The End of School as We Know It: AI and the Future of Learning

AI is making knowledge abundant—so what comes next?

Misreading AI in Education

There is one question that should be filling the halls of education right now: ‘In a world of super-intelligent machines, what is the role of humans?’ Education, already struggling to function in our changing world, now faces the reality that AI is not just another challenge but a fundamental shift. This article examines AI’s impact on education and the uncertain future ahead.

Many of the conversations I have read on the role of AI in education have been about banning it, censoring it, or addressing the uncertainty of how to apply it in schools. I’ve not engaged with these conversations because the framing of the discourse feels myopic (‘to close’ (myō) ‘sight’ (ops); ‘to close one’s eyes’). Lumping AI into the same conversations as managing digital devices, social media, gaming, and classroom management fails to see the forest for the trees. The problem with such arguments is they presume a straight-forward trajectory of educational systems in a ‘business as usual’ scenario. As Stephen Hawking (and others) have acknowledged, “Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation”.

Systems on Borrowed Time

The fact is that AI is not going to disrupt education—it’s going to transform it, along with most other human systems, from its foundations. Institutions don’t change overnight—they adapt, evolve, or resist transformation. The question is whether we will guide that change or merely react to it; will we actively shape AI’s role in education or passively accept its consequences. Like a missile that’s launched but hasn’t yet reached its target (Mo Gawdat), this transformation is already in process, but conversations around AI in school don’t seem to be registering the scale of the impending impact.

AI is not merely another technological advancement; it’s a paradigm shift that renders many of our long-held assumptions obsolete. Since the industrial revolution, education has functioned in significant part as a mechanism for preparing individuals to participate in labour-driven economies. But if intelligence and expertise are no longer human monopolies—if machines can learn, adapt, and outperform—then what exactly are we educating for? The classroom is not immune to this disruption; it is, in fact, one of its primary fault lines.

Some recent AI considerations for context

• “…92% of trading in the Forex market was performed by trading algorithms rather than humans.” (2020)¹

• AI could achieve a century of biomedical progress in just 5–10 years, potentially doubling the human lifespan. (Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, World Economic Forum, Davos, 2025)²

• 93 percent of manufacturers have started new AI projects over the past year."³

• By 2030, approximately 30% of work hours globally could be automated by AI technologies.⁴

• AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030—more than the current output of China and India combined.⁵

• Google's AI tool, ‘Co-Scientist’, recently solved a decade-long mystery concerning antibiotic-resistant superbugs in just 48 hours.⁶

Global economies are currently established upon the premise that labour is scarce and that skilled labour is more valuable than unskilled labour. To ensure survival and prosperity, education functions as a mechanism for producing skilled workers, imparting knowledge and expertise while conferring credentials as proof of employability. What happens if this system falls because skilled, knowledgeable labour becomes abundant?

AGI and the Acceleration of Intelligence

AI is automating expertise faster than humans can adapt, making many traditional skills obsolete while expanding new frontiers of discovery. Meanwhile, robotics continues to transform industries by automating physical labour, though human adaptability and oversight remain crucial in many domains. While human expertise in creativity, ethics, and interpersonal skills still holds value, AI is encroaching on these domains at an accelerating pace. The window in which human input remains indispensable may be closing faster than we realise. Considering only humanoid robots, the predicted number ranges from 63 million units in the US by 2050 (Morgan Stanley⁷) to “More humanoid robots than there are people” (Elon Musk⁸) by 2040, with ChatGPT (o3-mini-high) estimating around 1 billion units (2040).

Mo Gawdat

, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, contends that AGI may already be here—or soon will be—doubling in capability every six months. He puts it bluntly: “Just count a few doublings, and it becomes way outside the realm of human intelligence... There is now an AI that can beat human intelligence on almost everything. Call it AGI, call it a goat... Doesn't matter, because six months from now, it will double again, right?”⁹

Gawdat’s assertion aligns with a growing opinion among AI researchers that AGI may already be emerging, though definitions vary. Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic) are among those who argue that an early stage of AGI has already arrived or is imminent.¹⁰

Education on the Brink

(ChatGPT o3-mini-high)
Prompt: What percentage of the global human workforce will be displaced from their current employment by either AI or machines (humanoid and non-humanoid robots) by 2040?

Response: Based on current data and projections, a reasonable estimate is that around 40% of the global human workforce could be displaced from their current roles by 2040 due to AI and automation. …in advanced economies, a larger share (sometimes cited up to 47%) of jobs could be affected.

Our systems of education serve multiple roles in society, however, they are structured in large part to prepare individuals for traditional job markets; a role that needs to change with emerging realities. It’s fine to debate the application of AI in classrooms, but the conversation does not go deep enough when school as we know it is on the cusp of transformation.

'School is Dead.' What Comes Next?

It’s easy to forget that “the job” is largely a modern construct—a historical anomaly. It’s equally difficult to imagine life beyond a job-based economy, yet that future is becoming increasingly likely. Schools, designed to serve a labour-driven system, are now bound to a labour market that may no longer exist in its current form.

Regardless of AI, schools are already struggling to stay afloat. Teachers grapple to hold the attention and engagement of their students, schools are failing to retain their teachers¹¹, and bureaucratic bloat is choking budgets.¹²

K-12 is compulsory in over 50% of the world’s countries (and K-9 in 80%). Required attendance for students who do not wish to be in school creates an environment of forced participation. On average, 28% of U.S. students¹³ and 19% of UK students¹⁴ are chronically absent. Those who do not want to be in school rarely absorb much knowledge; they also disrupt the learning of others and diminish the ability to teach.

Meanwhile, educational outcomes continue to decline. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that reading proficiency for eighth graders has fallen to its lowest level in 32 years, with over one-third unable to demonstrate basic reading skills appropriate for their age.¹⁵ This is not only a failure of schools but also a reflection of disengagement—students are losing interest in an outdated system.

Most schools are structured around assessment. Grades were originally designed to measure learning, but they now serve as a system for competitive advancement. While measuring learning can be useful, many educators, including myself, contend that assessment should be used sparingly, prioritising intrinsic motivation supported by encouragement and high-quality feedback. There is research that demonstrates that extrinsic incentives can diminish intrinsic motivation¹⁶. As Mark Twain remarked, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”¹⁷ Grade inflation also diminishes their meaning: “Since the 1960s, U.S. colleges have experienced significant grade inflation. The most common grade shifted from a 'C' in 1960 to an 'A' by the mid-1990s, without corresponding increases in student achievement.”¹⁸ When grades lose their value, they fail to motivate students, and the system collapses into hollow credentialism.

I am not arguing that competition, assessment, and productivity are bad—they each have their place—but learning should arise from a desire to know, not from artificial incentives. If Aristotle was correct when he said, “All men by nature desire to know.”¹⁹ then education should cultivate that curiosity, not extinguish it.

We should not persist in a broken model simply because it has worked in the past. Instead, we must take what we’ve learned from traditional schooling and build something new—something that prepares students not for a workforce that no longer waits for them but for a future where human potential is redefined.

Salim Ismail credits Lawrence Bloom with the metaphor of a rocket launch to explain our current stage in human development:

The first stage of that rocket has to be really heavy fuel, really messy, expensive, dirty, etcetera, which would be, say, capitalism or fossil fuels.

You need that to get yourself out of that initial gravity well. Once you get to a certain altitude, you need a lighter craft to take you to the next level, so you jettison the booster rocket, right? And the danger is, if you don't jettison it, you fall back down.

We're at that point now where we have to jettison these old structures and take on new, much more elegant, lighter craft to take us to the next level. And we've got the whole category of people trying to go, ‘Oh, let's go keep the booster rocket because it worked for us thus far.’²⁰

Education is one of those booster rockets. The time has come to unlearn and relearn the entire concept of school. Alvin Toffler’s famous paraphrase of Herbert Gerjuoy captures the urgency of this moment:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”²¹

This concept has become an axiom in pedagogical discourse, yet remains largely ignored by educational systems. Now is the time to act. We can wait for the system to break, or we can begin the process of rebuilding education from first principles. The future is coming far faster than most expect.

If the system of traditional schooling is no longer viable, what should replace it? The next section explores two possible approaches.

Reclaiming Purpose for School

Racing Against Time: The Urgency of AI in Education

“What we’re concerned about is people not embracing AI fast enough to solve the big problems of our current society.” (Jack Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent, in conversation with Peter Diamandis).²²

This sentiment of Jack Keller is one that I have been hearing with increasing frequency. Having cut my ecological teeth on Rachel Carson, James Lovelock, Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, etc., our societies have been sounding the alarm of ecological crisis since the 1960s. It’s safe to say that we’re further down the road to self-annihilation than we were in their time. If humanity’s challenges are accelerating, so too must our solutions. AI may be our greatest advantage in this race against time. Beyond this, we face crises of economic inequality, food and water insecurity, political polarisation, pandemics & antibiotic resistance, and demographic problems, to name a few.

AI literacy is about knowing how to use AI as a cognitive amplifier to solve complex problems. As AI becomes the foundation of present and future job markets, it must become a core competency in education. Currently isolated in institutions, in partnership with AI, students can make a real-world impact on the challenges that stand in the way of Earth’s prosperity. The energy of students is one of our world’s greatest untapped resources. Creating real world impact makes education relevant and meaningful for students now; rather than conveying the notion that they are not ready for the world yet, but perhaps after 20 years of knowledge and credential attainment they may begin to live lives of significance.

Instead of the traditional bottom-up approach, we might begin with the unknowns at the bleeding edge of our understanding, working backward to define the necessary competencies. This approach is exciting for students because it places them on the frontiers of our knowledge, positioning them to contribute to solutions. The sheer volume of our accumulated knowledge makes bottom-up learning progressions impractical, there simply isn’t enough time to start from the foundations in every field. In the same way that we can drive a car without first calculating velocity, understanding the chemistry of combustion, etc., students can drive AI into real-world solutions without prior mastery of the composite complexity.

As machines increasingly do the heavy lifting of our knowledge labour, we should reconsider what it means to be human. We did not create AI as competition for ourselves but as leverage to unlock new dimensions of human potential—intelligence beyond intellect, mastery beyond knowledge.

Redefining Human Potential Beyond AI

We have long treated intellect as the primary indicator of capability, but it is but one dimension of human potential. K-12 schools have largely ignored practical investigations into physical intelligence (except in competitive sports), emotional intelligence, intuition, sensory mastery, alternate states of consciousness, and other aspects of humanity—capacities that are critical to how we navigate the world. We are not merely processors of information; we are creators, feelers, and experiencers.

Sören Kierkegaard reminds us that "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”²³ Yet our education system prioritizes knowledge over experience. Albert Einstein is often credited with saying, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." In which practical ways might we educate ourselves to improve our faculty of intuition? Blaise Pascal, a master of the mind and logic, compels us to look to the intelligence of our emotions: "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing."²⁴ If we had the same mastery of the intelligence of our emotions as we do of our intellects, how different would our societies be?

Should we not pursue these avenues of mastery through the formalised investigations of education? The capabilities of AI will soon greatly exceed the human ability to reason, but our access to this god-like power literally lies at our fingertips. We are not only compelled by the geniuses of human history to explore the neglected domains of human possibility, we are now obliged to do so.

I am not making a case to neglect the development of human intellect through education, we need critical thinking and wisdom to wield the powerful tools at our disposal. Instead, I argue that we now have the freedom to also pursue the untapped potential of our other faculties, each of which may possess the transformative potency of the intellect. Humanity’s grand project to explore the potential of reason has come to fruition, now, it is time to unlock the rest.

Rewriting the Future of Education

The classroom must become a place where students want to be—not for grades or external validation, but for the thrill of discovery and the potency of self-expression. We are entering a time laden with the power of gods: protein folding allowing us to craft fantasies from the material of life; virtual universes that allow us to experience the power of our imaginations; the energy of stars to employ in technologies that bend quantum and nano realities to our wills; vehicles to build that will carry us on adventures through galaxies. These are not domains suited for duty and obligation, but those of opportunity and possibility. Learning must not be coerced, it must arise from desire and passion.

If a students long to write because words are their language of self-expression, then they should do so out of the abundance of their hearts. Let this become an era where school empowers the unique essence that lies within each of us; if that be through instruments or song, maths, language, motion, thought, service, or any other form of self-expression, let school become the workbench and laboratories for human potential. The role of the teacher should not be reduced to policing learning. We are not agents of law and justice but examples of passion and possibilities, sharing our experiences and perspectives with others through inspiration, nurture, and instruction.

The role of education is to empower the future. If we do this right, we may discover that the most powerful intelligence is not artificial—it may be the human capacity to dream, to create, to connect, to feel, and to imagine what has never been.

The future demands that we rethink education. Rather than preserving what was, let us build education for what could be.

1. Kissell, Robert (September 4, 2020), Algorithmic Trading Methods, Elsevier Science, ISBN 978-0-12-815630-8

2. Amodei, D. (2025, January). 100 years of biomedical progress in 5-10 years: AI’s impact on human lifespan. World Economic Forum, Davos. Observer. https://observer.com/2025/01/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-advances-double-human-lifespans/

3. American Supply Association. (2024, August 15). AI revolutionizes manufacturing: 93% of U.S. manufacturers embrace new technology for strategic gains. American Supply Association. https://www.asa.net/News-Publications/ASA-News/ai-revolutionizes-manufacturing-93-of-us-manufacturers-embrace-new-technology-for-strategic-gains

4. McKinsey Global Institute. (2023). Generative AI and the future of work in America. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/generative-ai-and-the-future-of-work-in-america

5. PwC. (2018). Sizing the prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise? https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/data-and-analytics/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html

6. Imperial College London & Google DeepMind. (2025, February 19). AI solves decade-long superbug mystery in 48 hours. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/19/ai-superbug-mystery-two-days-scientists-10-years/

7. Morgan Stanley. (2024). Humanoid robot market outlook. Morgan Stanley. https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/humanoid-robot-market-outlook-2024

8. Musk, E. (2024, October 10). Elon Musk says robots will outnumber humans by 2040. [Video]. YouTube.

9. Gawdat, M. (2024, March 8). AGI is here, you just don’t realize it yet [Episode 153]. In Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. Spotify. [25:34]

10. For example:

Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) - ​Altman, S. (2025, January 8). How OpenAI's Sam Altman is thinking about AGI and superintelligence in 2025. Time.

Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic) - Amodei, D. (2025, March 2). Anthropic chief: 'By next year, AI could be smarter than all humans'. The Times.

11. As of the 2024–25 school year, an estimated 406,964 teaching positions were either unfilled or occupied by individuals lacking full certification, accounting for approximately one in eight teaching roles nationwide.

Learning Policy Institute. (2024). State teacher shortages and vacancy resource tool. Retrieved from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/state-teacher-shortages-vacancy-resource-tool-2024

12. Between 2000 and 2023, administrative staff in U.S. public schools increased by 95%, while the number of principals and assistant principals grew by 39%, despite student enrollment rising only 5% (National Center for Education Statistics, as cited in Magnolia Tribune, 2024).

Magnolia Tribune. (2024). Where's all the public school money going? Retrieved from https://magnoliatribune.com/2024/10/10/wheres-all-the-public-school-money-going/

13. U.S. Department of Education. (2024). Chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools: 2021–2023 trends and policy implications. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/supporting-students/chronic-absenteeism

14. Department for Education. (2024). Pupil absence in schools in England: Autumn 2023 and Spring 2024. GOV.UK. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england-autumn-2023-and-spring-2024

15. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (2024). NAEP Report Card: 2024 Reading Assessment. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov

16. Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105–115.

17. Twain, M. (1924). Mark Twain’s Notebook (A. B. Paine, Ed.). Harper & Brothers.

18. Rojstaczer, S., & Healy, C. (2012). Where A is ordinary: The evolution of American college and university grading, 1940–2009. Teachers College Record, 114(7), 1–23.

19. Aristotle. (1984). Metaphysics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation (Vol. 2, p. 1552). Princeton University Press. (Original work published ca. 350 B.C.E.)

20. Gawdat, M. (2024, March 8). AGI is here, you just don’t realize it yet [Episode 153]. In Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. Spotify. [14:15] (see link above)

21. Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. Random House. (Original work citing H. Gerjuoy, p. 414)

22. Diamandis, P. (Host). (2025, February 15). AI leaders reveal the next wave of AI breakthroughs (At FII Miami 2025) [Audio podcast episode]. In Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. Spotify. [26:00]

23. Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Two upbuilding discourses. In H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong (Eds. & Trans.), Eighteen upbuilding discourses (pp. 1–20). Princeton University Press.

24. Pascal, B. (1670). Pensées (A. J. Krailsheimer, Trans.). Penguin Classics (1995).