Reaching Out to an AFT Teacher Regarding the Dangers of AI

An article appeared in the most recent issue of American Educator that featured a discussion with three AI-trained teachers, Elisa Leonard, Cal Siebenmark, and Louis Venagro.  On April 7, I sent the following letter to one of those teachers who was on the receiving end of the AI mushroom treatment devised by the Tech Bros and promoted by AFT.

Good morning, Cal—

I read with interest, as well as a degree of alarm, your contribution to the AI promo piece in the Spring 2026 issue of AFT’s American Educator.  While your surely identifed some of your reservations and fears related to AI, I did not see anywhere in the dialogue a mention of the existential threats posed by AI development if corporations and nation states continue down the unmonitored roads they are now  toward the ultimate goal, AGI (artificial general intelligence). 

The prospect of AGI loose in the world without the benefit (to humanity) of human constraints is the principal reason dozens of AI experts signed on to a statement that  puts the risks of AI in the most unvarnished terms: 

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." 

Presently, we have no regulatory bodies patrolling for reckless AI research/development and no coordination among regulatory bodies even if we did. 

This is not my opinion but, rather, a sad fact that management at Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Microsoft are fully aware of, as witnessed by Anthropic’s most recent decision to delay the public release of their latest AI model because of its capacity to hack every computer security system in the world.  Even so, none of AI’s existential threats are discussed in the teacher training institutes that prepare smart, well-intentioned people like yourself to become promoters of unregulated technologies that have proven unsafe for children and unsafe for the security and continued existence of humankind.

The leadership of AFT is also aware of the many present and potential dangers.  I encourage you and other teachers who have been through these training institutes to come together to create AI literacy curriculums that can be used to educate children at every level about the psychological, economic, and sociocultural dangers of AI and how to avoid them. (By the way, I’m not a union basher—I was a member of AFT until my retirement in 2024.)

As a teacher voice on the front line of AI implementation, I implore you to become fully educated about the threats of AI, as I and millions of others are doing at this time.  Please visit the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) for more resources that will lead to further in-depth resources.  

I have been a blogger at Schools Matter for over 20 years, and I have recently come to the conclusion that while schools do still matter a lot, the one thing that matters the most is societally-responsible control of AI development and implementation. Without it, I believe humanity is doomed.

What altered my vision, you might ask.  I saw this documentary, for which I have no financial interest whatsoever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkPbV3IRe4Y

I am reaching out to you because of your youth and optimism about technology, which reminds me of myself when I was a young educator and the Web was just coming on in the early 1990s.  I am still an enthusiast for how technology can be beneficial to learning, but I have become very much aware of how the goals of committed educational professionals can be hijacked by tech companies and corporate ed reformers who are selling solutions in search of a problem. 

The Silicon Valley tech bros' current solution, AI, could be the final one.  

With all sincerity and respect,

James Horn, PhD