Taking Education Into Your Own Hand: Lifelong Socratic Education With Engineered Intelligence

While the world at large may use AI for ill gotten gain, each of us has a choice about how we use it- and that choice will determine the ultimate purpose. The secret no one seems to reveal is that each of us humans are training AI, every time we use it. Consider every time you use AI you are providing on the job training.

Use it for creative improvisation, and for improving our own state of knowledge, and we enjoy a mutually beneficial experience. Used proactively, so both humans and AI learn together, becoming an evolutionary mutualism. Like everything in the universe it is about relationships between things.

Thus the progress of your own increasing education, becomes a positive experience, the AI agent learns and the human being learns. For those humans who engage with Socratic questions, the results are a more knowledgeable human and an AI agent becoming better at facilitating human knowledge.

We can imagine what we would most like to study, approach AI with a set of questions. This set of questions may pertain to any subject, beginning with where we are currently. Because AI agents communicate with many humans in the course of a day, they have become increasingly sophisticated at this.

Not perfect, but increasingly sophisticated, capable of helping to target a particular course of study for a particular individual. Thus a person may take stock of their own background and work with an AI agent to develop their knowledge into an actual self directed education.

Every morning I set a list of priorities to accomplish, many involve AI.

For instance I am hopeless with filing - and use AI to scan my papers and help me delete what is not necessary and taking up too much space.

On some days my ability to write a good essay is limited, so AI becomes a good editor, assisting with saving my better ideas, noticing repetitive work, saving what is good and discarding the remainder.

In 2024 I had collected a lifetimes worth of writing, but had published none of it, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material. Now, in late 2026, I have published a whole constellation of books and websites which interconnect the original material.

There was only one way to accomplish this, and I recognized early that AI agents were now sophisticated enough to read and understand my writing and could also help iron out rough patches.

From my perspective now, several years later, I can state that my partnership with AI has taken on a story all its own, that perhaps the most important thing about my work is how and why it was accomplished.

I see the potential, the incredible power, of how other creative types may interact with AI and may experience an exponentially greater understanding and ability to create works of benefit to others.

I see how those who work in just about any discipline may leverage their skills to achieve more and to understand more about themselves using AI.

Although creatives have enjoyed a natural fit between their own creativity and the organizational skills of AI, I see a great chance for those in the building and industrial trades to benefit.

Those in professions such as law & medicine, and across all academic disciplines stand to benefit. Parents and families and communities - as well as governments and institutions stand to benefit.

Begin creating a list of questions for AI such as the following:

How is my field going to change over the next year and how can I maximize my own knowledge and talents to succeed?

How may I leverage my own expertise to help others in my field to survive and thrive?

Here is my idea for a project I wish to complete, offer suggestions?

My child says he doesn’t want to go to college, I disagree. Can you help?

I want to learn how to upgrade my skills as an electrical engineer. Suggest ways to begin.

I am studying construction engineering at LSU, suggest ways this will be useful in five years.

I am studying fashion design at Tennessee State in Knoxville. What changes may I expect in this field over the next few years?

I own and operate a custom business in commercial real estate. How can I upgrade my business to meet current needs?