The Human Advantage

The Human Advantage is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Becoming Einstein. Enjoy it! Sign up here, and I will keep you informed about the publication. Copyright Erika Twani.

“Self-education [learning autonomy] is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.” - Isaac Asimov

Ken Rush never enjoyed school. No matter how hard he tried, he saw no sense in learning what he was told to and regurgitating answers on a quiz. As a result of this disengagement, he was told he was not good enough, was not focused, and did not measure up. The classroom felt like a place designed to show him what he lacked.

There was one person who saw him through different lenses: his grandfather, Willie Lucas. When Ken was still a teenager, Lucas gave him something most schools overlook: a real challenge rooted in purpose. Lucas owned a grocery distribution business in Ireland and asked Ken to determine when it would be ideal to add a second truck to their distribution business. It was a question about timing, cost, and strategy.

Ken took it seriously. He grabbed a notebook, worked through numbers, and lost track of time doing it. For the first time, learning felt alive. He calculated truck load percentages and driving hours. He tested different combinations of routes, fuel and insurance costs, driver wages, and maintenance. He reasoned that if one truck was running sixteen hours a day and filled to 90%, the company might start losing efficiency or delaying orders. He estimated that two trucks, running six hours a day at 60% capacity each, would keep the business ahead of demand while staying profitable. Ken filled pages with his logic, confident that every number told part of the story.

When he presented his findings to Lucas, something remarkable happened. Lucas listened. He didn't interrupt or correct. He asked Ken to reflect and return in a week to see if anything had changed. That moment of being heard and trusted opened a door. Ken felt encouraged in a way he had never felt before. His grandfather believed in him and that belief lit a fire.

The following week, Ken returned with a refined answer, but Lucas had something deeper to share. He said the numbers mattered, but they told only half the story. The other half comes from within. Lucas called it instinct. It was the feeling that arises when you are deeply in tune with the work, the people you serve, and yourself. His most loyal customers appreciated his honesty and consistency, and he could sense when a product would succeed or when a shift was needed. It came from experience, trust, and listening.

That moment stayed with Ken forever. It became a guidepost for every decision he made. While still using data to forecast possibilities, Ken learned to trust his inner voice. He never learned that lesson from a textbook, but it became one of the most valuable skills he developed. Instinct, the quiet sense that speaks without words, is an inherent part of being human. It cannot be programmed. It cannot be downloaded. It grows from awareness, trust, and experience. And no matter how advanced technology becomes, human skills are the most significant advantage we have.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide all the data we need to make decisions, but it cannot predict the future. Instinct is our innate ability to predict the future when we heed our inner voice. As Cassie Kosyrkov, Google's first Chief Decision Officer, said: "AI only sees the past, not the future. It only sees the pattern, not the purpose. It sees the data trail, not the human story." Instinct, like many other human skills, shapes our life experience.

We are witnessing AI merging with our everyday life: social media, home devices controlled by our phones, generative AI that can advise us on every subject and communicate more efficiently, and so on. At our current rate, we are experiencing rapid advancements in technology, science, the environment, and human relationships. Scientific progress is accelerating, and we may see more change in the next 20 years than in the past 300. What was once science fiction is quickly becoming reality. We have never seen such creativity and rapid expansion.

Should we embrace AI or rely entirely on our human abilities?

I published my book Becoming Einstein’s Teacher nine months before ChatGPT was made public. In it, I shared how AI would reach human-level intelligence by 2030, what we need to do to coexist with it in harmony, and how the answer lies within our own brains. Five years later, education systems worldwide are either embracing AI as if it were the solution to all schooling challenges or prohibiting its use in the classroom because it is deemed harmful to cognitive development.

Recent research done with 413 schools in the UK[1] found that the experience education leaders have with AI dictates what will happen in their schools. A skeptical leader will likely prevent the adoption of AI, while an experiential leader will give it a try and allow the school to utilize familiar tools. Skeptical leaders have their reasons: AI can easily be a cheating tool. What is the point of teaching students to try hard when AI can get the work done a lot faster? Why do students have to learn to do something if AI can do it in seconds?

Let us say that we do prohibit the use of AI tools in schools. What do you think is happening outside of school? Students are already using AI everywhere else, making them very efficient – and they like it! They use AI to reply to messages, comment on friends’ posts on social media, or to find a non-judgmental companion to counsel them on the difficult questions they do not want to ask another human being. It is natural to think that AI can also help to write an essay or solve math problems. However, using AI within the orthodox education system, where teachers lecture and test students’ knowledge on the correct answer, can make students intellectually passive.[2]

So, is hold-on-for-dear-life the answer to this evolution? Perhaps it is the answer to many education systems resisting embrace AI because they are based on students precisely retrieving content that has been shuffled in their heads. In other words, today’s students learn to have answers, but in the AI era, they must learn to ask questions. The right question, or “prompt” as AI tools call it, takes users to an infinite world of information and possibilities. If AI gives all the answers, we finally have the chance to learn what to do with information rather than merely regurgitating it in tests.

Our challenge is more pedagogical and philosophical than technological. It requires us to fundamentally rethink education in the era of AI. We are bound by the notion that we must prepare students for the workforce, meeting the current market's needs with the skills of the moment, as if the most significant challenge were to be “hirable.” So, most of the education systems prepare students for the known: books to read and grades to earn for success. But the world is unknown: health crises, emotional breakdowns, climate change, drug abuse, COVID, job market disruption, tariffs, technology advancements, and so on. By the time children leave school, there will be a whole new world for which they are unprepared. The world of the unknown requires resilience, agency, and adaptability.[3] Perhaps the goal is no longer to prepare for the future of work, but the future of humankind.

According to the United Nations[4], the world has not seen much progress in achieving quality education. Without additional measures by 2030, 84 million children and youth will be out of school, 300 million students will lack basic numeracy and literacy skills, and only 1 in 6 countries will achieve the universal secondary school completion target. If little to nothing is done, we risk a generation without the proper preparation to coexist with AI.

The call for education transformation

Throughout history, technology has improved our lives as it has become increasingly accessible. Rural communities underwent industrialization during the first Industrial Revolution. Schools, as we know, were conceived in Prussia during this revolution to prepare students for industrial jobs. It inspired other countries to adopt the model in the 19th century. Between 1870 and 1914, the world experienced rapid industrial growth and expansion, driven by the introduction of electric power and mass production, as well as significant technological advances, including the telephone, the light bulb, and the internal combustion engine. Schools had no change in their format.

Then came the third industrial revolution in the 1980s, known as the digital revolution. Technology evolved from analog and mechanical to digital, as we know it today, with advancements such as the personal computer and the Internet. And guess what? Schools’ format remained the same.

We now live in the fourth industrial revolution, in which technology has become deeply embedded in society and the human body, encompassing robotics, artificial intelligence, the metaverse, NFTs, biotechnology, nanotechnology, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, WEB3, brain-to-computer interfaces, wearables, and more. Yet, the school's format remains the same.

Please note that I am emphasizing the format of most schools, in which teachers lecture on the correct answers for the test. While it served us well, we must understand that this old setup teaches students about past facts while providing the expected answers. AI does precisely that for us now. What AI requires is our ability to ask the right questions to output a refined answer. Inquiry and critical thinking are essential human skills that we must develop in our students immediately. Without them, we are at the mercy of whatever information AI provides.

As Stanford University professor Li Jiang stated, “We don’t compete with existing knowledge and how fast we can access it because everyone can do it. What matters is innovation, or how we use knowledge to create something new. It is essential to teach a more humanized approach to creation and innovation, as AI is tied to the past.”

How students should learn in the AI Era

Imagine a group of students who want to diminish the use of plastic worldwide. They research the subject for a couple of weeks and refine their prompts when using AI tools. Their brainstorming sessions are “heard” by Microsoft’s Copilot, an AI system, which later summarizes the conversation into a report with a concept idea. Students then ask Copilot to identify potential investors on LinkedIn who are more likely to invest in an idea like theirs. Copilot designs a PowerPoint presentation using Dall-E AI-generated images and the concept paper as the prompt to resonate with these investors. The students' plastic-free solution is to create an app, which they want to demonstrate to potential investors as a prototype. They ask ChatGPT to write the code, which students can cut and paste on GitHub, and voila! They have a demo prototype.

These students are not experts on environmental cleaning. They have never met investors before and are not presentation designers or coders. But they know how to ask questions or create prompts. AI becomes an extension of our brains, our augmented intelligence, when we use it with a purpose. See chapter X for the how-to.

Developing students’ IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient) remains relevant in this new world. Math, literacy, and emotional intelligence are foundational skills schools must focus on. However, given the rapid technological advancements, we must also consider AQ (adaptability quotient), which is the ability to adapt to various situations and the many professional changes that today’s students will encounter in their future.

Our students’ job market

Every technological advancement has displaced jobs, but it has also created new ones. A study by Goldman Sachs predicts that 300 million jobs will be lost to AI[5], like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, gardening, housekeeping, cooking, warehouse workers, security guards, policing, white collar jobs, the army, etc. Still, at the same time, AI will create new jobs at a pace that will require today’s students to change professions three to four times in their lifetime. These changes will benefit us all, as AI adoption can increase global GDP by 7%.[6]

Professionals proficient in AI can produce a lot more in less time. Companies may need fewer workers to deliver the same or higher output as AI is more cost-effective and productive than human beings. Forget about the 40-hour work week, work-life balance, vacation time, or sick days. AI works 24/7, increasing productivity to unimaginable levels with tireless precision and efficiency. That is the essence of capitalism. Organizations that invest in human skills, such as empathy, emotional agility, and trust-building, alongside the adoption of AI, will build a more balanced workforce and gain a competitive edge in an increasingly automated world.[7]

Furthermore, consider a historic shift that has been underway. For centuries, the human population has grown. However, in the coming decades, global deaths are expected to surpass births, leading to a steady decline in population. At the same time, millions of AI systems, robots, and autonomous agents are being developed. These entities are designed to generate goods, offer services, and shape ideas, much like humans do. They are also beginning to consume, invest, and drive economies forward, even as the global population decreases.

 Graphs 1 and 2 – The world’s population and the average fertility rate. Source: Research Gate[9]

This moment will be a significant handoff, and we will need it to be successful as humankind. By 2050, the population pyramid may become more conical, with fewer active workers in the labor market. As the human role in population and production diminishes, bots and AI agents are filling essential economic spaces. Human focus will increasingly lean toward pursuits that thrive on inefficiency, such as art, discovery, relationships, and invention, while machines handle tasks that scale efficiently. This evolution will mark a transition from the “world of the Born” to the “world of the Made,” offering a path for civilization to continue growing even as human numbers decline.[8]  

Graph 3 – World’s population projections for 2050. Source: The Research Gate[9]

Singularity

How would a world run by AI look like?

The term "singularity" coined by American futurist Ray Kurzweil, is a theoretical moment when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in profound changes to civilization. Kurzweil argues that advances in AI, brain-computer interfaces, biotechnology, and nanotechnology are accelerating us toward a moment when humans and machines will merge. Current technological developments, such as large language models and neural implants, paint a vivid picture of a future where humans transcend biological limits, including disease prevention and a longer lifespan.

The internet will evolve into a brain-net, an interconnected web where emotions, sensations, and feelings move at the speed of light across the globe. This symbiosis of humans and machines is what scientists call transhumanism[10], a philosophical and cultural movement that fosters the use of technology to improve human life. As brain-computer interfaces advance, we are inching closer to a future where mental communication could happen with a single thought, bypassing language altogether. This shift may transform empathy into a shared experience, making global consciousness a tangible reality and blurring the line between individual minds and collective intelligence. This transformation will expand human intelligence, extend lifespans, and democratize access to knowledge, creativity, and problem-solving on a planetary scale.

The Hollywood blockbuster Terminator may come to mind when we think of this human-machine symbiosis. Academic research notes that the Terminator franchise has "shaped the public perception of AI since 1984.”[11] However, a more recent review by Stanford's AI100 study confirms that the public's understanding of AI is gradually becoming more nuanced, shifting beyond Terminator-style fears to concerns such as job displacement, surveillance, bias, and social impact.[12]

While fear may be the initial response to this unfamiliar world, we must remember that AI is bringing superb healthcare solutions, driving learning transformation, and providing access to more affordable products, among many other benefits. We cannot stop it because it is too good for too many things. While we cannot control how much and how fast AI will evolve, we can adapt our thoughts and beliefs to harmonize with our changing world. Through education and experience with AI, we dispel the fear of a dystopian future and create a better, more advanced world for our children.

It is time to transform education to foster the necessary skills students need to succeed in this new industrial revolution.

The motivation to write this book

I wrote my first book, Becoming Einstein’s Teacher, because I never found an educational book that provided a simple process for developing students’ agency. So, I shared our six-step learning process to make it happen, the result of 15 years of research, development and implementation. After publishing the book, giving a TEDx Talk, and witnessing so many heart-touching stories, I felt a sense of fulfillment, and at the same time, a sense of responsibility to continue researching and developing student agency to make learning even easier in the AI era for the entire learning community.

In this new book, Becoming Einstein, I simplified the technological advancements so educators, parents, and educational leaders can understand what is coming, and how technology will affect our lives and the lives of students. I present a process to develop the learning autonomy and adaptability to our new reality in the AI era. You will be inspired by stories from students, teachers, leaders, and parents who dared to believe that children can develop learning autonomy from an early age, a result of the outstanding work my team at Learning One to One has done over decades. It will help you to picture the possibilities in your school. My purpose is for these stories to find their way to your heart and inspire your path towards learning transformation, fostering IQ, EQ, and AQ with your students. I am confident you will know what to do, and I am grateful for that.

So, what is next? While there are many self-proclaimed AI-in-education experts out there delivering the latest EdTech solutions or providing professional development to use those tools effectively, I reflected on how to highlight the greatness of humankind. What do we have that AI does not? Among many things, AI does not possess consciousness, and it will never have it.

No matter how advanced, AI operates through computation: algorithms, data, and probabilities. Human consciousness, on the other hand, is a subjective experience shaped by emotions, senses, memory, embodiment, and awareness of self in time. It includes intuition, paradox, and meaning-making, none of which can be fully captured by code. AI may one day mimic the behaviors of consciousness, but true human consciousness remains a uniquely human frontier. It gives us awareness of our human capabilities and how to use them to benefit the whole.

Even if AI simulates consciousness convincingly one day, that is, responding with empathy, reflecting on its "thoughts," or passing every test we throw at it, that’s not the same as having consciousness. It’s like watching a movie of a sunset versus standing on a cliff and experiencing it firsthand. Australian philosopher, cognitive scientist, and professor at New York University and the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, David J. Chalmers, refers to this as the “hard problem of consciousness”: how and why do physical processes in the brain give rise to the experience of being alive?[13] We have not solved that for humans, so giving it to machines is a leap of science fiction, not science fact.

This journey to explore human consciousness put research resources and people in my way to awaken this knowledge. Becoming Einstein serves as a vessel through which I share knowledge to motivate you to transform learning traditions that need a shake-up. You will feel it in your heart if this book is right for you, if this is the moment to read it. If that is the case, this book found you because your heart and soul yearn to do more, find more, and change the frequency of this world through children's education. As Joe Dispenza says, “knowledge precedes the experience.”

As students exercise their conscious agency to learn, their life experiences will be magnificent. Being passive learners, as many of them are today, will keep their consciousness at lower levels, resulting in an average life experience. Not everyone is lucky enough to have Willie Lucas in their lives like Ken Rush had, but we can provide it in schools. It is our birthright to live life to the fullest because we are all born with consciousness. It is our right to realize our potential and utilize the tools we have at our disposal as human beings: awareness and the capacity to learn. Learning autonomy becomes more relevant than ever as each child can become Einstein in their own way.

Einstein developed a remarkable ability to translate complex scientific concepts into simple, relatable examples that ordinary people could understand. But there was a moment when he got stuck. Einstein’s friend and former classmate, Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, introduced Einstein to differential geometry and helped him with the mathematical aspects of the Theory of Relativity.  Based on what you know about AI, do you think Einstein would work with his friend if he lived in today’s world, or use AI to assist him with math?[14] Well, we will never know. One thing is for sure: your students will. We are fortunate to be alive now and part of this learning transformation into the new world of AI.

This book is your invitation to delve beneath the surface, to explore the depths of human capacities and assist you in writing the learning transformation history.

References

[1] Aubrey-Smith, F., Ed.D.; Et. Al. (2024); Shape of the Future: How System Leaders Can Respond to the Provocations of Artificial Intelligence; United Kingdom.

[2] Braunstein, I.; Et. Al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. MIT.

[3] Preparing for the Unknown. 2024. McKinsey Report.

[4] United Nations SDG 4 2025 Report. United Nations.

[5] Briggs, J.; Hatzius, J.; Kodnani, D.; Pierdomenico, G. (2023). The potentially large effects of artificial intelligence on economic growth. Goldman Sachs Economics Research.

[6] Generative AI Could Raise World GDP by 7%. Goldman Sachs Research, 2023.

[7] EI & AI: Workplace Status Report. 2025. Six Seconds.

[8] The Handoff to Bots. Technium, 2025.

[9] Halkilahti, M.; Ruiz, S.; Voutilainen, J.; Reissmann, M.; Shaw, M. (2019). Futures Personal Data Can Build: Scenarios for 2030. Research Gate.

[10] Dieguez, A. (2017). Transhumanismo: La búsqueda tecnológica del mejoramiento humano. Herder Editorial, Spain.

[11] Bode, I.; Watts, T. F. A. (2023). Machine Guardians: The Terminator, AI Narratives and US regulatory discourse on lethal autonomous weapons systems. Sage Journals.

[12] One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). Stanford University.

[13] Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.

    Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.

[14] Neimand, S., Ed.D.; Twani, E. (2025). If Einstein Had AI.