AI literacy is the new literacy

There was a time when reading and writing were specialist skills, held by scribes and clergy, and everyone else got by without them. It seems absurd now. Literacy became the baseline – not because everyone became a novelist, but because the world reorganized itself around people who could read.

Something similar is underway with AI, and it’s moving faster than literacy ever did.

The claim isn’t that everyone needs to become technical. It’s that a basic fluency – knowing what these tools are good and bad at, how to ask them for something useful, how to check their work – is becoming a normal part of being a capable adult. Not a superpower. A baseline.

The people who treat AI as optional are making a bet that the world will wait for them. It won’t.

The good news is that this literacy is unusually easy to acquire. You don’t need years of schooling. You need a few honest hours, a willingness to look a little foolish at first, and someone to explain it without the jargon. That last part is the whole reason Practable exists.