Candice’s Current Thinking
Weekly analysis and perspectives on the AI and policy landscape.
AI as Your Reading Guide
I’m reading six books right now—four nonfiction, two novels.
The challenge: the thickest is over 600 pages, and a few nonfiction titles overlap.
Inspired by a Supreme Court justice’s memoir I was reading, I asked AI: “Judges read a lot—how do they get through it all?”
The first answer made me laugh: “They have clerks.”
But the next suggestion was quite helpful: “And they use efficient reading strategies.”
Fiction Belongs on Your AI Reading List
I recently finished Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability, a novel that makes the abstract debate around AI ethics deeply personal. The story’s central dilemma: a family is in a fatal accident in their AI-powered self-driving car after the teenage son jerks the wheel. It also turns out the mother, Lorelei, designed the car’s algorithm. Holsinger shows how impossible it is to untangle fault when technology and human lives intersect.
While the book has many layers, it raises a crucial question for our own lives: what is our role in shaping AI’s impact?
When My Daughter Said She Wasn’t Allowed to Use AI for School
At the start of the last school year, my middle schooler came home and announced, “We’re not allowed to use AI.” The school hadn’t explicitly banned it; she had simply interpreted “don’t cheat” as “don’t use.”
It struck me how easily a well-intentioned message can get muddled. It’s often simpler to say don’t than to explain how, which can make it harder for kids to understand and explore a world where AI is already everywhere.
Candice Bryant Consulting provides strategic intelligence, public affairs advisory, and communications strategy for organizations operating at the intersection of AI and emerging tech policy, national security and public-private partnerships.
“This is a 1996 moment for AI — the companies that show up in Washington will shape the next decade.”
— Candice Bryant