.K.L. Kettle.

So chuffed that as we (the UK) enter this new school year that Control Alter Delete is on School Reading List's round-up of books about AI and AI ethics for children and teens! https://schoolreadinglist.co.uk/genres/books-about-ai-and-ai-ethics-for-children-and-teens They say on their bookshop.org link (where you can get the books with their affiliate links, below) “For many young readers, AI is one of those subjects: exciting, unsettling, useful, confusing and impossible to

Spoilers ahead. There's a version of hope I've never trusted. The soft, fluffy kind. The poster on the corridor wall with a kitten dangling off a branch and hang in there underneath. When things are genuinely hard, I find that version a little insulting. When I came to write about hope ( and ‘Control Alter Delete’ is, underneath all the games and the glitter, a book about hope ) I thought about my best friend. They rhave always been that person I have had to point my head in

I planted a flag on this blog and called it the hill I'd die on: if we take the online square away from young people, we have to fund the offline ones. If we restrict the online, we have to resource the offline at the same time. I just found out that the School Library Association has been awarded £500,000 by the Charlotte Aitken Trust to launch Reading Reboot : a programme bringing around a thousand "social book clubs" to more than a hundred secondary school libraries acros

Right. Let's do this. The under-16 social media ban. I'm a senior technologist AND a novelist who just published ‘Control Alter Delete’, a book about how tech and screens are quietly eating our inner lives, so surely I'm cheering? I’m not. Because, Reader, it's complicated. Let me start with the problem I have with it, because I do have one. A ban is close to unpoliceable (ask any thirteen-year-old, or any parent who's watched one vanish a screen-time limit in roughly four s