(Illustration by Ross MacDonald)
A year ago I accepted an invitation to attend a workshop at Stanford associated with a yearlong project called “Education and Learning for Longer Lives.” The Stanford Center on Longevity and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences were partnering on the initiative, which sought “to develop a national vision for lifelong human-capital developing in the face of major changes in the character of work.”
I listened to the research fellows’ presentations with great interest. As someone who changed careers midstream from academia to journalism, I needed little persuasion to accept the idea that society nowadays should do a better job of enabling adults to acquire new skills to adapt to the ever-changing job market over their ever-longer working lives. Today educators must consider the entire lifespan, not just our “school-age” years.
One presentation particularly intrigued me: Isabelle Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, discussed the role of artificial intelligence in lifelong education and warned against the “Turing Trap”—a term coined by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson according to which AI is used to automate, rather than augment, human labor, leaving those replaced by AI trapped in poverty and powerlessness. I encouraged her afterward to share with our readers her positive vision of human flourishing in the age of AI. The result is our Spring 2026 cover story, “Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence.”
The person who invited me to this confab was Mitchell Stevens, an organizational sociologist and professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education who leads several cross-disciplinary efforts at the university and beyond. We have since engaged in many conversations about education, technology, social innovation, and the research that he and his many collaborators are producing. Someone with such broad and humane interests in addressing social problems and in convening like-minded thinkers and practitioners is an ideal partner for SSIR. I am pleased to announce that he has agreed to join us as our new academic editor.
Our two other features offer important critiques to contemporary philanthropy in the United States. Ariel Simon, president of Tambourine Philanthropies, warns of the danger of the monoculture he sees in the sector, favoring instead a pluralistic vision that embraces the variety of motivations that lead people to give. And Mark Dobosz, vice president of Philanthropy at Mozaic Senior Life, underscores the importance of small donations to the funding of social innovation and the maintenance of equality in the sector.
Read more stories by David V. Johnson.