The purpose of intelligence is to help us make decisions. As civilization grew more complex, education became increasingly devoted to solving technical puzzles. A child had to spend years studying before we trusted them with meaningful resources. Today, AI gives a ten-year-old an Einstein on call—without the years of study. But access to answers does not give the kid the judgment to use those capabilities wisely. Education must develop that judgment through the humanities and social sciences. We may return to an ancient ambition: people envision the future, while machines build it.
Our brains help us survive. We use them to find food, to escape a predator, to chase prey, to find a partner on Tinder, and to order pizza. We call this intelligence.
The official history of our civilization teaches us: we know far more than our ancestors. They definitely didn’t know how to use Tinder. Moreover, the speed of knowledge growth keeps increasing. Scientific output doubles every nine years, according to Bornmann and Mutz. Most of the knowledge is technical—related to math, physics, chemistry, drugs, materials, algorithms. Of 3.3 million research papers published in 2023, only 5% were about social sciences, says the U.S. National Science Board.
A kid must spend a decade in school and then another 4-6 years in a university to master a small part of that knowledge. We expect them to grow their intelligence by learning the stuff and solving the problems invented by others. We don’t expect them all to become mathematicians or programmers. But we expect them to be responsible for the resources they inherit from us—the dying generation. Socrates believed that those trained in arithmetic “become much quicker than they would otherwise have been.”
Now, AI steps in and gives a ten-year-old a tool that solves almost anything a teacher asks them to solve. Honestly, I don’t know what could motivate kids to study anymore. The complexity of knowledge is the primary motivation for study. Seymour Papert called it “hard fun”: kids enjoy the work because it is hard, not in spite of it. Today, with AI, the perceived complexity is literally zero. And we can’t take AI away from kids.
What will build the intelligence of a person, if all the answers are available without thinking? Technical knowledge, while being mostly useless in their lives, used to develop their skill of judgment. Not anymore. We may get a generation that, as Socrates warned, “will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”
Some say that people still play chess, even after IBM’s Deep Blue. Well, give a kid a computer that hints every move and see how interested they will be in staying at the board.
We must give kids something else to motivate learning. Problems that aren’t finished when an answer appears on a screen. How do you persuade people to work together? What is worth building? Whose interests should come first? What consequences are you willing to take responsibility for? AI can help us think through these questions, but it cannot relieve us of the responsibility to decide.
This is where rhetoric, psychology, politics, and economics belong. At the top of the list I would put philosophy.
Centuries of technological progress pushed these disciplines into the background. The respect was given mostly to mathematicians and engineers, who created AI for us. Now, we can get back to where ancient civilization started from and make its dream come true. As Seneca said, those “who take time for philosophy, they alone really live.” People decide what to build, while robots build it.
Education of the future must prepare people for that. Philosophers, your time is coming.
