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Week 2 of Claude, and I’m hooked.
Two weeks ago, I migrated over from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude. In case you missed it, I shared two resources with step-by-step how-to guides on how you can do it too, if you’d like to, for Claude and Gemini, in Issue 8.
As with all new things, changing tools requires patience. I keep reminding myself that it took five years of training ChatGPT, to my liking, for it to feel truly reliable. I’m not going to be able to replicate that in five days, or probably even 5 weeks. And that’s okay.
What I can tell you is that the more I use Claude, the more I understand why it works differently. This week, we’re going deeper on that.
Note to readers: Moving forward, some links in these weekly newsletters may contain affiliate links to help support my work.
Hot Take & AI Headline This Week
Good AI news doesn’t make headlines often enough.
Most of what we see about AI is negative: ethics violations, privacy concerns, data exploitation, billionaires, climate costs, population health risks, and more. And all of that is valid. We should keep talking about and advocating for better.
But when AI is doing genuinely good work in the world, we need to talk about that too. Because I believe AI can and will improve many of the problems we’re facing today. We just need the right people steering it.
Remember the J-PAL initiative I wrote about a couple weeks ago? This week’s headline is another one of those AI-for-good stories.
This week’s headline:
What’s happening?
In 2024 alone, nearly 2000 people were killed by mines, and more than 4300 were injured, due to active land mines across 57 countries. 90% of them were civilians, and nearly half were children.
Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology are using AI-powered drones to detect landmines faster, more safely, and with greater accuracy than traditional ground-based methods. Traditional detection methods are slow, dangerous, and limited. Handheld metal detectors often struggle in mineral-rich soils and have difficulty reliably detecting low-metal or predominantly plastic mines. The new approach layers multiple drone-mounted sensors (thermal, hyperspectral, LiDAR, and magnetic) and uses AI to fuse that data into something no single sensor could detect alone.
Why this matters:
Earlier research showed that drone-mounted magnetic sensing can detect metallic targets with accuracy comparable to ground-based methods, while reducing human risk and increasing survey speed ~10x.
In Ukraine, where 20 million sq meters of land have already been cleared and 36,000 explosives removed, the HALO Trust aims to 3x the speed of clearance by combining drone technology and satellite imagery with AI to scan huge areas and quickly assess where landmines may be.
High-level takeaways:
AI isn’t just disrupting industries; it’s saving lives in conflict and post-conflict zones.
Combining multiple sensor types with AI delivers results that no single tool could achieve on its own.
Speed matters here: the faster the detection, the sooner families can return to farmland, children can walk to school, and communities can rebuild.
The researchers are also building uncertainty estimation so the system flags ambiguity rather than forcing a high-confidence prediction. The difference between “mine detected” and “possible mine detected, low confidence” demonstrates responsible AI design in practice.
What to pay attention to:
The team is releasing their dataset as open-access. This means that other researchers worldwide can build on it. Watch how open science accelerates humanitarian AI applications.
Why this matters to OT:
You might think this has nothing to do with OT, and at a high-level, there isn’t. But when we zoom out to sociocultural and geopolitical environments, it certainly does.
Occupational therapy is fundamentally about enabling participation in life. Landmines are one of the most devastating barriers to that—stealing limbs, independence, and community from civilians long after conflicts end. The populations affected by landmine injuries are often the same populations with the least access to rehabilitation.
AI that reduces that burden is AI doing exactly what it should: extending human capability where human effort alone is insufficient.
This is what “AI for good” actually looks like.
Know What Matters in Tech Before It Hits the Mainstream
By the time AI news hits CNBC, CNN, Fox, and even social media, the info is already too late. What feels “new” to most people has usually been in motion for weeks — sometimes months — quietly shaping products, markets, and decisions behind the scenes.
Forward Future is a daily briefing for people who want to stay competitive in the fastest evolving technology shift we’ve ever seen. Each day, we surface the AI developments that actually matter, explain why they’re important, and connect them to what comes next.
We track the real inflection points: model releases, infrastructure shifts, policy moves, and early adoption signals that determine how AI shows up in the world — long before it becomes a talking point on TV or a trend on your feed.
It takes about five minutes to read.
The insight lasts all day.
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