Knowledge is easily accessible to every individual, so knowledge itself is not as valuable anymore. The abilities to acquire knowledge/information and implement it effectively are what matter now. So, what should we call this age we are in? The Asker Age? The Intelligence Age? The AI Age?
Yesterday, knowledge was decentralized. Today, it is centralized. Ask, and you will receive. AI knows everything, waiting for you to ask the right question. Time and efficiency are key. You can talk to it repeatedly without it getting tired or losing focus. Of course, this is understandable—it hasn’t been on this planet for long. It’s essentially an alien with a massive brain. However, it doesn’t worry about its next meal—you do. So, you’d better learn to communicate with it effectively.
If AI knows more than anyone of us, what will be our niche? What will our competitive advantages be? Luckily, the world is more complex than knowledge itself. In the future, we may no longer be the species best at thinking, but we are definitely good at doing. Do you know the secret? Doing involves much more than knowledge. You can’t learn how to drive just by memorizing an instruction manual. Through action, we learn many things that can’t be easily explained in words. Another domain where we excel is social interaction. Our ability to interact with other human beings won’t be surpassed by a superintelligent AI. A baby knows how to interact with her mother from the first day she drinks milk. Every day, this ability (not knowledge) accumulates throughout our lives. We develop not only an acute sense of what is happening emotionally to the person we are looking at but also the ability to know what to say or how to act to make them feel happy, sad, or angry in real time. Give AI a photo of a person’s face, and it can tell you they are angry. But ask it to make them less angry, and see what it can do. Many of the things we do are superpowers given to us by nature and honed over time—things AI can’t compete with because we ourselves have little understanding of how they work. Social interaction is one major example.
The third area where we won’t lose our competitive advantage is our ability to offer reality-validated opinions. We are not short of opinions per se. Everyone can have opinions about everything and publish them. What we need are reality-validated opinions—opinions that have been tested and proven in the life of the person holding them or, better yet, in the lives of many people around them. Saying, “I think/believe…” is not enough. It should be: “I think…, and it really happened.” I don’t know about you, but no matter what, I will always trust what is happening in front of my eyes more than what ChatGPT or any other AI says. The output of the complex world is more trustworthy than the output of AI. AI doesn’t live, experience, or interact—it only receives and processes information. So, if you have insights about the world gained through your personal experience that you think might be valuable to someone else, share them. That is what will be valued. That is what improves humanity, broadly speaking.
As the knowledge age is over, we need to rethink the validity of our education systems. These are urgent and important matters to discuss and deal with. Education of an individual takes a long time to finish, but the development of AI is fast. We don’t want our kids waste their precious youth on learning or mastering something irrelevent for their future.