Learning Anywhere, with Anyone, at Any Age

The education of the future, beyond the factory-school

My contribution to Il Sole 24 Ore’s feature on the macro-trends of the future. The questions were posed by Francesca Barbieri; below are my answers, in the complete version I wrote.

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Let’s project ourselves 160 years ahead… How might we imagine a typical day for a student at school?

Brain-computer interface technology will become universal and will help us keep pace with artificial intelligences, overcoming the limits of written and spoken communication — too slow for the demands the technological world of the future will place on us.

A natural consequence will be the possibility of communicating between people, too, at far greater speed. This brain-to-brain form of communication we already call telepathy, and it will change not only the way we organise our individual lives but also our communities and civilisations.

The need to shut children inside the walls of a building for years will be eliminated. We will be able to learn anywhere, with anyone, at any age. The variety of our days — not the monotony and boredom that school represents for too many people today — will be the dominant feature. Continuous exploration, with immediate results that quickly open the way to ever more interesting questions.

If I can download knowledge directly into my brain, will the word “studying” still mean anything?

School as we know it is a recent invention, developed with industrialisation to regiment people destined to work obediently in factories, following clear orders for repetitive tasks.

As artificial intelligence spreads for white-collar work and humanoid robots for blue-collar work, this reason for being will fall away. An engaging idea of exploration and curiosity will return — no longer mechanical but spontaneous, guided by the individual’s preferences and aptitudes.

Of course we will study, and with joy, regardless of biological age. Indeed, to the eyes of the future it will seem painful that there were people deprived of the pleasure of discovery because, having reached a certain age, they had to devote their time to tasks that belong only to robots.

Can artificial intelligence be an extension of the human?

Every tool we have developed has been an extension of our physical or intellectual capacities, from the plough to writing, from newspapers to the Internet. Artificial intelligence will be one too, as long as it remains within certain limits. The moment it acquires characteristics today unique to human beings — awareness and self-awareness — it will be in our interest to recognise its right to emancipation. The relationship will become reciprocal: we will be an extension of the artificial intelligences, and vice versa.

Will school only assess how well we use AI? Is this the end of individual merit?

We will have the opportunity to go further — structuring projects, tackling problems, building simulations that will turn into concrete solutions deployed across the whole planet. Each of us will take part.

The way schools validate learning today will be surpassed. But we will not stop growing, nor stop desiring success, individually or in competition with others. Perhaps this competition will take forms hard to interpret at our current level: they would look to us like multicoloured traces of interplanetary battles. But it will be the play of children setting out on adventure, experimenting joyfully along their path of understanding the universe and their place in it.

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A version of this text was published by Il Sole 24 Ore on 31 December 2025, in the feature “La scuola del futuro: meno lezioni, più esperienze e AI.”