I just finished Ron Folman’s 2025 book The Human Test: How Predictability, Creativity, and the Quantum Mind Will Redefine Life in the Age of AI. Folman’s book opens with ahypothetical story of Eve, who was in his lab looking at atoms, and asked the question “Are they alive?” My mind immediately went to 10th grade biology class and the list of characteristics of life we recorded. During the intervening 45 years, I know many of the items on our list were dubious, but surely Mr. Potter (I have not seen him for a few years, but he stopped at my son’s house and asked to put a sign on his lawn the last time he was running for the state legislature) would have marked us wrong if we claimed an atom was alive.
Eve returns throughout the book, and Folman continues to consider Eve’s question in the context of Folman’s emerging argument. Some of the book is interesting, though less directly relevant for educators—it takes a long time for interesting ideas to trickle down to curriculum, but at least they do trickle down unlike tax cuts to the rich.
I am not sure when schools will start incorporating quantum minds into their lessons, but predictability and creativity are things we can consider, and should consider, when teaching, especially in the age of AI.
Folman suggests human life can be understood as a probability. If we are completely predictable (something AI is hoping for), then our probability of an event would be 1. Remember probability is some number between 0 and 1, where 0 means the event will not happen and 1 is the chance it is sure to happen. According to Folman, humans should strive for probabilities of .5. If we are completely predictable, then there can be no free will, and we may as well just let the predicting entity decide what we are to do.
That observation is very elegant.
In a landscape where we can get answers; predictable answers like we get out of our large language models, we should strive to be unpredictable. This is where creativity arises. This is where unique ideas come from; you know those ideas that make life worth living.
I have been thinking about math recently. Specifically, the math we study in schools. That is a situation in which you want to be predictable. We kind of need everyone to get the same answer when they do math. Especially, if they are going to build things like bridges where the results of miscalculation could be disastrous.
What do we do in a field like mathematics, where success depends on students reaching a probability close to 1 of getting the correct answer, when Folman argues that a probability of .5 is optimal for human creativity?
Fortunately, I quickly refined my thinking about math. I still want students to get correct answers with a probability close to 1. What I hope for is students understand there are multiple ways to get to the correct answer, and the way they get there can be unpredictable.