For decades now, we’ve seen organizations and countries be valued for the knowledge they hold. Knowledge could be mined through research, or it could be acquired through acquiring talented people or developing individuals. We are entering a new age now. One where human agency is what will be valued. Knowledge will be boundless, always available for those who seek. But to seek knowledge, requires agency. And to apply knowledge, requires agency. In that sense, AI is the greatest leveler of our times. The role of education changes from providing knowledge to teach how to develop and exercise our agency.
This shift is harder than it sounds, because agency is not taught the way facts are taught. It is built through friction — through the struggle of forming a thought before it is fully formed, of choosing a direction without knowing where it leads, of being wrong and working out why. These are precisely the moments that a capable machine will happily remove for us, and every removal feels like progress. What we measure will have to change accordingly. If the finished work is all we grade, we will optimize for output and quietly hollow out the process that produced the thinker. The task ahead is to make the process visible again — to value how a person arrived somewhere, not just that they arrived.