We are the tortoise. Accelerating change is the hare. Except this time, the hare isn’t resting — and the finish line keeps moving.
“If you conceive of your children’s education as training in career skills — whether that be growing rice or programming a computer — you are preparing them to be slaves, not free men.”— Devon Eriksen
Nobody knows what the world looks like in 20 years. A war, a pandemic, a technological rupture — the specifics are unpredictable. But that’s precisely the wrong question to be asking. The better question is this: what kind of person survives an unknowable future?
Most of the conversation around AI and AGI gets stuck in the same loop: which jobs will survive? Will doctors be replaced? What about programmers? Lawyers? The framing is always defensive — how do I protect what I already have?
But that’s a slave’s question. And I mean that in a precise, historical sense — not as an insult.
Two kinds of education — and what they were designed to produce
In classical antiquity, there were two kinds of people, and they received two completely different educations.
The slave — or serf, or labourer — was taught career-specific skills. Grow wheat. Herd sheep. Ride a horse. Turn the wheel. These were competencies that made them useful to someone else’s system. Valuable, in the same way a well-calibrated tool is valuable.
The noble was educated differently. Yes, they learned particular crafts and disciplines. But the centre of their education was something else entirely: how to live and think as a free, independent, self-directed person. The curriculum was formal. It had a name.
The seven liberal arts of classical antiquity:
- Arithmetic
The language of quantity and pattern - Geometry
Spatial reasoning and structure - Music
Harmony, pattern, and proportion - Astronomy
Navigating the larger order of things - Grammar
Precise expression of thought - Logic
Arriving at truth from known facts - Rhetoric
The art of persuasion — and of recognising it in others
None of these were vocational. None trained you for a specific trade. They trained you to think — to learn any trade, adapt to any circumstance, and navigate any future.
None of these were vocational. None trained you for a specific trade. They trained you to think — to learn any trade, adapt to any circumstance, and navigate any future.
Notice which two arts are conspicuously absent from a modern government school education: logic and rhetoric. A student educated in logic might notice when the things he’s being told are false. A student educated in rhetoric might recognise the techniques being used to influence him. Neither quality is convenient in a workforce trained for compliance.
Modern compulsory schooling was not designed as liberation. It was designed — quite deliberately — to produce clerks and factory workers at public expense. Obedient, competent, and dependent. Useful to the machine, but not equipped to question it.
The modern liberal arts
Writer Devon Eriksen translated this framework for the present. The seven liberal arts of the modern world aren’t about scrolls or Latin. They’re about sovereignty — the same core idea, rewritten for a world where the machines aren’t in factories, they’re in your pocket.
Logic
How to derive truth from known facts. The ability to reason clearly without being derailed by emotion, authority, or motivated thinking.
Statistics
How to understand what data actually implies — and what it doesn’t. The difference between correlation and cause. The danger of small samples and survivorship bias.
Rhetoric
How to persuade — and how to spot when you’re being persuaded. This is both a creative and a defensive skill.
Research
How to gather reliable information on any unknown subject. Not Googling. The ability to go from ignorant to informed with rigour and speed.
Psychology
Practical, not academic. Understanding the real — often unstated — motivations driving the behaviour of others.
Investment
How to manage, protect, and grow existing assets. Time, money, relationships, reputation — all are capital, and all compound.
Agency
The ability to make decisions and act on them proactively. Not waiting to be told what to do. Not asking permission to pursue your own life.
“Worry less about which career skills AI will take over. Worry more about whether you are training to be a high-agency, perceptive, self-motivated person who can navigate an unknowable future.”
The three pillars these arts collapse into
If you trace all seven back to first principles, they converge on three practical domains. Everything else flows from these.
The classical skill
- Rhetoric
- Logic + Research
- Statistics + Agency + Investment
The modern translation
- Marketing & Sales
- Writing & Clear Thinking
- Entrepreneurship
Marketing & Sales
If you cannot attract and persuade, you will never get what you want — and your only option will be waiting for an employer or a government to give it to you. Rhetoric and psychology in practice. The non-negotiable skill of the free person.
Writing & thinking
This is the ability to communicate the value that exists in your particular mind. It is the foundation of visibility. Before you can sell, before you can build an audience, before you can lead — you must be able to think clearly and express it. Writing is thinking made legible.
Entrepreneurship
Not as in “starting a startup.” As in taking your future into your own hands. Hunting for your own survival rather than waiting to be fed. Building something the world actually needs — that you also happen to want to see exist. Statistics, agency, and investment all live here.
Entrepreneurship is the vessel. The liberal arts are the navigation system inside it. With that vessel under your feet and a clear mind at the helm, the technical skills you need at any given moment become learnable — fast.
The technical layer: current vessels for your entrepreneurial work
The underlying skills are permanent. The tools sitting on top of them change with the era. Right now, in what some are calling the digital renaissance, those tools look like this:
A personal brand on social media — your storefront, your command centre. The place where the value you produce becomes visible to the people who need it.
Content — writing or video that educates, entertains, or inspires. The primary mechanism for demonstrating what you know and building the trust that precedes any transaction.
Email marketing — the owned channel. Social platforms are borrowed land. Email is yours. Newsletters and sequences that nurture the audience you have earned.
Visual design — the aesthetic layer of your brand. The ability to spark emotion and communicate credibility without a word.
Funnel & web building — landing pages, websites, conversion systems. The infrastructure that turns attention into action.
AI will reshape all of these, continuously. The specific tools will evolve. The underlying need — to attract, persuade, and deliver value — will not.
What do you build? The answer is in your adversity.
Once you have the foundation, the question becomes: what do I apply this to?
The honest answer is found in your own life. The most durable entrepreneurial ventures tend to come from one of three places:
Something you wanted to exist and couldn’t find. A problem you personally lived through and solved. A gap you noticed that nobody else seemed to be filling.
Or — best of all — all three at once.
The question was never “which career is safe”
The AI conversation gets framed wrong almost every time. People ask: will my job survive? Will my profession be automated? Which skills are AI-proof?
These are the wrong questions. They are the questions of someone who has accepted that their role is to be useful to someone else’s system — and is now worried about losing their place in it.
The right question is older and more fundamental: am I becoming the kind of person who can navigate whatever comes next?
The person who can think clearly, communicate value, understand people, make decisions, and take action without waiting for permission — that person doesn’t need to predict the future. They adapt to it. They build inside it. They thrive precisely because the future is uncertain, because uncertainty is where agency compounds fastest.
The tortoise can still win this race.
But not by running faster. By being the kind of runner who doesn’t need to know the finish line in advance.
Teach yourself — and the people around you — how to think. How to learn. How to act. Everything else follows from that.
Technology only continues to advance. The free person advances with it.
— Prince Shanto
