Home School Support Network

Below are the references to the latest episode of our podcast on YouTube:
John Lennox, interviewed by Steven Bartlett, *The Diary of a CEO*, June 4, 2026. Source of the “redness of red” formulation and the warning about anthropomorphizing AI systems.

John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 417–457. The original Chinese Room argument.

Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Harvard University Press, 1988. Source of Moravec’s paradox — that tasks humans find hard are easy for machines and vice versa.

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Penguin Press, 2025. Cited here for the argument that AGI lacks a scientific definition and that benchmarks reflect what technologists count as intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005) and *The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI* (Viking, 2024). Source of the 2029 AGI and 2045 Singularity predictions.

OpenAI’s AGI definition — “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic), “We Must Pace the Frontier,” published September 12, 2026. Argues for slowing the rate of capability improvement, international coordination, and third-party evaluators embedded in labs — and that the most effective pacing mechanism would be regulation covering all U.S. frontier developers.

Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Elon Musk (xAI) — public responses expressing agreement.

President Trump — remarks to reporters in Ireland, September 13, 2026, and a Truth Social post of September 14, 2026 stating that the only guardrail AI needs is a strong and smart president.

David Sacks, response on X. Argued the labs should slow themselves if they wish, questioned what they claim to see, and raised product-liability exposure as a possible motive.

Speaker Mike Johnson — comments calling for meetings rather than legislation.

The Home School Support Network (HSSN) Online Academy has been educating and equipping students to participate in cyber defense competitions since 2014. Two of the most prestigious competitions that our students have participated in are: US CyberPatriot the National Youth Cyber Education Program and the Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition (PCDC).

The US CyberPatriot program runs online competition events for middle school and high school students that focus on operating and defending individual computer operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux, as well as Cisco network appliances. Cyber security is a strong focus area. HSSN has fielded multiple teams per year since 2014 in the US Cyber Patriot program with students from around the lowcountry of South Carolina ranging in age from those in 6th through 12th grade.

The Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition is a three day event hosted by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) Atlantic in collaboration with the South Carolina Lowcountry Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). The first day of PCDC is when High school teams are invited to compete based on their performance in the US Cyber Patriot Program’s state round. These PCDC events are very competitive and result in head-to-head between some of the best trained high school teams from around the state of SC. The format of these events are red-on-blue live competition and require teams to operate and defend a complex set of networked computers while defending against live attackers. The event attackers are professionally trained penetration testers and red team members primarily from within the Department of Defense (DoD).

The Home School Support Network Online Academy provides students with basic system administration knowledge and skills training at HomeSchoolSTEM.com. Local Charleston area students have an opportunity to join a HSSN Cyber Team that meets regularly to receive more advanced training and preparation for events like those hosted by US CyberPatriot and PCDC. Our HSSN Cyber Teams regularly finish in the top five teams in SC in the US Cyber patriot events.

Leave a comment below or join or Cyber Team Info Mailing Lists to learn more about how to get home school students in these competitions.