The Last Generation of 'Normal Minds'; or A Father Watches his Children Transcend w AI

In crypto, I regularly meet teenagers, 16-year-olds who know "too much." They understand things about the global economy, for example, that they have no business knowing. Some are quite literally on par with 60-year-olds who've worked in finance their entire lives.

Or they're experts on cars, or rocket telemetry, or metaphysics.

It's jarring AF.

And it's all thanks to the internet (YouTube and podcasts in particular).

Age no longer matters.

We've flattened the arena of minds!

And now, AI is about to explode everything we thought we knew about learning.

When I look back at my own childhood and learning journey, I realize I grew up in a sort of dark ages for knowledge. We had to physically go places, real places: libraries, conferences, summer camps, bookstores, to find shards information at the very forefront of thought.

(Sometimes, we even wrote letters on paper and sent them to our favorite [authors, thinkers, scientists, professors] and waited weeks or months for replies.)

Everything you learned was caked in blood and sweat and mucus. In a lot of ways, we were like lonely monks copying manuscripts by candlelight.

We learned what we had the drive and patience and mad flickering passion to learn.

Now, my kids are showing me how much crazier things are going to get...

One example: they love asking Claude for drawing prompts. Then, they force me to photograph their drawings and upload them to Claude for feedback (example at the top of this article).

Claude praises their work like it's Leonardo-level. Then, he/she/it offers them a few lines of criticism/suggestions on how to make the work even better.

The same words from my human mouth would crush them. But from AI? They lap up that constructive criticism and grow from it.

I'm not sure why that's the case?

I presume it's because there are too many subconscious processes at work when we take information in from other humans (and in particular from our parents).

The net effect is my kids are learning things about artwork, psychology, science, and virtually everything else many years (and sometimes decades) before I encountered the same concepts.

The gap widens every day.

And it's not just raw information. AI can customize learning to the precise way your brain works.

Example:

I like parables and I like psychology, so I regularly ask Claude things like:

"Please make up a parable that illustrates one of Jung's most powerful psychological concepts."

Boom! I get a custom story that cracks my brain open like an egg. This kind of personalized learning would have seemed like science fiction even 20 years ago.

Soon, we will jam this intelligence into robots, and the educational acceleration will steepen... to point where it's almost like a form of ascension or transcendence.

See, I envision a world where robots will be with us from birth, teaching us, growing with us, understanding us in ways other humans can't. The cognitive gap between future humans and us will be like cavemen versus Einstein.

The barriers dissolve.

Nothing will matter but your ability to focus, avoid the matrix (aka social media algos) and use these tools more deeply.

Throughout it all, here I am, standing between two worlds.

There's my paper-and-ink past and my children's AI-enhanced present. I see them and I realize we're not just changing how we learn. We're changing what it means to be human.

And the journey has just begun.