Staying One Step Ahead of AI
In this series, Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, offers reflections from her coaching and mindfulness practice on how people discover insight, meaning, and resilience in the changing landscape of modern life. Her perspective is rooted in years of working with people from many cultures and in a driven curiosity that understands human growth as a life in motion.
I asked a student this while coaching him through a research paper. Like many students, he had taken key points straight from AI without questioning them. My question stopped him and prompted a realization: in the age of artificial intelligence, the challenge is not simply gathering information, but learning to question it, think for ourselves, and develop our uniquely human capacities. He then did what this article is about, and I'll come back to it.
“Do you know if this is true?”
We have created machines that process information faster than we can, draw on more knowledge than one person could hold, and give answers in seconds.
We should not have to compete with that. As we explore what AI can do, we risk forgetting what we can do instead. So AI is forcing us to confront an interesting question: how can we keep developing the qualities that make us uniquely human?
We don't need to be faster machines
For a long time, we have associated intelligence with acquiring knowledge, remembering information, and finding answers. In mathematics, quickly recalling formulas and solving equations was often seen as intellectual prowess. Now machines do many of these things better than we do. Our response should not be to become faster versions of the machines we created, but to develop what they cannot replace.
Staying one step ahead of AI doesn't mean we need to know more than AI. We can use what it gives us, but we still need to observe, experience, imagine, create, and stay curious. The key is not to become too dependent on it: AI can be a powerful learning tool, but it shouldn't replace our thinking and judgment.
Education needs to move in the opposite direction
The obvious example is the screen. It's a familiar point, but it matters more now than ever. Because AI is a powerful learning tool, it is tempting to let it fill more of the school day. Schools should do the opposite: protect the physical, creative, and experiential parts of learning. Observation and curiosity develop when children encounter the world themselves, not through a screen.
Think about a science experiment where students make predictions and test them. Sometimes things don't happen as expected. One student may notice something the others didn't, while someone else might wonder what would happen if they changed part of the experiment.
This is where AI can be useful. Within seconds, students can access an explanation drawing on scientific knowledge. But the answer should not end the lesson; it should give them more to work with. They can ask: Does the explanation account for everything that happened? What does it assume? Could there be another explanation? What if we changed one part of the experiment?
Armed with these questions, the students leave the computer and return to the lab to test, investigate, and discover for themselves. AI provides access to knowledge, but their curiosity determines where they go next.
The power of the question
We often think of intelligence as being able to solve problems and learn new things. But AI is changing the way we think about that. A student who accepts an AI answer may not learn much. The student who questions the answer, notices something others missed, or keeps asking why is still thinking and learning.
We should also be careful about telling students to ask only “good” questions. How do we know which questions are worth asking before exploring them? A question that seems trivial to one person may fascinate another, and one that seems to lead nowhere may open a new direction. Students should be free to ask questions without judging whether each is intelligent, useful, or relevant. Most may lead nowhere, but one might.
Without the question, the knowledge available through AI remains dormant. The question gives that knowledge direction; another question changes it. Ten students can use the same AI and travel different intellectual paths, because each notices and asks something different. Asking questions requires observation, imagination, curiosity, and confidence: the willingness to pursue something that interests you even when nobody else thinks it's important.
Questions come from experience
Questions need to come from somewhere. That is why the physical world becomes more important, not less, as AI grows more powerful: it gives us the experiences from which real questions arise.
People don't learn just by taking in information. We learn by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. We learn by moving, trying hard, being with other people. We learn when something surprises us, excites us, or lets us down. All of that gets tied to our memories and feelings and changes what each of us notices.
A student can ask AI to explain balance, but can it describe what it feels like to stand on a beam and stay upright? Each student will experience it differently. AI can describe and produce sound, but playing music with others means listening, responding, and feeling sound through the body. A unique, in-time communication happens. AI can explain acidity in detail, but it cannot give a child the experience of tasting a lemon for the first time.
These experiences are part of what it means to be human. Schools need laboratories, workshops, playing fields, art studios, kitchens, music rooms, gardens and theatres. Children need to make things, move their bodies, experiment, perform and interact with others. This is the raw material for their observations, questions, and growth.
An example is sports. Students can use AI to understand biomechanics and physiology. But they can run, jump, measure their heart rate, modify their technique, and observe their bodies in action. I once had two students who followed the same exercise but experienced it differently. They were curious, so they asked each other how it felt. Their answers were uniquely their own. AI could never have come up with those answers.
Our emotions are important. Curiosity is emotionally driven. We go for things because they fascinate us, confuse us, delight us, disturb us, or refuse to leave our minds. A student may become interested in something a teacher, curriculum, or AI considers unimportant, yet that emotional connection keeps them investigating.
Creativity grows from the same sources: unusual connections between experiences, memories, and ideas. It requires the freedom to imagine something that does not yet exist and to develop it without knowing whether it will succeed.
This freedom may become one of the most important parts of education in the AI age. A science experiment may lead to design, music to mathematics, sport to physiology or psychology, and a walk outdoors to questions about biology, climate, or human behavior. These departures are not distractions from learning; they are learning.
When answers come too easily
Another relationship with AI exists, however. A student encounters a question, asks AI, receives an answer, and moves on. Then comes another question, another answer. It is efficient, but efficiency is not the same as learning or growth.
Much of our development happens when we struggle with a problem, develop an idea, discover we are wrong, or argue with someone who sees things differently, leading us to realize our understanding was incomplete and ask more questions. If AI resolves every moment of uncertainty immediately, we risk losing the experiences that build our intelligence, judgment, persistence, independence, and connections.
This is why AI literacy must mean more than writing good prompts. Young people need to know how to use AI well and when not to use it. They need to be comfortable putting it aside, thinking for themselves, and challenging what it tells them.
The purpose is not to teach children that AI is wrong. Increasingly, AI is right, and that is precisely why the question is whether we can think critically alongside it.
Remember the student I mentioned at the start? When I help students write a thesis or research paper, I see how often they accept AI-driven information unquestioningly. So I asked, “What other perspective could you take on this that differs from AI?”
He took time to think outside the AI box. He played with the idea that the information was false, coming up with scenarios that would prove it. It took time, and he learned about questioning facts. In the end, AI was mostly right, but it left out what he wanted to discover and communicate. His observations went deeper, and he created something genuinely his own, far more interesting to read. Most of all, he walked away feeling empowered. He took the reins and decided for himself what he wanted.
A correct answer does not mean there are no more questions. The greatest protection against dependence on AI is curiosity. A curious person does not stop simply because an answer has been provided.
The student must remain the traveler
We can each encounter the same situation and notice different things because we bring different senses, memories, emotions, and experiences to it. One person hears a sound everyone else ignores, like distant birds; another recognizes a pattern in a difficult conversation; someone else becomes fascinated by what the group considers irrelevant. That is what makes us unique, and we need to develop our individuality.
As AI becomes more powerful, education needs to develop the “whole human being”: through our five senses, emotions, creativity, physical awareness, imagination, judgment, and curiosity. We should not narrow this human experience as machines become more capable. Not every question needs to be useful, and not every journey needs to be efficient. The real aim is to keep the student thinking, noticing, and asking: I noticed something, and I want to know more.
AI can become an extraordinary companion on that journey, opening a vast landscape of knowledge at a speed previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But the student must remain the traveler, because the journey is still theirs to make, question, and shape.
There is something worth remembering. AI learns from what human curiosity has already discovered. Without people noticing, questioning, and exploring, it would have far less that is new to learn from. Our curiosity doesn't just keep us one step ahead of AI. It also helps AI grow.
We don't need to surpass AI's speed or capabilities to stay one step ahead of it. We need to use its power to facilitate the discovery and development of our uniquely human potential.
As AI continues to develop its capacities, it is up to us to continue growing as human beings.
Read more from Elizabeth Ballin
Elizabeth Ballin, Professional Certified Coach
Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, is an International Coaching Federation (ICF)-accredited professional coach and mindfulness practitioner working globally with people and professionals from many backgrounds. She combines emotional insight, cultural intelligence, and practical structure to support meaningful growth. She brings a lifelong multicultural awareness, deepened by twelve years of coaching across more than twenty cultures, which helps her attune to the emotional and practical realities her clients face. Her writing spans themes such as curiosity, creativity, well-being, communication, judgment, and the inner shifts that support meaningful growth in the complexity of modern life.
