Masters of the Liberal Arts, or servants of the machine? Education as learning how to jack in to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The skills needed by free people living by their wits just got more, not less, important with the coming of “AI”: use “AI” to deepen our connection to humanity’s knowledge stack—or let it quietly hollow us out… Share
I have a new set of slides for this perennial topic I sometimes include and sometimes don’t—short, very short:
2026 01 15 Lecture Slides Introductory Digression Latin Ars Skill Liber Free4.49MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload
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Latin is, for once a useful starting point. Ars is skill. Liber is free. The artes liberales—the liberal arts—were, at their origins, not high-minded exercises in self-expression or vague “critical thinking,” but rather the skills appropriate to a free man. That phrase, “free man,” is already doing a lot of work. In context, it meant someone:
Not bound to onerous obligation;
Not fixed in place to obey the will of another—not a slave or a serf;
But also not a military-judicial aristocrat near the top of a society-of-domination hierarchy;
Not a guild master and not a large property owner;
Not somebody with ample societal power, and conversely not somebody with strongly negative power either.
The liberal arts the toolkit that allowed one who had no land, no inherited office, no fixed corporate-body privilege, to navigate the world. They were about surviving and thriving in a complex, literate, institutional society in which your only capital was what you knew and how you could use it. Thus away the Latin and the robes from the medieval university and you find something remarkably contemporary: a curriculum for people whose main asset is their brain.
To wit:
THE BASIC THREE Logic: how to construct and assess arguments. Grammar: how language works, and thus how to read and write with precision. Rhetoric: how to persuade other human beings face-to-face.
THE NEXT FOUR: Quantitative mastery of number (arithmetic, algebra). Quantitative mastery of space (geometry: surveying, spatial reasoning). Forecasting (astrology—with a little astronomy thrown in; and, more generally, the habit of quantifying and modeling the world). Harmony (music: ratios, patterns, and aesthetic form as numerical relationships have psychological and social resonance).
PRE-PROFESSIONAL: Theology, law, medicine—the three organized advanced faculties opening the way to a social role and a livelihood.
OTHERS: history, commerce, accounting, finance, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, either folded into these ten departments or operating in their shadow.
What is the thread that connects these? It is not “STEM vs humanities”. It is not “hard skills vs soft skills.”
It is this: every one of them is a way of accessing, organizing, and deploying the storehouse of human knowledge we East African Plains Apes have collectively built up since the invention of writing 5000 years ago. To be liberally educated, to be a Magister Artium Liberalium, a Master of the Liberal Arts, was to be able to jack-in to what we might, in our current jargon, call humanity’s “knowledge stack.”
They used the information-communication technologies of their time. But we have new, more powerful information-communication technologies. More powerful for good and ill.
It is fashionable right now to worry about “ASI”—Artificial Super-Intelligence—that sometime next Tuesday, a silicon god will awaken in a data center, look around, and decide to take control over the apes that built it. Or simply that Elon Musk will decide the only way to keep the extravagant promises he has made to shareholders is to use his tame Grok Superintelligence to hypnotize us into giving him lots of money as we are then driven to try to bang the silicon digital god he is creating.
These seem to me to be distracting fantasies—whether of utopia or dystopia.
The right way to look at it, I think, is that if we are going to talk about “Super-Intelligence,” we should first recognize the one we already live inside: call it the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The collective creation of human minds, binding time and space across the past five millennia and he entire globe. No individual human—not Aristotle, not Newton, not von Neumann, not, heaven help us, Elon Musk—is remotely smart enough to think through more than a tiny sliver of the world from first principles. We are a profoundly cultural species. For at least a million years, our advantage has not been bigger fangs or faster legs but the ability to learn from others, store that learning, and pass it on.
Isaac Newton—who was not given to false modesty—put it cleanly: “if he had seen farther than other men, it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants”. The line is so over-quoted that it has become a cliché. But it is also a cold, hard description of our condition.
If Newton recognized this, how dare any of us not?
The liberal arts, properly understood, are the skills needed to interface with this Anthology Super-Intelligence—to query it, update it, criticize it, extend it, and carry it forward. The task of education is not primarily to stuff a fixed quantum of information into student heads. It is to train each of us to be a good front-end interface node for society to this real ASI, the Anthology Super-Intelligence of humanity’s collective mind. to train your brain to be an intelligent client in a vast, distributed system. Liberal education is about client design.
What would happen to you were you to be cut off from this Anthology Super-Intelligence—when you would have to think things through from nearly first principles?
You wold die. Rather quickly.
Consider the shlock TV show “Naked & Afraid.” Take two people, strip them of modern tools, drop them somewhere inhospitable, and see what happens.
Sometimes what happens is entertaining. Mostly it is boring, and the show editors have to work very hard to turn it into watchable TV.
But, always, what happens is rapid metabolic catastrophe.
Melissa Miller, after twenty-one days in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is a case in point. She is not some urban web designer who has never seen a tree. She is an outdoors educator, a nature-preserve naturalist in Michigan. In the summers she strips to shorts and a sports bra and, in the environment she has learned how to handle, catches turtles in Michigan lakes to make turtle soup. She knows a fair bit of practical natural history.
But put her in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she has to think things through from first principles. And what happens?
She loses seventeen pounds in three weeks.
That is a 2800-calorie-per-day metabolic deficit. Given her basal metabolic rate of something like 1500 calories per day, this is, in a grim physiological sense, an impressive achievement.
Reading about her state back to civilization is harrowing: fungus growing underneath fingernails and toenails; severely under-weight BMI; severely infected bug bites, 4 that resulted in abscess growth, surgically extracted; plus hundreds of thorns in feet and hands (result of the spiny palm trees that littered the ground in the amazon).
Her partner, Chance Davis, a former U.S. Army Ranger, physically very capable in strength and speed, plus with the standard 1300 cc supercomputer that is the human brain, does worse. he is down thirty-two pounds in three weeks.
Why does he lose so much more? Because he does not have the fat-layer metabolic reserves evolution has given human females who might, and month, get pregnant, and start immediately constructing an entire additional human inside him. A man in “good shape”, i.e., without a lot fat, then starts burning muscle. And he needed to burn 3 lbs. of muscle to get the caloric energy she could get from burning 1 lb. of fat.
And the experience of trying and failing to thrive in the Ecuadorian Amazon drove him (temporarily) insane:
The worst part was being hungry. Long-term hunger plays with your psyche. After the show, hunger made me physically reactive and angry. I carried food stashes in my pockets and car. I gained 70 pounds in a month because I couldn’t stop eating—I didn’t want to be hungry. A big scoop of peanut butter sticks in your throat; you feel full—the taste, texture, sweetness. That’s what I wanted. Creamy or crunchy? Doesn’t matter—they’re all heaven…
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70 lbs. in a month, 2.3 lbs./day—for a 2000 kcal/day male BMR, add 400 a day for exercise, assume the weight gain is half muscle recovery and half fat, that is 2000 + 400 + 1.15 x 1200 + 1.15 x 3500 = 7805 average calories per day eaten by Chance Davis during his post-Amazon month.
The experience of caloric deprivation without sufficient fat resources seriously messed with his head. And not just in a “in life, we have support—friends, family, podcasts, coffee, sugar—without those, you’re outside yourself; when I get hungry, I get angry” way.
Meanwhile, back in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the other mammals were doing fine.
It was homo sapiens that floundered.
Melissa Miller went back to the show several years later. Before she headed out (to South Africa this time), Melissa deliberately gained sixteen fat pounds—banked energy sufficient to keep her going for thirty-seven days at her BMR, or about nineteen at a marathon-training pace.
The moral here is not “do not go on dubious reality shows” unless you really like your own pain. That, however, is sensible advice. The lesson is that even very competent, very tough, very knowledgeable individuals, placed in an environment without the supporting infrastructure of accumulated knowledge, tools, and social organization, are terrifyingly close to the edge.
Human survival, let alone human flourishing, is not about geniuses manipulating and controlling nature single-handed. It is about very ordinary brains plugged into very large, very deep, collectively constructed reservoirs of knowledge and practice. When you are forced to reinvent fire, metallurgy, agriculture, and epidemiology from scratch, you do not get a heroic age of rugged individualism. You get starvation and infectious disease.
Where, then, does our contemporary “AI”—large language models, code copilots, generative engines—fit into this picture? First, we should demystify. Much of what is sold as “AI magic” is, in practice, an aggressive reduction in the cost of looking things up, drafting boilerplate, and getting a halfway plausible first pass at an answer.
Think of coding. What the “copilot” does, if you already know your way around a programming language and a problem domain, is remove the need to frantically page through a reference manual at your left hand to recall that one obscure method signature, and spare you a dozen confusing Stack Overflow tabs. It turns rote recall bottlenecks into autocomplete. It lowers the cost of search and synthesis.
It does not remove the need to know what you are doing.
This isan extension of the liberal arts project.
Logic, grammar, rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry, astrology, harmony—these were the ways earlier generations learned to interrogate, structure, and deploy the knowledge already out there. Today, interacting with AI systems is a new interface layer on top of the Anthology Super-Intelligence. Prompt design, verification, cross-checking, the ability to sense when the model is hallucinating versus when it is summarizing something real: these are fast becoming part of what an educated person needs.
We are, I think, in the early days of a shift in which “knowing how to ask the right question of the machine, and how to check the answer” joins “knowing how to read a difficult text” and “knowing how to set up a back-of-the-envelope calculation” as a basic liberal skill.
However, there is a difference between “interface” and “replacement”. Be very careful. Using “AI” as a way to boost your interface data-transfer speed is laudable, and powerful. Using “AI” as a way to get yourself out of the loop—to take whatever comes into your machine and copypasta it as your thoughts and conclusions is terrifyingly destructive to your ability to be a Magister Artium Liberalium—to be a master of the skills of being a free person living by your wits and knowledge, and ability to gain more.
We do not yet know how to reliably do the first, and not fall into the second.
We are, in many ways, back where we began, with the figure of homo liber—the free person who has to make their way in the world by their wits.
The twenty-first-century version is not confined to a particular sex, status, or estate. It includes anyone who is not a dominant owner of capital and who is not content to be a passive subject of algorithmic governance: people whose main asset is their ability to think, communicate, and cooperate. For such people, the liberal arts remain the relevant curriculum. But what are they? They are the set of skills needed to participate meaningfully in, and not be crushed by, a world permeated by both the Anthology Super-Intelligence and its new silicon front-ends.
Our machines will assist us, or they will hollow us out.
This course is an attempt to figure out how our educational institutions need to shift to help us accomplish the first, and not the second.
Please help me do this.
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Introductory Digression: Latin: Ars—skill. Liber—free.Artes liberales—liberal arts—originally: the skills appropriate to a free manWhat was a “free man”, back in the old days when universities used Latin as their lingua franca?:
One not bound to onerous obligation.
Not fixed in place to obey the will of another—not a slave, or a serf.
But also not a military-judicial aristocrat near the top of some society-of-domination hierarchy.
And not a possessor of guild- or craft-right, or an inheritor of property.
Not somebody with ample societal power; conversely, not somebody with negative societal power.
A man—almost invariably a man—who has to make their way in the world by his wits.
What are these skills appropriate for a free man?What are these artes liberales, these liberal arts?For someone who has to make their way in the world by their wits?
What are the skills a university should teach such a person?
In the old days: trivium: logic, grammar, rhetoric: how to construct arguments, how to write, how to persuade in person.
In the old days: quadrivium: arithmetic (algebra), geometry (surveying), astrology (astronomy), harmony (music).
In the old days: preprofessional: theology, law, medicine.
Other subjects? History, commerce, accounting, finance, natural philosophy, moral philosophy?: folded into the ten departments.
Plus: learning to write a fine chancery hand
What is the thread connecting all these?
They are ways of accessing the storehouse of human knowledge.
The Real ASI—The Real Anthology Super-IntelligenceNot an “Artificial Super-Intelligence”, but rather the collective creation of human minds…
…binding time and space across 5000 years and across the entire globe.
None of us is smart enough to think through anything from first principles...
We are a profoundly, profoundly cultural species—and we and our ancestors have been for more than a million years...
As Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants!”...
And if Newton recognized this, how dare any of us not?...
Hence the way to live a good life as a free man—the liberal arts we need—are how to access the storehouse that is “the best of all that has been said and thought”—and written down...
Thus we can enrich our lives...
Thus we can persuade employers that we will enrich them, and so they will pay us...
The Real ASI—The Real Anthology Super-IntelligenceThe task of education, hence, is to train each of us to be a good front-end interface node for society to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of humanity’s collective mind…
What Happens to Us If We Find Ourselves in a Situation......in which we have to think things through from nearly first principles?Briefly: we starve to death in short order:
Shlock TV show: “Naked & Afraid” <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/does-each-of-us-have-a-big-enough>
Melissa Miller after 21 days in the Ecuadorian Amazon:
Not a city mouse: an outdoors educator and nature-preserve naturalist in Michigan.
Drops 17 pounds—a 2800 cal/day metabolic deficit; given her BMR of 1500 cal/day, quite a feat.
Her partner Chance Davis, ex-US Army Ranger, dropped 32 pounds—he was burning muscle at 1200 cal/lb, rather than fat at 3500 cal/lb.
Before her next appearance on the show, she gained 16 fat pounds—enough to keep her going for 37 days at her BMR (or 19 at a marathon-training pace).
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