Learn how to learn

Sante says: “Learn how to learn, and use AI to enhance your ability to learn.”

Has the way that we learn how to learn changed in the era of AI?

“Not yet, but it is going to. The winners are going to be the people who can master the art of learning.

If you go back and look at the education system and how we have been educated, it's all been a sort of sausage-making machine. Meat goes in one end, it goes through the grinder, it comes out the other end, and we're a sausage.

It’s like factories in the Victorian era, and we are still very much in that era, from an educational point of view, because there is a curriculum and it's very well defined. AI has broken that. The internet disrupted it, but AI is the final blow to a system of predefining what we learn. Now, we have somebody there 24 hours a day who can answer just about any question that we throw at them.

This PA is there, and it can be a blessing or a curse. At the moment, a lot of people have embraced the path of least resistance by hogging all kinds of information, harvesting it, and using it without too much thought.

There are a lot of people saying, ‘I don't know how to do this. I'm going to ask AI, and AI is going to tell me how to do it.’ That's not what we need. The people who are going to be successful are the ones who say, ‘I need to reach an objective. I need to define something. I need to do something. What do I need to know? What is the threshold that I need to reach so that I can tell AI what to do and get the most out of it?’”

Is it likely that there will be a divide between people who are proactive and search for knowledge themselves and people who can't be bothered?

“I'll answer that question with a quote that a famous Italian sociologist gave at a closed event for a board of engineers about 13/14 years ago. The title of his presentation was 20 Megatrends for 2020. They were all wrong, but there was one takeaway that stuck with me, and I think was extremely relevant.

That takeaway was: ‘The most successful people will be the ones who are the most creative.’ Creativity does not really sync well with the sausage approach, where things go in one end and come out the other. Learning, like life, is a very non-linear procedure, and it's very personal. The way I learn is going to be different from the way you learn.

That's where AI can step in. It can be a very personal partner, helping you define the way you build the pathways to success. Therefore, success is in the hands of the very creative.

Creativity is something that will go hand in hand with services to the people. The more we go on and the more things are automated, the more value will be coming from those who can curate the best services for people.”

Do you think that AI will have a significant impact on the future of formal education?

“That brings to mind a quotation I heard recently on a podcast about scientists, which was that ‘science progresses one funeral at a time’.

Yes, change is going to come about. It will be slow because there will be a lot of kickback from institutions and people who want to continue doing things the way they have always been done.

There is such potential to accelerate the rate at which one can learn with AI. When you go beyond scratching the surface of simple questions and start prompting it in a very articulated way, you can unearth an incredible amount of information that can help you learn.

For instance, I started learning some rudimentary coding – not to become a programmer, but to move things around in my day-to-day SEO work: take stuff from Search Console, elaborate it, and create different Excel files for reporting. That was extremely painful at the very beginning because I had only done some rudimentary coding in the very early days of my academic curriculum, when the first computers were coming about.

I started taking this tangent because I had the need to get some stuff done. I have been using Claude a lot, rather than ChatGPT, because I found it to be much more human. I like the approach, I like the way it answers, and I like the reasoning. My son Alex is actually going back to ChatGPT-5 and he tells me that it's quite impressive, so I'll probably go back and take a look at it.

It is very tempting for everybody to go to an AI agent/large language model, ask a question, and get back a very nice piece of code. The problem is, everybody's going to be doing that. It's going to lose its value very soon.

How do you keep your value? That's what we need to do. I've been doing that for 30 years now, so I trust my gut. My gut tells me that you have to move ahead and do things in that way.

If we look at what's happening with clicks, we can see that clicks are going down. There was a recent article in Search Engine Journal documenting how the number of impressions was going up and the number of clicks was going down.

There is already a crunch on traditional SEO, in the sense that people are not reaching a website the way that they used to, through search. The only alternative right now is to build a brand.

One of the ways that we can do that is through storytelling. Storytelling is another word that has been used and abused, but I've read a book called A Story is a Deal by Will Storr. I've actually read it twice. It's very articulate and it talks about a lot of things. I think it is very useful for anybody who is interested in looking beyond the basics.

It talks about brand, and how we can look at a brand, build a brand, and substantiate a brand, looking at things from very different points of view. I'm extracting elements from this book to build a matrix around which a company can use very elaborate prompting to build a story. It will allow companies to use a matrix of values or elements that aggregate people, create emotions which move people, and push them all together in a way that is highly associated with the brand.

The book has a very interesting opening. It starts by saying, ‘If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks to work. Instead, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’ This is what you want to keep as your lighthouse, as an SEO who is looking ahead.

We know the basics of SEO. We know how to structure a story from a technical point of view. The real challenge is to be creative and work with the company to articulate their story and weave it into the fabric of the marketing. We are marketers, after all.

AI can be an outstanding ally because, without it, you would need a whole team of people to address this, but with it, you can sit and do this with just one or two people.”

Have you read Will Storr’s other book, The Science of Storytelling?

“No, I haven't. I'm stuck on this one because there's so much in it that is really interesting, and I'm still digesting it.

I'm beginning to pull out elements that I'm going to use as pseudocode in my prompting of AI, to build the matrix that I mentioned. Pseudocode is like the pre-code that you create before you write code that a machine can execute. It is pre-prompting.

Before I build a prompt in AI, I typically build a pre-prompt, especially if it is a complicated or articulated task. I create a structure and write a very detailed list of tasks that I want to formulate – first of all, for myself.

A pen is always around me somewhere; I've come back to using pen and paper a lot. I do as little typing as I possibly can, because it helps me to think a lot more than banging away at a keyboard does. I’ve been doing that for too many years.”

Would you ever have a generalised brain interface installed in your brain so that you could interact with AI directly?

“I've never thought of that, actually.

I'm just waiting for Claude (Claude, if you're listening, please take note) to be able to just talk like we're talking now, to an agent, instead of banging on a keyboard.

I've written a prompt of about five or six pages, and I've uploaded it to the large language models, and it works fine as well. It's just that you have this intermediate passage where you do the uploading, but it works fine.”

Do you believe that anyone can be taught to be creative, or is it a natural trait?

“I don't believe in predefined traits. I think anybody can develop a line of creativity. Obviously, we're not all the same. Some of us are more inclined to be creative in the arts. Creativity is a broad skill.

Creativity also means being open to new ideas, exploring, and being curious. If you're curious, you'll go down different paths. You'll be open to exploring something different, something new.

That's one of the first challenges for anybody. If you just sit and continue doing things as you normally do, because you're not really interested in exploring, that's one of the biggest barriers that your potential and creativity can face.”

Sante, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Use your SEO knowledge as a starting point and be very critical about what you know.

Discover what you think you need to know and use AI to learn as much as possible. The more you learn, the more you can get out of AI.”

Sante Achille is a Search Marketing Specialist and Data Analyst. Find out more over on LinkedIn.