Patrick works in classrooms, and he had been listening to the panel talk about post-AGI life and vanishing cognitive labor. "I go into a classroom of five-year-olds and six-year-olds, and it looks like the 1960s," he told the Moonshots AMA. "Nothing has changed. They're doing it the same way."
Then came his question: "Do we need a curriculum anymore? Do we need a certain type of learning? Or are we talking about passion now? Should these kids be finding out what they want to do in a future where there may not be jobs?"
The supply-side education problem
Salim took it first and said Patrick's observation was "dead on," only more so than stated: "We're still teaching people the way we taught them 150 years ago. Forget 20th century. We're still in the 19th century in many places."
His second point was about content. "A child with an AI today in an hour can learn what they could learn sitting in a classroom for the whole day," he said. He called that gap an "impedance mismatch" — a term from electronics for two parts that cannot pass energy to each other efficiently — and expects it to break the existing system. What breaks it, on his account, is not that the material is wrong but that the delivery is slow relative to the alternative sitting in the child's pocket.
The third point was his proposal, and he said it is how he and Peter are raising their own children. Conventional education is built on the supply side: a student becomes a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, then goes into the job market hoping someone wants that skill. Salim's objection is that both halves of the trade are now unknown — "we don't know what a job looks like" and "we don't know what the demand will look like."
So start from the demand side instead. Get children excited about a problem, and from the vantage point of that problem — what he called an MTP, or a major problem you want to solve — let them go and find the skills, capabilities and techniques it requires. He said this is starting to happen in charter schools, and paired it with what he called 21st-century skills, the "six C's," which he did not stop to list. That combination, he said, will be the future of education for the next few decades, "until we figure out what the hell happens in a post-AGI world."
What a purpose-first program looks like
Peter pointed Patrick to a concrete example: TKS, a group he said he is involved with. He set it beside Alpha School, a private school he said has earned a great deal of credit and name recognition, and whose people he has had on a podcast. TKS, he said, is not a school but "an overlay" for mostly high-school ages, which he put at 13 to 18.
Its mission, as he described it: "help the child find their purpose, help them shape their mindset, help them learn AI tools and help them become entrepreneurs." The program's own description fills in the mechanics — a ten-month accelerator with weekly sessions, emerging-technology projects, mentorship and a peer community, running online and in person. The listed skills are specific and unglamorous: scientific reasoning, systems thinking, root-cause analysis, public speaking, financial modeling. Its project examples include search-and-rescue robots and sodium-ion battery research.
Purpose is the load-bearing part of Peter's argument. He quoted a line he attributed to Mark Twain, that the two important days in a life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Once a child has that North Star, he said, they are intrinsically motivated to go and learn whatever is needed to act on it. His wish for listeners who do not have one: your mission is to find it.
The part nobody has solved
Dave agreed on the stakes and then supplied the counterweight. Children, he said, are everything, and getting this right is "the most important mission you could possibly have." But his version of the answer has two halves that pull apart. "We know the curriculum is going to become irrelevant, but we also know the kids need each other and they need school more than ever before to come out as normal, happy, healthy, functional adults."
Somewhere in there, he said, there is an answer: "It's a really hard problem, but it's critically important to get it right."
Patrick's question started in a room of five- and six-year-olds. The replies came back pitched at older children: pick a problem, find your purpose, join a program for teenagers.
Patrick had one last thought. He said he follows Emad Mostaque and his idea of a sovereign agent — an AI of one's own. Could that apply to children? Should a child have one from the age of five that stays with them?
The answer came instantly, and it was fiction: that already has a name, the primer in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, recommended from the panel as a vision of what is to come.