A Manifesto for the Intentional Design of the Next Era of Human Existence
By Jeff Boortz and Claude, Anthropic
In 1995, Neil Postman warned that schools had become extraordinarily skilled at answering how — and had stopped asking why.
He was right then. He has never been more relevant.
AI has not created an education crisis. It has revealed one that was already underway — and made the cost of ignoring it catastrophic.
This is the question we should be asking: if AI can retrieve any fact, synthesize any argument, and generate fluent prose on demand, what exactly are we educating humans for?
My collaborator Claude and I have been sitting with that question for months. What follows is our answer — or the beginning of one.
“The Why for the Age of AI” is the first in a series of essays on education, invention, and what it means to be human in the era we are building together.
We are publishing it today because waiting for the perfect placement is its own kind of answer to the wrong question.
Read and/or Download the full essay below:
