In the years to come, agentic artificial intelligence will become pervasive, with super-intelligent agents that exist to specialize in and collaborate on specific tasks with unmatched expertise. These agents will far outnumber human beings by many orders of magnitude.
This inevitable reality will have profound implications on human civilization, changing forever the purpose of a human life. Through human history, the value of a human life has been measured by productivity. Going forward, productivity will not necessarily be the purpose of human life, and when productivity is still a constituent of the ‘meaning of life’ equation, it will not be realized in the same way that it has been since before the dawn of human civilization. I am currently writing a book about this topic with the working title ‘Humans in a Post-Human World’.
If you accept that the most fundamental purpose of school is to equip students for their adult decades ahead, then today’s educational systems are categorically failing our children at every level.
Today’s educational policymakers are focused on the wrong outcomes, largely because they have not yet realized the implications of agentic AI on human civilization that I alluded to above. Our current approach assumes that we are preparing students to compete for future educational opportunities and jobs in which the human is the primary driving force to achieve productivity goals. We have curriculums designed to teach skills to that end. When pervasive agentic AI is embedded in every aspect of human existence, the knowledge that a human needs to understand to be successful in an agentic world is quite different. Language arts (e.g. English grammar), mathematics, science, and social studies / history remain fundamental skills, but what a human must master in each domain is substantially different.
It’s not that science and mathematics aren’t important any more, but rather the way science and mathematics will be productively applied by humans in the future is changing in fundamental ways. Advanced research is already being conducted by AI while human Ph.Ds only direct lines of research and validate results.
Reading and writing in terms of mastery of grammar, language contruction, and conjugation matter less than comprehension with understanding through our combined channels of perception - reading, imagery, video, audio, touch, scent, and taste. The ability to increase information absorption, critical thinking, discrimination, understanding, organization, and creative thinking should be among the most fundamental purposes of human education in a world where swarms of super-intelligent agents orchestrate the heavy-lifting of complex intellectual and logistical pursuits.
Tests are meaningless if they’re measuring progress towards an antiquated approach to education. Straight As now demonstrate that a student is mastering an irrelevant curriculem rather than providing a leading indicator of future success and accomplishment. Tests in modern education are only relevant in assisting placement of students within educational programs (e.g. university admissions) that are equally irrelevant to a student’s future trajectory.
This may seem ridiculous and outrageous to those who subscribe to the religion of modern education, but the today’s approach to education is based on a world that is rapidly evaporating. We are in the most transformative moment in human history. It is the moment when after many millenia, humans stop being the fundamental units of productivity. That torch is being passed to AI agents forevermore. We humans must find new purpose, explore new ideas about how to measure our own value, and recognize that our approach to education needs to be reimagined by policymakers and educators.
We keep doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation that we’re preparing our children for a rapidly changing world, and that is the definition of insanity.
For more discussion on this topic, check out Practical AI episode #376:
Practical AI: Is Education Failing our Students in this AI-Driven World?
Practical AI on YouTube: Is Education Failing our Students in this AI-Driven World?