The Genius Formula: Why Schools Are Becoming Obsolete

LEGO bricks have been the classic building block for decades. They have inspired generations of children to create and play as they imagine. Now, with the rise of Generative AI, the biggest challenge is how to use them in the modern workplace.

You may already be sniffing where I'm going with this...

The Crisis of Innovation

Much like the rise of blockchain, you'll find company after company, startup after startup, hailing Generative AI as the power of the gods made manifest.

And yet none of them can come up with anything new. It's like the whole industry is screaming at the top of its lungs for someone to come up with something new. Because they can't.

The best that companies can come up with in terms of innovation is turning a spoon into a smart spoon, an IoT spoon, a Meta spoon.

Quick, get the ads rolling! "Is your spoon smarter than a US President? Order now, and find out!"

But, if you brought real innovation to the table, you'd be asked to take this sci-fi garbage outside, because this is a serious industry! Tangible, real-world results are needed, not video game nonsense. Now make me some cat waifu pie-charts!

But if that's the best that corporations can come up with, then were is innovation supposed to be coming from?

We Need Better Creatives

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), creativity will be one of the top three skills in demand by 2025. And critical thinking and problem solving will be among the key skills for lifelong learning in the 21st century, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

But what are these anyway?

Well, creativity is the ability to generate new ideas or solutions that are original, useful, or valuable. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze information in a logical, objective, and rational manner. Problem solving is the ability to identify a problem or challenge and come up with an effective way to deal with it.

These are the same skills that public schools can't teach. And not for lack of trying.

It's because, you can't teach trees how to grow in pots.

Modular Learning

What schools have not and cannot provide, AI can and will. A nurturing environment. AI can provide children with personalized, adaptive, and engaging learning experiences tailored to their needs and interests. It can empower children to become independent, collaborative, innovative learners who create their own projects.

Today, almost everything is modular. This means that you can take a number of unrelated but common parts and put them together to create something new. This means that if your child learns to think in terms of modules, they will have a much easier time understanding how things fit together and how to extend them. Which in turn will make it easier for them to think in terms of systems.

Children can use AI to access information or content they might not otherwise encounter. They could also tap into their creativity long before their motor skills are developed. Imagine a mind untouched by the world, free to explore the infinite.

Soon we could expect children to develop convergent reasoning as they interact with AI. Convergent reasoning is the ability to evaluate multiple ideas or solutions and choose the best one for a given problem or situation.

But to get to the point where AI can tutor the children, they must have already understood the holistic nature of the world. And for now, the best way for children to learn this, has remained LEGOs.

Building on top of this holistic understanding, AI can help turbo-charge further development.

The Wisdom of Youth

Think of AI as growing up with your child, even if it is not at its peak today.

Every child can now explore the world at their own pace and in their own way. They will be able to build on the knowledge and wisdom of those who have gone before them. They will not have to learn in lockstep. Which never made sense anyway, because each person is unique.

School is an idea from a bygone era of industrialization. We must leave this old thinking behind if we are to venture into the future. We needed schools, because those who had the skills were a rare commodity, and there weren't enough with those skills who could do the work that needed to be done. But with AI acting as a personal assistant, this solution is now obsolete. Everyone can own their personal Aristotle.

Why would you buy something wholesale, when the tailor-made solution is cheaper and of higher value?

As you see, with AI we have mass-produced tutors. No longer will a teacher be needed to educate a group of young minds. Each young mind will have their private teacher, at a fraction of the cost.

No longer will you have to worry about bullies, harassment, or school shootings.

The Socrates of the next generation may not be 50 years old or have spent most of their lives in a cave. They may be 14-year-old children with a maturity far beyond their years. And a sports car.

From their point of view, our times may seem barbaric in many ways, but they will not have to wait until they are 40 to have a mid-life crisis and then decide to do something better. And they will build on that wisdom with all the zeal and energy of their youth.

Idle Hands

I still remember my grandmother's words when she told my father to come and supervise me, because I was capable of doing "who knows what". As I grew older, I heard those words over and over again. I've heard them from executives, teachers, business owners, government officials, and heads of state.

But who is it that needs to be supervised? And why do they need to be supervised? Adults should not need to be supervised. They know their responsibilities. So the question is, who is it that needs constant supervision?

It is children.

Children get themselves and others into trouble when they are not supervised. And if you look around you, you will find adults and grown-ups around you.

Now, as I understand other people use these terms the other way around. So, I will provide my definition for them, and you will imagine that I have used the correct matching definition on your end.

An adult would be a person who has reached a certain level of maturity and has learned how to live. A person who has mastered their own life. In contrast, a grown-up would be like a plant. Something that may have grown like a weed. Just add food and water. A grown-up is an overgrown child, if you will.

And it is this infantilization of society that is holding the human race back today.

But AI could change that. It won't be long before children will be able to challenge the status quo in ways that even today's best lawyers cannot.

Conclusion

While some strive to integrate humanity with brain-computer interfaces or to genetically engineer humans into genius super-soldiers, they ignore the power of the small compound growth that empowering 8 billion people with AI will have on not just the economy or society, but on humanity as a whole.

Once the collective mind has been liberated in a way that would make the Buddha himself look like an ignorant fool, we will be looking at an age unlike any other in history. And this age, will be empowered by the ability to see complex systems as being made up of small, tiny modules woven together into a cohesive whole that is greater than the value of the parts.