The danger
Immediate answer instead of patient question. Output instead of experience. Optimisation instead of perception. Convergence instead of exploration.
Lead essay / Peirce / Firstness / The age of AI
The Future of Education
Firstness competence, atelier practice, biosemiotics and co-creation as an urgent pedagogical concept for the age of AI.
Self-test
Firstness Test: How open are you to the indeterminate?
Before you read the essay: find out where you stand. A wonderer, a quick-closer, or an athlete of ambiguity? Seven questions — no right or wrong.
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Core theses
Three formulas for the education of tomorrow
The human cultivates Firstness. AI amplifies Thirdness. The dialogue produces productive Secondness.
Not the reproduction of knowledge forms the core of education, but the cultivation of that human dimension from which genuine novelty arises.
Protect the Firstness of the human being against its premature translation into mere function.
Essay
Education after the end of knowledge scarcity
Education stands at a historic threshold. For centuries, its institutional form was shaped by a paradigm of knowledge scarcity. Knowledge had to be collected, preserved, structured, transmitted, and reproduced. Teachers were the bearers and curators of bodies of knowledge; learners were those who acquired them.
With the arrival of generative AI in almost every knowledge and design context, this paradigm loses its central position. Systems like GPT, Claude and Gemini already operate with remarkable precision at the level of symbolic condensation, variation, pattern recognition and linguistic explication.
This radically shifts the task of education. No longer does the reproduction of Thirdness form its core, but the cultivation of Firstness.
Firstness competence as the new baseline
Firstness denotes the qualitative presence of the not-yet-determined: wonder, irritation, pre-propositional perception, the as-yet-unnamed difference. It is the sphere in which something "stands out" before it is translated into concepts, methods or logics of optimisation.
In the age of AI, precisely this capacity becomes the decisive future competence:
Firstness competence is the ability to dwell in the indeterminate without prematurely closing it conceptually.
Aesthetic sensibilityPerception before concept, resonance before category.
Tolerance of ambiguityBearing productive emptiness and multiplicity of meaning.
Abductive insightGenuine question-formation and hypothetical thinking.
Bodily resonanceEthical sensibility and the ability to wonder.
The anthropological urgency
What is at stake here is not only new didactics, but the future of the human being as a cultural creature. The real danger of the AI era does not lie in the machine, but in a pedagogy that trains people to make themselves machine-compatible.
The consequence
Humans who only react probabilistically and surrender their own Firstness. Education would then have missed its humanistic task.
The task
Teaching must become a biophilic shelter of the living — the love of the becoming, of the open, of the surprising.
Biosemiotics and negentropy as foundations of education
Novelty does not arise from sheer complexity, but from living negentropy: from the homeostatic, bodily-grounded form of existence that has something to lose. From this perspective, education is not primarily information processing but part of life's negentropic project.
Learning then means not filling a container, but cultivating resonance:
Perception of differenceRecognising irritation before it is explained away.
Experience of resistanceFriction as the source of genuine insight.
Habit formationTransformation of irritation into hypotheses.
EmergenceNew orders out of living semiosis.
The atelier as the epistemic form of the future
The institutional form that corresponds to this insight is the hybrid atelier. The atelier is not merely a space of production, but an epistemic architecture in which Firstness is protected and then translated into Thirdness. Here, vagueness is allowed to remain productive. Here, the not-yet-sayable is brought into a first shape via sketches, models, conversation, material and AI.
Learning begins with irritation, not with instruction.
The atelier organises learning as a continuum of perception, irritation, incision, externalisation, critique, feedback and reformulation. This applies to communication design just as it does to theory, research and social responsibility.
AI as a partner of Thirdness
In this concept, generative AI takes on a clear, non-defensive role. It handles structuring, research, condensation, variation, perspective-taking, transfer, linguistic explication, simulation of counter-positions and acceleration of iteration.
This does not delegate thinking; it outsources symbolic work, so that the human focus on Firstness, judgment and responsibility is strengthened.
Firstness
The human cultivates wonder, irritation, aesthetic sensibility and genuine question-formation.
Secondness
The dialogue between human and AI produces productive resistance, friction and feedback.
Thirdness
The AI amplifies regularity, convention, semantic structure and deductive–abductive recombination.
Didactic methods
From this perspective, concrete methods emerge that are consciously designed not to skip over Firstness:
Paradoxical assignmentsWicked problems and open research questions.
Rapid sketchingPhemic sheets and dialogical critique formats.
Co-creation sprintsCollaborative work with AI as an instrument of Thirdness.
Productive failureIterative reflection loops in the spirit of Manu Kapur.
These methods are not a toolbox but an epistemic architecture that combines material and media experiments, synchronous and asynchronous atelier dialogues, and collaborative boards.
Examination formats of the future
Examinations must change too. The foreground is no longer the mere correctness of answers, but:
Quality of question-formationOriginality of abductive hypotheses.
Documented iterationsReflective capacity and process-oriented learning.
Ethical framingSocial responsibility and transfer into real contexts.
Handling AIDeploying AI as a Thirdness instrument deliberately and reflectively.
Examinations thus become more process-, atelier- and portfolio-oriented.
Education as a humanistic imperative
This pedagogical concept is urgent because it is through it that we decide whether education remains a humanistic project. The future of humanity depends on whether human beings learn:
Seeing before namingPerception precedes the concept.
Feeling before calculatingBodily resonance before algorithmic optimisation.
Asking before optimisingGenuine questions instead of efficient answers.
Designing before decidingEntering into relation before functionalising.
Only then does culture remain alive. Only then does design remain research. Only then does the university remain a place of becoming. And only then does humanity remain human.