NEWS: Next Monday (28/07), in Launceston, will see the first primary school in Australia to teach neuroscience to ten-year-olds.
I will be launching the project along with the Principal, 22 teachers and 34 parents.
For a decade, artificial intelligence followed a wonderfully Silicon Valley formula: vacuum up the internet, feed it to a machine the size of Nebraska, and send the electricity bill to someone in Accounts.
The difficulty is that the internet has now been more or less eaten.
Books, blogs, tweets, recipes, arguments, cat captions—the great digital buffet has been scraped clean. AI has therefore begun training on synthetic data, which is a polite term for machines recycling their own homework. Left unchecked, this produces model collapse: an intellectual photocopy of a photocopy, with each generation slightly blurrier and more certain of itself.
What AI now needs is what it cannot manufacture: genuinely new human thought.
This changes the economics of intelligence. An untrained brain, faithfully defending its Current View of the Situation, produces predictable ideas already available in several billion online versions. But a trained brain, one capable of escaping its habits and creating a Better View of the Situation, produces something scarce. Novelty.
Hence the emerging equation: AI X10 requires HI X10. You cannot fuel an x10 machine with x1 thinking.
The future may not belong to people who outsource their minds to AI. It may belong to cognitive athletes: humans who train daily, think laterally, and remain gloriously difficult to predict.
So, that alone is enough reason to teach neuroscience in primary school.
Cheers,
Michael
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CONTACT: Timothy Bristow, Principal, Launceston Preparatory School. Launceston. Tasmania. Timothy.Bristow@lps.tas.edu.au
Michael – I love the idea of cognitive athletes. I have been pushing clients on the idea of daily thinking training – the notion that they are becoming cognitive athletes is very helpful. Thanks, Dom