Category: technology

A Song of His Own

“Dad, I made a song.”

That was the first thing my son said to me when I got home from work.

“That’s cool, pal!” I responded, thinking he had jotted down a few lyrics to show me.

“Do you want to hear it?” he asked.

Hear it, I thought. Interesting. “Of course!” I said, following him to his room.

I sat on the corner of his bed as he went to the computer.

“Ready?”

I nodded.

He hit play, and from his speakers came an actual rock song. Drums. Bass. Electric guitar. And a vocalist singing about the Colorado Avalanche (my son’s team) defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning (my team) in the NHL Stanley Cup Finals in 2022, the year we were in Colorado and went to a finals game. A game that, as my son constantly reminds me, the Avalanche won 7-0 on their way to hoisting the cup.

As I listened to the song, I watched the smile on my son’s face, especially when the lyrics touched on the game we attended, continued to widen—the smile of pride, connection, and love. It’s the single best sight that I will ever see.

Tampa’s thunder tried to fight,
But Colorado owned the night.

When the song finished, I stared with my jaw dangling open, which caused his smile to grow even wider.

“How?” I asked.

And he walked me through his process, prompting an AI tool with styles, themes, and concepts until he had a completed song.

“Well,” I said. “This has to be on Spotify.”

“Really?” he asked, his voice caught somewhere between disbelief and excitement.

“Really,” I confirmed. “I’ll figure out how to get it distributed so that everyone can hear it.”

For all the challenges my son has, his creativity and ability to figure things out are truly inspiring. When my wife and I were discussing her next book, my son decided to write a Fortnite Tips book, complete with an illustrated title. He gets inspired by videos of his favorite players and builds giant arenas and stadiums in Minecraft—sometimes following tutorials, other times just experimenting until it works. And now, he figured out how to make a song.

It could have been so easy for him to let obstacles define him. To look at the world through the lens of what isn’t possible. But he doesn’t. He assumes everything is possible, and then he goes and proves it. As a parent, it’s more than I could have ever wished for him.

A few weeks later, I went into his room and showed him my phone. I had the Apple Music app up and, ready to play, was the hit new song from the artist neurodefender titled “Avalanche Rising.”

We sat together and listened to it again. He gave me the same look and smile as the lyrics recounted the Avalanche victory. He grabbed his phone and pulled the song up on Spotify, replaying it for the rest of the night. When he joined his friends online, I could hear him telling them about his song, too.

And in that moment, I realized something: no matter the struggles, no matter the setbacks, my son keeps finding ways to make his voice heard. Sometimes literally. Always beautifully. And I’ll never stop listening.

Neurodefender: Video Games and Epilepsy

My first video game console was an Atari 2600 that my sister and I received for Christmas when I was eight.1 It was magical to toggle the switchbox and have an arcade on my television screen. Within a few months, I had a collection of cartridges. Pitfall, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. I even had that horrible E.T. game. But Space Invaders was my favorite game, and my mother’s boss and I had a friendly competition every time we visited his family.

I usually won.

As I got older, I became very interested in computers. My first computer was a Mattel (yes, that Mattel) Aquarius, one of the shortest-lived computers ever to go to market. It had a Tron game that I played constantly, even though I had never seen the movie. But it was the ability to program on the Aquarius that got me hooked and, for a long time, my world revolved around computers and my gaming followed suit.

My first online games were on a computer. That was back before there were high-powered consoles connected to the internet. I’m talking the days of dial-up modems. I would spend hours playing an air combat game with a classmate, but I was obsessed with the text-based fantasy role playing game Gemstone on GEnie, an early online service. It was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that connected people across the country in a virtual world. Eventually, I moved on to more graphical games like the World of Warcraft, but the ability to connect with other people in these worlds was life-changing and even turned into friendships in the real world. One of my groomsmen at my wedding was someone whom I had originally met in an online game.

My son developed a love for video games at an early age. We had a Wii and loved to play baseball and, especially, bowling. I have videos of him running circles around the house after getting a strike, a huge smile on his face emitting an excited giggle.

As he got older, we began to play video games together, especially sport games like hockey. We’d adjust the settings to give him an edge, and I’d occasionally have to pull my goalie and allow him to score to keep the game close, but it was a fun way to spend time together doing something that we both enjoyed.

Eventually, of course, I stopped pulling my goalie and boosting his settings because he got better. Today, he wins more games than me. The grasshopper has become the teacher. And we’ve expanded to other games. We finished the Halo series, one of my all-time favorites. We played MarioKart every night during the pandemic to get three stars on every course. Today, we play Fortnite and Rocket League together, with an occasional session of Minecraft mixed in.

But I’m not the only one he plays with. This era of powerful PCs and consoles with fast internet has opened up the world and allowed him to play with his friends. He has a friend in Connecticut who plays a baseball video game with him. And he hops on Fortnite after school to play with a few of his friends. Through them, he’s met other friends and he has a little network of gamers. Especially over the summer, it’s helped him stay connected as many families travel and it’s been harder to connect with summer schedules.

In this world of gamers streaming on platforms like Twitch, he has decided that it is the career he wants to pursue. Whether or not that is a viable path for him, it has been a great way for him to explore many aspects of a traditional career: schedules, consistency, marketing, and engagement. He learns by watching other streamers and then practices engaging with his audience, describing his actions and thought process as he navigates a challenge. He loves to teach the “noobs”2 how to get started and basic tactics and tips.

As a technologist and a gamer, it’s been fascinating to see how far gaming technology has come. For my son, it’s become a way to connect, express himself, and find his place in a world that hasn’t always made that easy. Watching him game, teach, laugh, and grow through this medium is beyond anything I could have imagined.

If you want to see what he’s building—and maybe learn a thing or two yourself—you can check out his Twitch stream here: @neurodefender.

Game on.

  1. Crazy side note, when the Atari 2600 was introduced, it cost $190, equivalent to paying $990 in 2024! ↩︎
  2. Slang for a newbie—someone who is inexperienced or new to a particular activity, especially in gaming or online communities. ↩︎

The Other AI: Autonomy and Influence

My son has been asking more frequently about living by himself. We’ll have a talk about independence and responsibility, and loosely talk about goals to help him move in that direction. But I also watch as he struggles to remember whether he had taken his medication, or put on deodorant, or pull his sheets up when he makes his bed.

As I watched him try to piece it together, I thought about the technology that I work with and whether it could help him.

I’ve been involved with computers and technology for most of my life, building products with bits and bytes of code and data. For the past ten years, I’ve worked in the evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI).

I recognized early on that AI could potentially transform my son’s life. As the technology matured, I watched it advance the state of medicine and healthcare.

Today, AI algorithms power diagnostic tools, accelerating the time to detect, identify, and treat complex medical conditions. AI is accelerating drug discovery, helping researchers identify promising treatments faster than ever before. It is also being used to examine genetic data to identify the right medication and dosage for individual patients.

AI could improve his quality of life in ways that weren’t possible only a few years ago. Pattern recognition can alert us when he misses a medication or a meal. Personal assistants can provide reminders, keep him on task, and communicate with him in a way that he understands. Self-driving cars will give him mobility and access to a wider world. AI-driven tools can assist him with complex tasks, help him communicate ideas, and give him greater autonomy and independence.

That’s the promise and the potential.

But here’s the problem. We live in a world where AI is already causing harm.

Inherent challenges with the technology, especially with generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT), result in hallucinations where the algorithm makes things up. The black-box nature of these algorithms makes them unpredictable and impossible to test fully, resulting in harmful behavior. And these algorithms are owned by corporations who control the data, usage, and output and can tune it to fit their agenda.

Beyond technology, people have been using these tools for nefarious purposes. It’s easy to create a false but believable story and share it on social media. It’s also easy to create completely believable but fake images and videos to mislead viewers. These bad actors are using the technology to push false narratives and generate mistrust and dissent in society.

My son struggles with memory and executive functioning. It impacts his ability to reason and determine whether what he is reading is fact or opinion, truth or lies. While I think society at large has lost its ability to thing critically, people like my son are especially susceptible to these false narratives and the harm they can cause.

So while I’m building the future with AI, I’m also guarding the present for my son. I want him to have access to all the promise this technology offers — the support, the independence, the chance to live on his own — without falling victim to its dangers. I have to be his guide, his filter, and his advocate.

Because while AI might one day help him remember his medication or build a career, it won’t teach him who to trust, what’s real, or what truly matters. It’s my job to walk beside him, protect him, and help him make sense of a world that’s changing faster than any of us can keep up with.