The rise of AI forces us to reinterpret our human intelligence

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The writer is chief executive of the New America think-tank and a contributing editor to the FT

In the age of AI, the whole world is a classroom/ And teachers are the guides to guide the way; With knowledge at students’ fingertips/ Teachers help them find and use it every day.

ChatGPT wrote that adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches. The generative artificial intelligence language model requires a quick, of course, and a critical reaction to the slow initial version. I have provided the necessary guidance; it only takes two rounds to make a Shakespearean version of the point I want to make.

That is, as the verse shows, that in a world of ubiquitous AI, we need more guides, coaches, navigators, mentors, teachers and counselors than ever before. Everything is a form of individual coaching. And teaching, in turn, is simply improving human performance. In its ideal form, it is the development of positive capacities to enable individuals and groups to reach their full potential.

When I grew up it was simple. There is “intelligence” and people have a high, medium or low quotient: hence the IQ test. Human brains are vessels and a teacher’s job is to fill them with knowledge. They are also “computers” in the pre-electronic sense of the word. At least from a layman’s perspective, people with high IQ can learn, remember, regurgitate and calculate faster than others.

Today, we have many types of human intelligence. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner described eight types in 1983: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, body-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic. In the 1990s, psychologists such as Peter Salovey, now president of Yale, developed EQ tests to assess the level of “emotional intelligence”, defined as the ability “to identify, use, understand, and control emotions”.

Generative AI points us to the dimensions of human intelligence that creates new patterns of symbols – words, numbers, notes, images – from recognizing and distilling existing patterns among the billions of things we “know”. The line between what is possible and true creativity – the creation of ideas that are truly “new” – is being questioned. The extent and speed of processing power, another capacity of the human brain that can be replicated by machines, is also under further scrutiny.

So the importance of generative AI is less that it is artificial than that it copies – and thus attracts attention – specific strands of intelligence that we now need to integrate into our understanding of our abilities, as we have done with previous technologies. After all, Google is just an artificial memory; those who suffer from “senior moments”, where a name or fact suddenly disappears from our internal memory, use it as an external organ that can be found immediately.

Instant encyclopedias in our pockets, like the advent of calculators, have reduced the importance of rote learning and increased the need to learn how to use these new tools. But generative AI also forces us to question what we teach humans, as well as why, how and when.

Critical thinking has never been more important. Generative intelligence, natural and artificial, is able to organize, synthesize and distill a lot of knowledge, but with persistent and indelible errors. Book by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Loud and Slow a manual of errors resulting from the work of different parts of our brain. Today’s internet is filled with books, articles, blog posts, tweets and videos full of unintentional (as well as intentional) mistakes. Generative AI will inevitably combine these errors in a more authoritative way.

Teachers of all kinds need to make sure that their students are constantly questioning what they think they know – and that they can use both natural and artificial sources of intelligence. Armed with the tools of curiosity and healthy skepticism, they must master nuance. And, as the burgeoning career category of “flexible engineers” shows, they must become more adept at asking questions.

If the goal of education is to create our full potential, then we need to rethink how we develop all human capacities, taking advantage of technological tools that enhance our natural abilities. This education should be lifelong.

Top performers in sports, music and, even more, business have coaches of many different types. These teams increasingly use technology to enhance the feedback they can provide to their clients to constantly improve their performance. As technological advances improve human capabilities, our need for human guides will only grow.