What Is Artificial Intelligence?
A computer can look at lots of examples and start to notice what they have in common.
The Wisdom Library
Ideas worth meeting twenty years early.
Each entry has a child-level explanation, a grown-up explanation, the words underneath it, questions to ask afterward, and something to draw. Four minutes, no preparation.
Nothing here is a lesson and nothing needs to be done in order. Pick whatever your child has already asked about sideways.
AI and Robots
What a computer is actually doing when it seems to think, and what a robot is once you take the science fiction off it.
What Is a Robot?
A robot is a machine that does a job, and somebody had to teach it how.
The Smartest Helper Still Needs the Right Toolbox
A smart helper can only use the instructions, tools, and doors that are open in the room.
Money
Value, trade, saving, spending, and the idea that choosing to buy something is always also choosing not to buy something else.
What Is Money?
Money is a way to trade what you have for what you want, without carrying a goat around.
What Is Investing?
Investing is using something valuable now, hoping it becomes more valuable later.
Business
Somebody has a problem. Somebody else builds a useful solution. Everything else in business is detail stacked on top of that sentence.
What Is a Business?
A business fixes a problem for somebody, and they say thank you with money.
What Is an Entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is someone who notices a problem and decides to be the one who fixes it.
The Internet
Computers talking to other computers, the places their information lives, and how anybody finds anything in all of it.
What Is the Internet?
The internet is computers talking to other computers.
What Is a Website?
A website is a place on the internet where somebody keeps their stuff so other people can come look at it.
What Is a Search Engine?
A search engine has already looked at almost everything, so it can tell you where to find what you want.
The Universe
The largest subject available, kept here on purpose to prove that even enormous ideas have small honest starting sentences.
What Is the Universe?
The universe is everything there is, including you, and most of it is empty space.
Missing something?
The library grows in the direction people actually ask about. If there is a subject your child keeps circling and we have not written it yet, it is probably queued behind whatever it depends on ... that is how the ordering works here.