ai-ed | applied intelligence education

A New Disruptive Paradigm for Education in the 21st-Century

“The Value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

                                                                              ~ Albert Einstein

I recently read an article titled “Yann LeCun’s advice for young students wanting to go into AI.” LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, left Meta to “lead a new AI startup,” the article says. However, since 2023, LeCun has been fairly negative about LLMs and their future. Recognizing that the simplistic and narrow thinking about scaling theory, of building larger and larger models, doesn’t work! “Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory, let the theory go,” said Agatha Christie, and it seems this is the conclusion LeCun came to. LLMs have hit the scaling wall, and there is nowhere else for it to go.

LeCun has previously stated in various forums, including the AI Action Summit and Viva Tech conferences in Paris, that ‘current large language models are not the path to human-level intelligence’ by machines, if there is such a thing, saying that he saw no future in LLMs — it’s a “dead end” and advised graduate computer science students not to pursue LLM-related PhDs.

LeCun went on to say that computer science (CS) majors need to ensure they spend their time wisely; “it’s much better to bone up on the foundations than [just going with] the trendy technology du jour,” he said. Advising that “If you are a CS major and just take the minimum required math courses for a typical CS curriculum, you might find yourself unable to adapt to major technological shifts.” “My recommendation was not to avoid CS as a major but to take the maximum number of courses on foundations (e.g. math, physics, or EE courses)” so that students “learn things with a long shelf life.” In other words, broaden and deepen your learning among various other subjects.

Essentially, LeCun was praising the merits of the long-proven but often forgotten, well-rounded or classical type of education. Highlighting the benefits of critical thinking and building intellectual curiosity. It is becoming clearer for those paying attention and sidestepping the hype, as AI grows and is better able to perform more tasks faster and at incredibly lower cost, i.e., coding, CS degrees/programmers, therefore, will become less in demand, and won’t command the higher salaries as it once did. This is basic supply and demand.

Today, you hear story after story, where a software engineer applies to 200 jobs. Gets 3 interviews. Zero offers. By the end of 2026, it is estimated that roughly 3 in 10 companies will have replaced many processes and jobs with AI.

We are therefore seeing an inverse relationship between the rise of AI and the declining value of certain non-creative, technical or mundane work. Over the last century, highly specialized education has been pushed as best for our economies and prosperity.

Technology has been shrinking blue-collar jobs for decades, but now it’s moving up-market and threatening the system. More people are noticing that the once considered ‘elite jobs’ that parents paid tens of thousands of dollars for at schools like Stanford no longer provide sure-fire ROIs.

Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton also stresses that critical thinking and a broader education would be more helpful as machines expand and replace human tasks. The key to staying ahead of AI’s advancements, he says, is not more AI-related, but to grasp that “Some skills that are always going to be valuable, like knowing some math, and some statistics, and some probability theory, knowing things like linear algebra that will always be valuable,” and knowing how to think and get things done well. “That’s not knowledge that’s going to disappear,” he told Business Insider recently.

In a nutshell, both LeCun and Hinton are effectively saying that learning anchored in mathematics and philosophy is foundational to effective knowledge acquisition to thrive in the future of work. Authentic knowledge will always be in style; it’s the underpinnings of logic and reasoning, our intellectual capacity and capabilities, to build our creative, ingenious, and innovative minds. I.e., it’s human intelligence that has always built our world, and AI won’t change that. This fundamental understanding of nature underlines the core tenets of an applied intelligence (ai) based education.

 

Proven: applied intelligence-education (ai-ed)

Looking back over the last two thousand years, we’ve seen that the classical type of education has produced the world’s greatest thinkers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and humanitarians. The world has benefited from their visionary and independent thinking. Today, the world is at risk when nobody wants to think and instead stupidly believes there can be shortcuts to invention, innovation, and prosperity by asking ChatGPT to build a business for them.

As AI continues to expand, more specialized, technical, and mundane tasks will decline. Still, machines possess no consciousness, so they can’t think or reason. They can’t have vision, authentic ingenuity or creativity, because intelligence requires consciousness. Therefore, the more broadly educated, i.e., ai-ed, will become the thinkers, creators, and innovators of the 21st century; they will be the doers and high-income earners in the future of work!

The current status quo education system is decades behind the curve in producing the workforce for the new economy. Therefore, change is needed, and the sooner the better, or the global economy will stagnate, and all the wealth and power will continue to concentrate in the hands of just a few billionaires in big tech because the status quo and the wilful ignorance of people work in their favour.

Therefore, applied intelligence education (ai-ed) cultivates timeless human skills: critical thinking, reasoning and creativity, ingenuity, vision and purpose, along with effective communication skills and ethics to best navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving digital world. It seeks to produce more well-rounded 21st-century students by focusing on applying their intelligence with intellectual depth, versatility and dynamism in pursuit of their respective knowledge and know-how agendas.

The four pillars of ai-ed are Philosophy, Math, Science and History. With this well-rounded and foundational learning base, individuals will be well prepared to apply their intelligence effectively to whatever domain and passions they choose.

Multiple studies show that philosophy students, for example, consistently score better on various standardized graduate and professional school tests compared to students from almost all other majors. Achieving the highest mean scores in both the Verbal Reasoning and Analytical Writing sections across all disciplines.

• On Quantitative Reasoning, their scores are typically higher than those of all other majors.

• Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT): Philosophy majors perform better than business majors and nearly all others, typically ranking among the top five majors.

• Law School Admission Test (LSAT): Philosophy majors consistently achieve the highest average LSAT scores of any major.

This superior performance is linked to core skills developed through classical type study found in philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics within the major. Philosophy coursework emphasizes the ability to deconstruct complex arguments, identify assumptions, evaluate evidence, and construct clear, cogent arguments. Students are trained to use language skillfully, make subtle distinctions, and present ideas with clarity and precision, which translates directly to success in verbal and analytical writing.

Recent U.S. data reveal art history graduates are more likely to be employed than computer engineers (3 per cent unemployment versus 7.5 per cent unemployment, respectively). Also pointing out that philosophy and history graduates often outpace tech specialists in the job market because humanities graduates in general are flexible and resilient, not one dimensional an rigid.

A recent working paper from INSEAD and the London Business School, which analyzed 596 job postings in the U.S., shows that jobs which reference AI tools are 37 per cent more likely to require cognitive and interpersonal skills. Similarly, OECD assessments of the Canadian job market point to rising demand for social, cognitive and language skills.

These are the types of strengths liberal arts grads have cultivated and what employers are seeking desperately in an evolving new economy.

Cambridge University research (“Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers”) indicates that even when controlling for students’ initial abilities (measured by freshman-year SAT scores), philosophy majors still show greater improvement on verbal and logical reasoning tests by their senior year than their peers in other disciplines, providing strong evidence that the major itself contributes significantly to these enhanced skills.

“So, what’s the value of a liberal arts degree today? In the age of AI, it is the human intelligence of the liberal arts, built on critical thinking, ethical leadership and strong interpersonal skills, that will matter most.”

— Ian Sutherland and Lucas Orfanides, Mount Allison University

Accordingly, ai-ed is built on the thinking foundations of intellectual giants, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Descartes, and Russell, all of whose wisdom has been grounded in the interdependent relationship between philosophy and mathematics.

The ai-ed systems take this base and augment it with intelligent technologies to enhance learning, making it faster, better, and more robustly. It utilizes the Socratic Method: an open-ended, empathetic conversational questioning framework aligned with the scientific process, involving formal deductive logic and reasoning, with structure, premise, and proposition. The Socratic Method was developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, a form of communicative dialogue based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and articulate reasoning.

Unlike the pure utilitarian or job-focused modern education curricula, ai-ed aims to develop well-rounded individuals with intellectual foundations that can help them excel in specialized knowledge fields — become the best of the best, because they know how to think! It offers a framework thinking process: turning information into knowledge, knowledge into insights and insights into strategy and actions.

Knowledge is the genesis of all things, and our prosperity will always be derived from how we choose to think and use technology effectively to advance our humanity.

 

Bringing thinking back

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a central and highly influential German philosopher of the Enlightenment who synthesized rationalism and empiricism, fundamentally reshaping modern philosophy in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. In his work, Critique of Pure Reason, he emphasized the paramount importance of critical thinking, that nothing was more important than acquiring knowledge, and reasoning through experience.

Reason, to Kant, is what defines intelligence: intelligence is fundamentally linked to conscious rationality, the ability to think independently, and the capacity to use one’s own understanding to make judgments and decisions.

Therefore, intelligence is integrated into a broader philosophical system of cognitive faculties, which is integrated for the practical application of knowledge in ai-ed.

To bring thinking back, we must return to the Socratic dialogue method of learning. Not memorization for test taking. With a focus on participants confronting their own ignorance and biases, creating discomfort as a means of acquiring useful and applicable knowledge. This is part of the process of how we become and apply our intelligence effectively.

Therefore, the applied intelligence process incorporates the Socratic Method and further integrates artificial intelligence technology to democratize learning — so anyone can access knowledge.

The ai-ed process doesn’t aim to make AI competitive, surpassing, or replacing human intelligence, as ChatGPT does. It acts as an augmenting force to enhance human value and worth.

This new back-to-the-future paradigm for authentic learning in formal education must begin at the elementary school level — the Discovery Phase — where the focus must be on setting core foundations of learning: proper grammar, curiosity and imagination, conscious observation of nature and discovery for meaningful introduction to learning about the universe.

The ai-ed progression continues with the applied intelligence Logic Phase of education through middle school and high school. This phase meets students where they’re at, introducing them to formal research and using intelligent technologies primarily as an efficient augmenting tool for research skills development and faster learning. It’s not about being led astray with finding quick answers and summaries filled with hallucinations. It’s about mastering independent thinking and defending your ideas through formal logic and the structure of arguments.

In this logic and research phase, students learn to think for themselves, formally write and express themselves coherently and develop their ideas with confidence, from the perspective of primary historical and literary activities and premises.

We want students to become their own philosophers and apply their own intelligence to problem-solve and come up with their own ideas, not to memorize and regurgitate interpretations from textbooks or hallucination summaries from ChatGPT.

This phase builds and establishes confidence for them to advance to higher learning at the university level. Which is the Rhetorical & Show Me Phase. Where students learn to build comprehensive arguments and express perspectives and views through analyzing and synthesizing information.

Here, they are inherently skeptical, and skepticism is a superpower! They can easily recognize logical fallacies from informal logic and reasoning, and don’t fall for the influence and nonsense of social media. In the university phase, they come in well-established learners and essay writers and can communicate concisely, effectively and persuasively, with confidence!

The culmination of the ai-ed process-methodology assists students in becoming resourceful and mastering the skill of how to learn, which is among the most important skills. They are confident and intellectually formidable! Ready to contribute to making a better world!

About ai-ed

From primary school to corporate training, ai-ed is reimagining, disrupting and overhauling how education is done in the 21st century. Offering more relevant learning options to meet and thrive in an evolving new digital economy. With equitable access and positive impacts for humanity.

Therefore, ai-ed is not about achieving brilliance, but the activity of learning, not perfection, but the art of getting there, confidently, which provides the most fulfilment for the human condition and our humanity.