan a new life as they transition into a broader, unfamiliar culture to find a future.

The State of Human Ecology Education

Human ecology education, whether via the school of hard knocks or by educational design, is integral to everyone’s success. However, there are problems: First, if offered in higher education, it is usually considered a psycho-social discipline and is fiercely guarded in those departments; therefore, practical life skills are not included. What could be less intellectual than learning to read a food label, for instance, a key lesson, or how to comprehend a lease, or select a health insurance plan to prevent medical bankruptcy, a significant cause of bankruptcies?

Leaving out that content abandons its Home Economics foundation and implies someone else will be at home dealing with those inescapable tasks responsible for good health and sanctuary. That higher education program planning mistake creates hardships for our society, where 30 to 50 percent of people live alone, depending on age.

Secondly, since college students often lack the life skills they should have acquired in elementary and secondary schools, it generates a list of problems for college presidents, including low attendance, decreasing state funding, declining transfer and graduation rates, and costly student support programs, loans, food programs, crisis counseling, and campus crime. Inexplicably, little is on their list for preventing these problems and teaching students how to live independently, stay healthy, and remain resilient and on track.

Although college presidents recognize that teaching is part of their mission, many devote institutional resources to research and career development. Every college or university should require all freshman students, regardless of age, to complete human ecology coursework to graduate or transfer. Human ecology education is life insurance, literally. Incorporating math, English, science, and economics into daily life experiences provides a foundation for and increases comprehension of those academic requirements.

The college problem list, without human ecology, would be tolerable if colleges and universities reached below themselves and supported teaching human ecology in elementary and secondary schools to prevent personal failure, and prepare for college success and independent living. For example, they could train more human ecology teachers, offer in-service human ecology programs for teachers in related disciplines, and expand existing programs to include knowledge of life and living.

The third problem indicating the need for human ecology for all is that those who struggle the most with independent living and homelessness are men. This demographic has traditionally prioritized the value of professional or trade skills over life skills. Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2023, has made gender equity on the home front the focus of her economic research, proving that daily self-sufficiency is a human social and economic necessity, not a gender-based cultural habit. This disconnect, the lack of the skills to meet personal needs, is a causal factor in male crime, violence, and homeless statistics, as well as low graduation rates, shorter life spans, obesity, and increasing health problems.

Colleges do not mandate human ecology as essential to every college education because most believe their schools exist solely for professional education, not personal development. This is the gender thing again from previous eras of female subjugation in which all things regarding personal life practiced at home were unpaid, taught by Mom, or suitable only for the lower grades. However, giving birth does not qualify one to manage a household or raise children, and lower grades no longer offer life education, not since the 1980s. Now, with no one at home, professional child care costs often equal or exceed many mortgage payments, and frequently do not provide a good example of resilience or a positive family life.

There are also problems in the lower grades. They face barriers like limited resources, no time, resistance to change, lack of trained teachers, and the same old gender stereotyping, all of which prevent students from transitioning successfully into adulthood.

As we confront climate change and environmental losses, the need to prevent social and ecological decline through personal education is no longer optional. Preventive education is the long-term, bottom-up approach that is the best choice before facing life’s difficulties. Treatment later to save lives is undoubtedly a needed intervention. Still, it is, by definition, a short-term, top-down triage action. It does not stop problems like homelessness or the growing number of people who are burdened for life with adverse childhood experiences (ACDs) because they lack the childhood care needed to meet health and safety needs.

Nationally, there are additional benefits. Human ecology education provides essential adaptation skills as climate disasters become more frequent and costly. Few states require even basic climate science education, and those that do often overlook the importance of personal climate adaptation skills. Additionally, as we struggle with political fragmentation and a growing income disparity, understanding and acknowledging that all people share similar human needs through human ecology education helps unite voters.

That understanding ties generations and cultures together, building a cohesive nation. Imagine the possibilities for saving lives, preserving nature, and conserving community resources if all local public schools taught students, in realistic and practical terms, how to sustain and share community and cultural resources. The time has come to empower all people with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the 21st century.

The Rise of AI Warfare: How Autonomous Weapons and Cognitive Warfare Are Reshaping Global Military Strategy

In the 1983 film War Games, a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response) is about to provoke a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but because of the ingenuity of a teenager (played by Matthew Broderick), catastrophe is averted. In the first Terminator film, which was released a year later, a supercomputer called “Skynet” decides to exterminate humanity because it’s perceived as a threat to its existence rather than to protect American nuclear weapons.

Although these films offered audiences grim scenarios of intelligent machines running amok, they were also prophetic. Artificial intelligence (AI) is so commonplace that it’s routinely applied during a simple Google search. That it is also being integrated into military strategies is hardly any surprise. It’s just that we have little understanding of the capacity of these high-tech weapons (those that are now ready for use and those in development). Nor are we prepared for systems that have the capacity to transform warfare forever.

Throughout history, it is human intelligence that uses the technology, not the technology itself, which has won or lost wars. That may change in the future when human intelligence is focused instead on creating systems that are more capable on the battlefield than those of the adversary.

An “Exponential, Insurmountable Surprise”

Artificial intelligence isn’t a technology that can be easily detected, monitored, or banned, as Amir Husain, the founder and CEO of an AI company, SparkCognition, pointed out in an essay for Media News. Integrating AI elements—visual recognition, language analysis, simulation-based prediction, and advanced forms of search—with existing technologies and platforms “can rapidly yield entirely new and unforeseen capabilities.” The result “can create exponential, insurmountable surprise,” Hussain writes.

Advanced technology in warfare is already widespread. The use of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs)—commonly known as drones—in military settings has set off warnings about “killer robots.” What happens when drones are no longer controlled by humans and can execute military missions on their own? These drones aren’t limited to the air; they can operate on the ground or underwater as well. The introduction of AI, effectively giving these weapons the capacity for autonomy, isn’t far off.

Moreover, they’re cheap to produce and cheap to purchase. The Russians are buying drones from Iran for use in their war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have been putting together a cottage industry constructing drones of their own against the Russians. The relative ease with which a commercial drone can be converted into one with a military application also blurs the line between commercial and military enterprises. At this point, though, humans are still in charge.

A similar problem can be seen in information-gathering systems that have dual uses, including satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft, ground and undersea radars, and sensors, all of which have both commercial and military applications. AI can process vast amounts of data from all these systems and then discern meaningful patterns, identifying changes that humans might never notice. American forces were stymied to some degree in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they could not process large amounts of data. Even now, remotely piloted UAVs are using AI for autonomous takeoff, landing, and routine flight. All that’s left for human operators to do is concentrate on tactical decisions, such as selecting attack targets and executing attacks.

AI also allows these systems to operate rapidly, determining actions at speeds that are seldom possible if humans are part of the decision-making process. Until now, decision-making speed has been the most important aspect of warfare. If, however, AI systems go head-to-head against humans, AI will invariably come out ahead. However, the possibility that AI systems eliminate the human factor terrifies people who don’t want to see an apocalyptic scenario on celluloid come to pass in reality.

Automated Versus Autonomous

A distinction needs to be made between the term “autonomous” and the term “automated.” If we are controlling the drone, then the drone is automated. But if the drone is programmed to act on its own initiative, we would say it is autonomous. But does the autonomous weapon describe the actual weapon—i.e., a missile on a drone—or the drone itself? Take, for example, the Global Hawk military UAV (drone). It is automated insofar as it is controlled by an operator on the ground, and yet if it loses communication with the ground, the Golden Hawk can land on its own. Does that make it automated or autonomous? Or is it both?

The most important question is whether the system is safety-critical. Translated, that means whether it has the decision-making capacity to use a weapon against a target without intervention from its human operator. It is possible, for example, for a drone to strike a static military target on its own (such as an enemy military base) but not a human target because of the fear that innocent civilians could be injured or killed as collateral damage. Many countries have already developed drones with real-time imagery capable of acting autonomously in the former instance, but not when it comes to human targets.

Drones aren’t the only weapons that can act autonomously. Military systems are being developed by the U.S., China, and several countries in Europe that can act autonomously in the air, on the ground, in water, and underwater with varying degrees of success.

Several types of autonomous helicopters designed so that a soldier can direct them in the field with a smartphone are in development in the U.S., Europe, and China. Autonomous ground vehicles, such as tanks and transport vehicles, and autonomous underwater vehicles are also in development. In almost all cases, however, the agencies developing these technologies are struggling to make the leap from development to operational implementation.

There are many reasons for the lack of success in bringing these technologies to maturity, including cost and unforeseen technical issues, but equally problematic are organizational and cultural barriers. The U.S. has, for instance, struggled to bring autonomous UAVs to operational status, primarily due to organizational infighting and prioritization in favor of manned aircraft.

The Future Warrior

In the battleground of the future, elite soldiers may rely on a head-up display that feeds them a wealth of information that is collected and routed through supercomputers carried in their backpacks using an AI engine. With AI, the data is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and fed back into the head-up display. This is one of many potential scenarios presented by U.S. Defense Department officials. The Pentagon has embraced a relatively simple concept: the “hyper-enabled operator.”

The objective of this concept is to give Special Forces “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent.” In other words, they will be able to make decisions based on the information they are receiving more rapidly than their enemy. The decision-making model for the military is called the “OODA loop” for “observe, orient, decide, act.” That will come about using computers that register all relevant data and distill them into actionable information through a simple interface like a head-up display.

This display will also offer a “visual environment translation” system designed to convert foreign language inputs into clear English in real time. Known as VITA, the system encompasses both a visual environment translation effort and voice-to-voice translation capabilities. The translation engine will allow the operator to “engage in effective conversations where it was previously impossible.”

VITA, which stands for Versatile Intelligent Translation Assistant, offers users language capabilities in Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese, including Mandarin, a Chinese dialect. Operators could use their smartphones to scan a street in a foreign country, for example, and immediately obtain a translation of street signs in real-time.

Adversary AI Systems

Military experts divide adversarial attacks into four categories: evasion, inference, poisoning, and extraction. These types of attacks are easily accomplished and often don’t require computing skills. An enemy engaged in evasive attacks could attempt to deceive an AI weapon to avoid detection—hiding a cyberattack, for example, or convincing a sensor that a tank is a school bus. This may require the development of a new type of AI camouflage, such as strategic tape placement, that can fool AI.

Inference attacks occur when an adversary acquires information about an AI system that allows evasive techniques. Poisoning attacks target AI systems during training, interfering with access to the datasets used to train military tools—mislabeling images of vehicles to dupe targeting systems, for instance, or manipulating maintenance data designed to classify imminent system failure as a regular operation.

Extraction attacks exploit access to the AI’s interface to learn enough about the AI’s operation to create a parallel model of the system. If AI systems are not secure from unauthorized users, then an adversary’s users could predict decisions made by those systems and use those predictions to their advantage. For instance, they could predict how an AI-controlled unmanned system will respond to specific visual and electromagnetic stimuli and then proceed to alter its route and behavior.

Deceptive attacks have become increasingly common, as illustrated by cases involving image classification algorithms that are deceived into perceiving images that aren’t there, confusing the meaning of images, and mistaking a turtle for a rifle, for instance. Similarly, autonomous vehicles could be forced to swerve into the wrong lane or speed through a stop sign.

In 2019, China announced a new military strategy, Intelligentized Warfare, which utilizes AI. Officials of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have stated that their forces can overtake the U.S. military by using AI. One of its intentions is to use this high-tech type of warfare to bring Taiwan under its control without waging conventional warfare. However, only a few of the many Chinese studies on intelligentized warfare have focused on replacing guns with AI. On the other hand, Chinese strategists have made no secret of their intention to control the enemy’s will directly.

That would include the U.S. president, members of Congress, combatant commanders, and citizens. “Intelligence dominance”—also known as cognitive warfare or “control of the brain”—is seen as the new battleground in intelligentized warfare, putting AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned. According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, the People’s Liberation Army is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”

Controlling an adversary’s mind can affect not just someone’s perceptions of their surroundings but, ultimately, their decisions. For the People’s Liberation Army, cognitive warfare is equal to the other domains of conflict, which are air, land, and sea. In that respect, social media is considered a key battlefield.

Russia has also been developing its own AI capacity. As early as 2014, the Russians inaugurated a National Defense Control Center in Moscow, a centralized command post for assessing and responding to global threats. The center was designed to collect information on enemy moves from multiple sources and provide senior officers with guidance on possible responses.

Russia has declared that it will eventually develop an AI system capable of running the world. Russians are already using AI in Ukraine to jam wireless signals connecting Ukrainian drones to the satellites they rely on for navigation, causing the machines to lose their way and plummet to Earth. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) has explored ways in which AI systems can be developed for uncrewed systems for the air, maritime, and ground domains. At the same time, at least in the short term, official policy is predicated on the belief that humans must remain firmly in the loop.

Meanwhile, the Russians are trying to improve UAV capabilities with AI as a mechanism for command, control, and communications. MOD also emphasizes the use of AI for data collection and analysis as a natural evolution from the current “digital” combat technology and systems development.

“Raven Sentry”: AI in the U.S. War in Afghanistan

The use of AI on the battlefield by U.S. intelligence, while brief, showed promising results. “Raven Sentry,” an AI tool launched in 2019 by a team of American intelligence officers (known as the “nerd locker”), with help from Silicon Valley expertise, was intended to forecast insurgent attacks. The initial use of AI came at a time when U.S. bases were closing, troop numbers were falling, and intelligence resources were being diverted. Raven Sentry relied on open-source data.

“We noticed an opportunity presented by the increased number of commercial satellites and the availability of news reports on the Internet, the proliferation of social media postings, and messaging apps with massive membership,” says Col. Thomas Spahr, chief of staff of the Resolute Support J2 intelligence mission in Kabul, Afghanistan, from July 2019 to July 2020.

The AI tool also drew on historical patterns based on insurgent activities in Afghanistan going back 40 years, which encompassed the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. Environmental factors were also considered. “Historically, insurgents attack on certain days of the year or holidays, for example, or during certain weather and illumination conditions,” Spahr notes. He adds, “The beauty of the AI is that it continues to update that template. The machine would learn as it absorbed more data.” Before its demise in 2021 (with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Raven Sentry had demonstrated its feasibility, predicting an insurgent attack with 70 percent accuracy. The AI tool predicted that attacks were more likely to occur when the temperature was above 4 degrees Celsius (or 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit), when lunar illumination was below 30 percent, and when there was no rain. Spahr was satisfied with the results: “We validated that commercially produced, unclassified information can yield predictive intelligence.”

Ukraine as Testing Ground for AI

Ever since the Russian invasion, launched in 2022, Ukraine has become a testing ground for AI in warfare. Outgunned and outmanned, Ukrainian forces have resorted to improvisation, jerry-rigging off-the-shelf devices to transform them into lethal autonomous weapons. The Russian invaders, too, have employed AI, conducting cyberattacks and GPS-jamming systems.

Ukraine’s Saker Scout quadcopters “can find, identify, and attack 64 types of Russian ‘military objects’ on their own.” These drones are designed to operate autonomously, and unlike other drones that Ukrainian forces have deployed, Russia cannot jam them.

By using code found online and hobbyist computers like Raspberry Pi, easily obtained from hardware stores, Ukrainians are able to construct innovative killer robots. Apart from drones, which can be operated with a smartphone, Ukrainians have built a gun turret with autonomous targeting operated with the same controller used by a PlayStation or a tablet. The gun, called Wolly because it bears a resemblance to the Pixar robot WALL-E, can auto-lock on a target up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) away and shift between preprogrammed positions to quickly cover a broad area.

The manufacturer is also developing a gun capable of hitting moving targets. It can automatically identify targets as they come over the horizon. The gun targets and aims automatically; all that’s left for the operator to do is press the button and shoot. Many Ukrainian drones, which look like those you can find at Walmart, are called First Person View (FPV) drones. Capable of flying 100 miles per hour, FPV drones have four propellers and a mounted camera that uses wireless to send footage of their flights back to operators. With a bomb on board, an FPV can be converted into a weapon that can take out a tank. They’re cheap, too; one manufacturer, Vyriy, charges $400 each, a small price to pay to disable a tank worth millions of dollars. Vyriy derives its name from a mythical land in Slavic folktales.

If one kamikaze drone is good, dozens of them are better insofar as the greater their number, the greater the chance there is of several reaching their targets. In nature, a swarm of ants behaves as a single living organism, whether the task is collecting food or building a nest. Analogously, a swarm of autonomous drones could act as a single organism—no humans necessary—carrying out a mission regardless of how many are disabled or crash to the ground or whether communication from the ground is disrupted or terminated.

Although humans are still in the “loop,” these weapons could equally be made entirely autonomous. In other words, they could decide which targets to strike without human intervention.

It isn’t as if Ukraine has adopted AI weaponry without any tech experience. In the words of New York Times reporter Paul Mozer, “Ukraine has been a bit of a back office for the global technology industry for a long time.” The country already had a substantial pool of coders and skilled experts who, under emergency conditions, were able to make the transition from civilian uses (such as a dating app) to military purposes. As Mozer reported: “What they’re doing is they’re taking basic code that is around, combining it with some new data from the war, and making it into something entirely different, which is a weapon.”

The reality is, “there’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big defense primes,” says P.W. Singer, an author who writes about war and tech. “There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big-tech Silicon Valley companies. There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in small startups.”

One of those smaller startups is Anduril. After selling the popular virtual reality headset Oculus to Facebook (now Meta), Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur in his early thirties, went on to found an AI weapons company that is supplying drones to Ukraine. “Ukraine is a very challenging environment to learn in,” he says. “I’ve heard various estimates from the Ukrainians themselves that any given drone typically has a lifespan of about four weeks. The question is, “Can you respond and adapt?” Anduril, named after a sword in The Lord of the Rings, has sold its devices to ten countries, including the U.S.

“I had this belief that the major defense companies didn’t have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics,” says Luckey. His company’s drone, called ALTIUS, is intended to be fired out of a tube and unfold itself, extending its wings and tail; then, steering with a propeller, it acts like a plane capable of carrying a 30-pound warhead. Luckey believes that his approach will result in more AI weapons being built in less time and at a lower cost than could be achieved by traditional defense contractors like McDonnell Douglas.

Anduril, founded in 2017, is also developing the Dive-LD, a drone that will be used for surveys in littoral and deep water. “It’s an autonomous underwater vehicle that is able to go very, very long distances, dive to a depth of about 6,000 meters (almost 20,000 feet), which is deep enough to go to the bottom of almost any ocean,” says Luckey. Ukraine is already making its own sea drones—essentially jet skis packed with explosives—which have inflicted severe damage on the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

As Anduril’s CEO Brian Schimpf admits, the introduction of Anduril’s drones to Ukraine has yet to produce any significant results, although he believes that will change. Once they’re launched, these drones will not require guidance from an operator on the ground, making it difficult for the Russians to destroy or disable them by jamming their signals.

“The autonomy onboard is really what sets it apart,” Luckey says. “It’s not a remote-controlled plane. There’s a brain on it that is able to look for targets, identify targets, and fly into those targets.” However, for every innovative weapon system the Ukrainians develop, the Russians counter it with a system that renders it useless. “Technologies that worked really well even a few months ago are now constantly having to change,” says Jacquelyn Schneider, who studies military technology as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, “And the big difference I do see is that software changes the rate of change.”

The War in Gaza: Lavender

In their invasion of Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have increasingly relied on a program supported by artificial intelligence to target Hamas operatives, with problematic consequences. According to an April 2024 report by +972 Magazine (an Israeli-Palestinian publication) and Local Call, a Hebrew language news site, the IDF has been implementing a program known as “Lavender,” whose influence on the military’s operations is so profound that intelligence officials have essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Lavender was developed by the elite Unit 8200, which is comparable to the National Security Agency in the U.S. or the Government Communications Headquarters in the UK.

The Israeli government has defended Lavender for its practicality and efficiency. “The Israeli military uses AI to augment the decision-making processes of human operators. This use is in accordance with international humanitarian law, as applied by the modern Armed Forces in many asymmetric wars since September 11, 2001,” says Magda Pacholska, a researcher at the TMC Asser Institute and specialist in the intersection between disruptive technologies and military law.

The data collected to identify militants that were used to develop Lavender comes from the more than 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, which was under intense surveillance prior to the Gaza invasion in 2023.

The report states that as many as 37,000 Palestinians were designated as suspected militants who were selected as potential targets. Lavender’s kill lists were prepared in advance of the invasion, launched in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which left about 1,200 dead and about 250 hostages taken from Israel. A related AI program, which tracked the movements of individuals on the Lavender list, was called “Where’s Daddy?” Sources for the +972 Magazine report said that initially, there was “no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices (of targets) or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” The officials in charge, these sources said, acted as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions before authorizing a bombing. One intelligence officer who spoke to +972 admitted as much: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

It was already known that the Lavender program made errors in 10 percent of the cases, meaning that a fraction of the individuals selected as targets might have had no connection with Hamas or any other militant group. The strikes generally occurred at night while the targeted individuals were more likely to be at home, which posed a risk of killing or wounding their families as well.

A score was created for each individual, ranging from 1 to 100, based on how closely he was linked to the armed wing of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Those with a high score were killed along with their families and neighbors despite the fact that officers reportedly did little to verify the potential targets identified by Lavender, citing “efficiency” reasons. “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that his colleagues had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

The IDF had previously used another AI system called “The Gospel,” which was described in a previous investigation by the magazine, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications, to target buildings and structures suspected of harboring militants. “The Gospel” draws on millions of items of data, producing target lists more than 50 times faster than a team of human intelligence officers ever could. It was used to strike 100 targets a day in the first two months of the Gaza fighting, roughly five times more than in a similar conflict there a decade ago. Those structures of political or military significance for Hamas are known as “power targets.”

Weaknesses of AI Weapons

If an AI weapon is autonomous, it needs to have the capacity for accurate perception. That’s to say, if it mistakes a civilian car for a military target, its response rate isn’t relevant. The civilians in the car die regardless. In many cases, of course, AI systems have excelled at perception as AI-powered machines and algorithms have become refined. When, for instance, the Russian military conducted a test of 80 UAVs simultaneously flying over Syrian battlefields with unified visualization, then Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared it to a “semi-fantastic film” that revealed all potential targets.

But problems can creep in. In designing an AI weapon, developers first need access to data. Many AI systems are trained using data that has been labeled by an expert system (e.g., labeling scenes that include an air defense battery), usually a human. An AI’s image-processing capability won’t function well when given images that are different from its training set—for example, pictures produced where lighting conditions are poor, that are at an obtuse angle, or that are partially obscured. AI recognition systems don’t understand what the image is; rather, they learn textures and gradients of the image’s pixels. That means that an AI system may correctly recognize a part of an image but not its entirety, which can result in misclassification.

To better defend AI against deceptive images, engineers subject them to “adversarial training.” This involves feeding a classifier adversarial images so it can identify and ignore those that aren’t going to be targeted. Research by Nicolas Papernot, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, shows that a system, even bolstered by adversarial training, may be ineffective if overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. Adversarial images take advantage of a feature found in many AI systems known as “decision boundaries.”

These boundaries are the invisible rules that instruct a system whether it is perceiving a lion or a leopard. The objective would be to create a mental map with lions in one sector and leopards in another. The line dividing these two sectors—the border at which a lion becomes a leopard or leopard a lion—is known as the decision boundary. Jeff Clune, who has also studied adversarial training, remains dubious about such classification systems because they’re too arbitrary.“All you’re doing with these networks is training them to draw lines between clusters of data rather than deeply modeling what it is to be [a] leopard or a lion.”

Large datasets are often labeled by companies that employ manual methods. Obtaining and sharing datasets is a challenge, especially for an organization that prefers to classify data and restrict access to it. A military dataset may contain images produced by thermal-imaging systems, for instance, but unless this dataset is shared with developers, an AI weapon wouldn’t be as effective. For example, AI devices that rely on chatbots limited to hundreds of words might not be able to completely replace a human with a much larger vocabulary.

AI systems are also hampered by their inability to multitask. A human can identify an enemy vehicle, decide on a weapon system to employ against it, predict its path, and then engage the target. An AI system can’t duplicate these steps. At this point, a system trained to identify a T-90 tank most likely would be unable to identify a Chinese Type 99 tank, despite the fact that they are both tanks and both tasks require image recognition. Many researchers are trying to solve this problem by working to enable systems to transfer their learning, but such systems are years away from production.

Predictably, adversaries will try to take advantage of these weaknesses by fooling image recognition engines and sensors. They may also try mounting cyberattacks to evade intrusion detection systems or feed altered data to AI systems that will supply them with false requirements.

U.S. Preparedness

The U.S. Department of Defense has been more partial to contracting for and building hardware than to implementing new technologies. All the same, the Air Force, in cooperation with Boeing, General Atomics, and a company called Kratos, is developing AI-powered drones. The Air Force is also testing pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft run by artificial intelligence. This next-generation drone is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets. The objective is to give human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. The Valkyrie is not autonomous, however. Although it will use AI and sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats, it will still be up to pilots to decide whether or not to strike the target.

Pentagon officials may not be deploying autonomous weapons in battle yet, but they are testing and perfecting weapons that will not rely on human intervention. One example is the Army’s Project Convergence. In a test, conducted as part of the project, held in August 2020 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, the Army used a variety of air- and ground-based sensors to track simulated enemy forces and then process that data using AI-enabled computers at a base in Washington state. Those computers, in turn, issued fire instructions to ground-based artillery at Yuma. “This entire sequence was supposedly accomplished within 20 seconds,” the Congressional Research Service later reported.

In a U.S. program known as the Replicator initiative, the Pentagon said it planned to mass-produce thousands of autonomous drones. However, no official policy has condoned the use of autonomous weapons, which would allow devices to decide whether to strike a target without a human’s approval.

The Navy has an AI equivalent of Project Convergence called “Project Overmatch.” In the words of Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, this is intended “to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.” Very little has been revealed about the project.

About 7,000 analysts employed by the National Security Agency (NSA) are trying to integrate AI into its operations, according to General Timothy Haugh, who serves as the NSA Director, U.S. Cyber Command Commander, and Chief of the Central Security Service. General Haugh has disclosed that as of 2024, the NSA is engaged in 170 AI projects, of which 10 are considered critical to national security. “Those other 160, we want to create opportunities for people to experiment, leverage, and compliantly use,” he says.

At present, though, AI is still regarded as a supplement to conventional platforms. AI is also envisioned as playing four additional roles: automating planning and strategy; fusing and interpreting signals more efficiently than humans or conventional systems can do; aiding space-based systems, mainly by collecting and synthesizing information to counter hypersonics; and enabling next-generation cyber and information warfare capabilities.

Ethics of AI Use

Although the use of autonomous weapons has been a subject of debate for decades, few observers expect any international deal to establish new regulations, especially as the U.S., China, Israel, Russia, and others race to develop even more advanced weapons. “The geopolitics makes it impossible,” says Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top negotiator on autonomous weapons at the UN. “These weapons will be used, and they’ll be used in the military arsenal of pretty much everybody.”

Despite such challenges, Human Rights Watch has called for “the urgent negotiation and adoption of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems.” It has launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which the human rights organization says has been joined by more than 270 groups and 70 countries. Even though the controversy has centered around autonomous weapons, Brian Schimpf, CEO of AI drone manufacturer Anduril, has another perspective. He says AI weapons are “not about taking humans out of the loop. I don’t think that’s the right ethical framework. This is really about how we make human decision-makers more effective and more accountable [for] their decisions.”

All the same, autonomous AI weapons are already under development. Aside from the ethics of relying on a weapon to make life-and-death decisions, there is a problem with AI itself. Errors and miscalculations are relatively common. Algorithms underlying the operations of AI systems are capable of making mistakes—“hallucinations”—in which seemingly reasonable results turn out to be entirely illusory. That could have profound implications for deploying AI weapons that operate with deeply flawed instructions undetectable by human operators. In a particularly dystopian scenario, an adversary might substitute robot generals for human ones, forcing the U.S. to do the same, with the result that AI systems may be pitted against one another on the battlefield with unpredictable and possibly catastrophic consequences.

Dr. Elke Schwarz of Queen Mary University of London views the AI weapon dilemma through a theoretical framework that relies on political science and empirical investigations in her consideration of the ethical dimensions of AI in warfare. She believes that the integration of AI-enabled weapon systems facilitates the objectification of human targets, leading to heightened tolerance for collateral damage. In her view, automation can “weaken moral agency among operators of AI-enabled targeting systems, diminishing their capacity for ethical decision-making.” The bias towards autonomous systems may also encourage the defense industry to rush headlong into funding military AI systems, “influencing perceptions of responsible AI use in warfare.” She urges policymakers to take risks into account before it’s too late.

“(T)he effect of AI is much, much more than the machine gun or plane. It is more like the shift from muscle power to machine power in the last Industrial Revolution,” says Peter Singer, a professor at Arizona State University and a strategist and senior fellow at the U.S. think tank New America, who has written extensively about AI and warfare. “I believe that the advent of AI on the software side and its application into robotics on the hardware side is the equivalent of the industrial revolution when we saw mechanization.” This transformation raises new questions “of right and wrong that we weren’t wrestling with before.” He advocates setting “frameworks to govern the use of AI in warfare” that should apply to those people who are working on the design and use.

One of the issues Singer calls “machine permissibility” is what the machine should be allowed to do apart from human control. He calls attention to a second issue “that we’ve never dealt with before,” which is “machine accountability.” “If something happens, who do we hold responsible if it is the machine that takes the action? It’s very easy to understand that with a regular car, it’s harder to understand that with a so-called driverless car.” On the battlefield, would the machine be held responsible if the target was mistaken or if civilians were killed as a result?