August 1, 2024
Jack Nicastro and Samuel Crombie
In a not-too-distant, not-entirely-inconceivable future, we may no longer produce. At least, not economically.
The question we intend to tentatively answer is two-fold: if we don’t need to learn to be more efficient producers, what will education comprise? Second, considering the importance we assign to their economic productivity, what will we do to earn self-esteem outside the economy? What is the purpose of our education in a post-scarcity world?
We argue that everything intrinsically valuable to humanity demands concentration, action, and the virtues requisite thereto. If this is true, then we demand a certain style of education: moral, aesthetic, literary, quantitative, philosophical, &c. This classical education cannot be exhausted by artificial general intelligence (AGI)’s annihilation of any and all avenues for economic productivity—this may be the least intrinsically valuable expression of one’s productivity.
Before beginning the theoretical portion in earnest, some empirical caveats: the future envisaged herein is, to our minds, highly unlikely. A society’s preferences change commensurate with its rate of economic productivity, with technology substituting and complementing human labor in sectors as it’s introduced. For example, fifty thousand years ago, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. Then came sedentary agriculture, domesticated animals, and so on through the l three stages of economic development: Malthusian, post-Malthusian, and sustainable.
At no point was humanity satisfied with these developments. Nor was he bored, wanting for work. We think it’s a good bet to predict that, impressive as AI is, it will greatly expand our opportunities for participation in labor markets, as we come to demand goods and services never before imagined.
Caveat concluded, let’s imagine a never-before-seen economic revolution in which the demand for human labor is reduced to zero.
Consumption is no longer bound inextricably to production; man can consume without producing. We’ve achieved fully-automated luxury communism. Or, better put, fully-automatic luxury hedonism. The human capital model is rendered as obsolete as is man qua labor-input.
Does this make education simpliciter no longer essential to the individual?
Education would only be rendered obsolete by such a development were schooling merely instrumental to individuals’ economic potential. Not only is education not merely instrumental to some good, it is good in and of itself. And perhaps one of the most important ones at that.
Education, classically understood, is about cultivating a person’s soul so that he may experience and enjoy life completely. As Socrates says, “a just soul and a just man will live well, and an unjust one badly. . . a just person is happy, and an unjust one wretched” (Republic, Book I, 353e-354). Through education, we cultivate just such a soul—one governed by the rational part—and delight in the highest of pleasures—“the most pleasant [being] that of the part of the soul with which we learn. . .” (Republic IX, 583).
Note that this moral dimension of education is utterly orthogonal to any economic activity. Activity, by the way, that we participate in so that we may satisfy our material needs—water, shelter, food, security—and our wants—ice cream, international travel, beautiful baubles for our belovéds, &c. In other words, we participate in the market in order to obtain that which we regard—properly and otherwise—as goods in and of themselves.
To borrow from Adam Smith, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production” (WN Book IV Chapter VIII, v).
We do not mean to say that productivity, i.e., the act of creating, is wholly instrumental. Quite the contrary: productivity is an essential part of what it means to be human; as Aristotle develops in the Nicomachean Ethics, we achieve eudaimonia through the cultivation and exercise of our developed capacities—our virtues. To flourish, you must be virtuous; to be virtuous, you must act—these actions are often exemplified by economic productivity, but, luckily for our psyches, needn’t be so narrowly understood.
We reveal our innate understanding of the breadth of virtuous action—productivity properly understood—every time we invest time, energy, and effort doing those things for which we do not receive compensation. More evidence of these activities’ intrinsic value is their lack of remuneration; we’re compensated for pains suffered, not pleasures indulged. So, if we’re not compensated for these activities, we must be benefited thereby. Examples abound of such activities: training for a marathon, calling your (grand)parents, cooking for your partner, and on and on.
Instead of obviating all education, the scenario under consideration would end the modern, misbegotten, Prussian-military, human-capital and signaling-models of education. We would have to engage in education classically and properly understood: the cultivation of the human person for life.
Why is this under consideration? Because the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is rapidly underway. And the forcing function for this post-labor society is AGI itself.
Whereas artificial intelligence (AI) is a catch-all term for humanity’s present machine intelligence technologies and systems, AGI describes a hypothetical, future general intelligence that holistically exceeds the capabilities of the average human. The reading: if an intelligence exists that is 1:1 indistinguishable from human intelligence, it will be used for labor. And if this machine intelligence exists, it is subject to the same continual optimizations and economies of scale that historically drive down the cost of technologies over time. Meaning that, once the cost of a computer program falls below the cost of human intelligence, we have the full displacement of human labor, creating the fertile grounds for the return to a classical education.
Fortunately, contained within the definition of AGI is an intelligence capable of teaching and educating humans at a human-level. Not just out of necessity, this unlock has the potential to be a democratizing force for education, which is ordinarily so expensive that it is restricted to the upper echelons of society. It can make a veritable Aristotle accessible to all pupils, rendering all children Alexander the Great—even those not born of fathers analogous to Philip II of Macedon.
Education today is fraught with competing belief systems, interests, and outcomes. Admittedly, it serves its purpose: to reliably churn out an employable labor force, maintain existing institutions, and innovate enough to keep the economy growing and tax receipts flowing. Horace Mann believed that an industrializing American society required compulsory education, to meet the demands of industry, to operate in a similar vein: efficiently and uniformly. This construction of US education accomplished what it set out to do.
But society, with the march of improving living standards and gradual elimination of manual labor, recognizes that education can be better.
Efficiency and uniformity has a fundamental flaw: it regresses to the mean. Instruction caters to the average: in a 30-student class, most students are either ahead of or behind the material. If a student falls behind, their achievement gap rapidly compounds. If a student charges ahead, their potential is handicapped by their environment. We know personalized, one-on-one learning is better suited to the individual. But no existing learning system can support absolute personalization.
We are constrained in our educational options because we are pre-post-scarcity. We must recognize all the hurdles preventing the kind of education we are imagining: instability in the home, standardized testing’s perverse incentives (to teach to to the test), poor nutrition, transient student-teacher relationships, community violence, post-graduation economic viability, plummeting tax revenues, student loan repayment, cellphones in the classroom, degree inflation, online/homeschool education alternatives, so on so forth.
It’s a miracle any learning happens at all!
This all looks much less intimidating in a world with AGI. Our teacher AGI of the future is a polymath. It can teach anyone, anything, in a highly-personalized style akin to one-on-one tutoring from an expert instructure. Except the tutor is the world’s leading academic, pedagogue, and counselor. And the tutor is free. It’s available anytime, anyplace. It is infinitely patient and helpful.
It may be a chat interface like ChatGPT. Or it may be an on-screen avatar that can hear and see you through your camera. Or a physical robot that sits across from you at your desk. It could be modeled after a famous scientist or your favorite celebrity. It can teach you tacit, procedural, or explicit knowledge. It could teach you formally, experientially, or facilitate self-guided study. It could teach you with words, images, videos, diagrams, sock puppets, field trips, or physical demonstrations. Learning becomes trivial. Fun, even. Entertaining, perhaps.
With AGI, we may achieve a post-scarcity society. It’s this same AGI that will stave off hedonism and decadence by democratizing high quality classical education.
Jack Nicastro is an Executive Producer with the Foundation for Economic Education and a research intern at the Cato Institute. Samuel Crombie is the co-founder of actionbase.co and a former Product Manager at Microsoft AI.