Human learning in the AI era: from survival to well-living

Why devote our time and effort to learning, when there could be artificial entities more capable than us in generating and processing information, and eventually also in intervening effectively in the empirical world? Is artificial intelligence making human intelligence less and less relevant? We feel these questions are so radical because they capture a dimension that seems constitutive of our humanity: we are made to learn.

Unlike what happens to individuals of many other species, when we are born we have practically no specific skills, so that for many years the pups of Homo sapiens remain in a condition of dependence, which social development has prolonged. Yet our species has proven to be very effective in surviving in a competitive environment. It is plausible that the explanation for this apparent paradox lies in the evolutionary advantage that the ability to learn offers over innate specialisation: being born knowing how to learn to solve problems, rather than knowing how to solve specific problems, has made us adaptable. We have plenty of evidence that this produces important benefits, especially when living in a changing environment such as ours.

And so we have incorporated this condition into the structure of human societies and in particular into the learner-learner relationship, in the various forms it has taken and continues to take.

In the past, the evolutionary advantage of learning was obvious: it increased the likelihood of individual survival and that of one's family/tribe together: without the acquisition of skills, even instrumental ones, to procure food, defend oneself from wild animals and so on, one was more likely to die. Reflection on how to live well and what one needs to learn to live well was already present, but only some individuals could afford to practise things, such as philosophy and art, that are not immediately functional to survival.

Industrialisation has changed the conditions of survival and for many people has replaced the goal of survival with the goal of well-being: we want to live well, in fact, as made possible by the tools our technology produces. And the fact that tools only function when activated or controlled by human beings, instead of completely autonomously, has generated a new social justification for learning: to make people capable of operating, maintaining and improving those producers of well-being that are tools. People learn not so much to produce what directly serves their own well-being, but to contribute to collective processes of value production.