How do we want our young people to deal with a world that is changing in unprecedented and unanticipated ways, particularly in an AI world?
Do we want our young people to reactively cope with a changing world – educated as they are with a set of concepts and tools invented in an earlier, more stable world? Or do we want them to be equipped to proactively engage with this change? A shift from “reactive coping” to “proactive engagement” with the world implies that we need to build agency in young people.
How is agency to be built?
Illumine’s work in cognition and change has shown us four fundamentally new meta-capacities that will help address this challenge. These capacities aim to make individuals adaptive, willing to grow and evolve, realize their own potential, and work towards creating a better society. In short, build agency at multiple levels.
The first level is helping young people develop sense-building capacities.
Artificial Intelligence can handle the vast amounts of information and knowledge in the world around them. But will young people be able to integrate & synthesize this information into their own personal vision of life?
In other words, sense-building capacities allow us to retain agency in an AI-infused environment.
Thus, sense-building capacities refer to the ability to engage with information and knowledge in the context of one’s values and choices, identity, and engagement with the world.
At the second layer, young people need to be enabled so that they can build new thinking capacities such as design & solution thinking, thinking in win-win (instead of win-lose) terms, sustainability thinking, and so on. These thinking capacities imply not only new intellectual tools and models, but also a wider “frame of thinking” which is more inclusive, more long-term, more universal and more purpose & meaning oriented. Thinking capacities allow us to use knowledge, information and experiences, especially in an AI-rich world, in a more meaningful and human way.
They allow us to make cognitive contributions, even if AI automates routine cognitive work.
At the third level, we need to train them for the capacity for “evolutionary response”.
What happens when we face a challenge that we have never faced before or we find ourselves incapable, at that point in time, of solving? Evolutionary response capacities help us step back, awaken deeper resources within ourselves, and engage with the problem from a new, higher or different plane of thought or being. In short, we evolve in order to respond.
Thus, evolutionary response capacities help us deal with the unknown, the unfamiliar, and the unpredictable, by growing ourselves from within. They awaken agency in the face of change.
At the deepest level, we need to help the new generation build a new vision of themselves.
They need to develop themselves not as skilled workers or competent individuals, (who are products of their training and environment), but as infinitely possible individuals – capable of architecting new futures for themselves, and for humankind.
This allows us to envision new realities – both outside us and within ourselves and actualize these visions in our own life.
This vision of infinite human possibilities may well need to be the foundation of a new educational system.
When we truly believe (and act out of that belief) that each young person is capable of infinite potential and possibilities – we will measure them differently, grade them differently, teach them differently and hire them differently.
Young people will then see themselves differently.
Instead of viewing themselves as individuals coping with an ever-unfamiliar world, they will see themselves as infinitely possible individuals who will build a new society where advancement doesn’t mean more comforts alone but also better human beings and a more harmonious balance between individuals, the societies they live in, and the planet they inhabit.
