AI 时代的深度连接：技术重塑下的教育、关系与人类本质

Esther Perel: What worries me is that we are more and more disembodied. We gather less, we party less, we drink less. 74% of food that is cooked in an American restaurant is eaten off the premises. What worries me is that we can't really deal with the messiness of human life the way that we are called upon to do.

Sal Khan: Where should we begin?

Esther Perel: You want to go first?

Sal Khan: No, no, no.

Esther Perel: Oh, I go first?

Sal Khan: I would serve you.

Esther Perel: Okay. Okay, let me see. Let me I'll shuffle it up a little while. Okay, I'll pick this just in case they rigged it. If you could redesign one system from scratch, what would it be and why?

Esther Perel: I actually if you give me that card, I would put it back in the bowl.

Sal Khan: You don't want to answer that?

Esther Perel: No, because I actually don't think that there is no system that I would redesign from scratch, but there's only one system that I know well, and that is the mental health system. So, I think that there's so much that one can do to improve the services in mental health, institutionally, training-wise, service delivery, interconnection to the legal system, to the medical system. It's a huge systemic redesign, and I actually work with very small systems, couples, families, groups.

Esther Perel: My systems are micro systems. What would you say is one system that you would redesign from scratch?

Sal Khan: Oh, well, probably the one

Esther Perel: It's an enormous question, isn't it?

Sal Khan: It's a big question. You had a good answer. You know, the one people would expect me to answer and this would be the system is the education system. You know, I talk a lot about that we've always known that the ideal education system is one that's very personalized. I always talk about that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor and throughout most of human history if you had resources, if you were a young prince, you did have a very good education. You fast forward to 2-300 years ago, we have a very utopian idea mass public education, but we have to make compromises. We have to batch students together, move them all together at the same pace, have some state mandated curricula standards. If a student doesn't understand a concept and gets a C, too bad. That C is in their transcript forever and they move on having to build on that C as opposed to having a chance to keep learning it so they can get it to a B or an A. So, I would instead of making it one-size-fits-all, I'd make it personalized. Instead of making it you only get one shot to get the grade and then you build on that gap, I would make it mastery-based, which means keep learning, which is what you would do today if you're learning a musical instrument or a sport, becoming Olympian. So, and I think the credential should be the same way. Higher education should be the same way. It should be what you know, not how long you sat in a chair.

Esther Perel: But you are looking at mastery and knowledge acquisition. Do you include in your definition of education also the relational component?

Sal Khan: 100% and I think this is something that's also been missing. You know, one of the main arguments people have always given for, especially why in-person schooling is so important, is that's a way to build social connections, socialization, learn to deal with conflict, relationships. And I agree. That is where many of us develop that, but nowhere on your transcript does it say that you are good at collaboration. You are a good listener. And so, I would also and I think we have an interesting opportunity in the coming years to really

Esther Perel: Do you know why?

Sal Khan: Why?

Esther Perel: Because relationship skills and relational intelligence, even in the workplace, has always been considered soft skills.

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: And soft skills used to be seen as feminine skills. And feminine skills are often highly regarded in principle and disregarded in reality. And that is fundamentally changing now. For the first time, relationship skills and relational intelligence are actually part of the bottom line and they're seen as hard skills. And if the workplace needs it, the education system is going to begin to value it, too.

Sal Khan: 100% You know, all of the talk these days about AI and how you develop skills for AI. And we're working on some higher education initiatives including with TED and Khan Academy and the skill when we talk to employers, yes, they want people to know how to vibe code and do this with that model. But the one they really care about and they're calling them durable skills now are communication, collaboration, creativity, listening skills, relationship skills. So, 100% agree.

Esther Perel: Yeah. Yeah. But it's interesting that it comes from the workplace and it will create a You know, in the same way that the workplace and the economy and the technological changes have constantly changed the curriculum, now it's going to change the relational aspects of education.

Sal Khan: And one last thing I we could talk the whole time on this one question. It is um

Esther Perel: I'm going to do this.

Sal Khan: Yeah. There you go. I'll say one last thing about that cuz sometimes people view Oh, if you're preparing people for work, it's vocational and they view that as less than the pure academics. But this is an example of This is a skill or set of skills that the workplace actually wants and they're not calling it soft skills anymore. They're calling it durable skills. And these are human skills. These make you a better human being. So, this is an example of the vocation is asking for you to become a better human.

Esther Perel: What is the conversation that you think the world needs to have, yet isn't ready for yet?

Sal Khan: There is a I think a high likelihood that we have major disruptions actually almost every dimension of our world in the next 5 to 10 years. The most obvious place is in the world of work where anyone from an Uber driver, you have the Waymos coming in to a call center worker to a software engineer, those jobs are either going to be transformed dramatically or there might be shrinkage. You know, some people say, "Oh, new jobs always get created." But hope isn't a strategy. And if we don't do anything about it, it's not just, and this is bad enough because those people have families, they're not going to find other jobs. It has follow-on effects. But one of the biggest ones going to go into politics, it's going to go to polarization. A lot of people think and I agree that a lot of the polarization that we're seeing today is because of 30 years of globalization. But that took 30 years. If this takes 3 years or even 5 years, we don't have the systems to do something about it. So, I think we have to have that conversation. And I think there will be a re-emergence of people looking for the transcendent, the spiritual, whatever you want to call it, because as AI starts to encroach on the things that we used to think were uniquely human, we are all going to be looking One, we need the purpose in work. If we don't find that, "Hey, how am I contributing to society and how am I supporting my family?" It's hard to think about anything else. But then we also want to think about "What am I? Who am I in this in this grand thing?" So, those are the conversations we should be having with more urgency. What do you think are the conversations?

Esther Perel: I mean, the conversation I am participating in and trying to shape as well is the conversation about relationships, because I think relationships are undergoing a massive makeover. The norms are literally shifting under our feet, and we don't necessarily have the skills because globalization is one piece, but social atrophy is something else. And so, I think they are more complicated than they've ever been, certainly in the parts of the world where they are organized by negotiation. It's no longer about duty and obligation and loyalty and community. Then you know what you need to do, you know what you need to accept, you know what you can and cannot change, and you know what decisions lie on your shoulders and what is decided for you. But if you live in a model of individualism that puts the individual in the center and you are to negotiate and to make the decisions, then you have a lot more freedom, of course, but it demands a very different process, and it demands adaptability, it demands flexibility, it demands excellent communication skills. You know, if it's father decides and nobody argues, then you don't really need to develop many skills of communication, but if it's about being seen and understanding and feeling valued, then then So, I think, interestingly, that I've go to a lot of places that have moonshots about everything, but there is yet to be a moonshot about relationships. What is a family today? How do we define the circle of care? You know, what are the boundaries that people want to draw around their relationships? You know, do you have to negotiate Have I found the right one? Am I ready for commitment? Do we want the same things? Who will wake up to feed the baby? Will we have a baby? How many baby? When do we want this baby? Will we visit your parents? Will we visit my parents? I mean, it goes on and on from the small to the big.

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: And now it's what is AI companionship.

Sal Khan: Yeah. It's wild.

Esther Perel: Oops.

Sal Khan: What worries you about the future of how we connect with each other? What excites you?

Esther Perel: I love the fact that there is also what excites you. What worries me is that we are living more and more in a contactless world. That you don't have to leave your house. You don't. You can make a living, you can work, you can exercise, you can feed yourself, you can shop. I mean it's just it's an unbelievable thing and that is an enormous amount of points of contact that are being deleted. So, we are becoming more machine. It's not just we are interacting with machines. Maybe the machines are going to actually resemble us quite a bit. What worries me is that we are more and more disembodied. We are less and less in real person in real life. We gather less, we party less, we drink less, we see 74% of food that is cooked in an American restaurant is eaten off the premises.

Sal Khan: Wow.

Esther Perel: So, that whole aspect of what worries me is that we look for the same kind of predictability and perfection that the apps give us in our relationships to other humans. We want them to be just as perfect and predictable.

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: What worries me is that we can't really deal with the messiness of human life the way that we are called upon to do. What excites me is that some of our fundamental human needs are so strong that we will find ways to connect even if it's connecting to a machine. You know, we will find ways to express our longings, our aspirations, our yearnings, our loss, our need for adoration. And what I really am interested in is the proliferation of small groups.

Sal Khan: Mhm.

Esther Perel: New small groups that come together around a shared purpose, a shared vision, an activity. It's like you see that there's a fatigue of just being constantly on a screen, there's something about meeting another human or humans in person and doing this. What do you think?

Sal Khan: It's easy sometimes to think that you live in a special moment in history, but I do think we're living in a very special moment in history. A lot of people have been theorizing about entering some type of a singularity for the last several decades, and as far as we can tell, we are in that singularity. Whether it's artificial intelligence, biotech, manipulating the human genome, I mean, all of these things are converging at the same time. And one of the things that defines a singularity is you don't know what's on the other side. So, that by definition is scary. We're afraid of things that we don't understand, that we can't predict. And it's happening at an accelerating And so, I do worry. Everything you just said is 100% true.

Esther Perel: Can I say something? I hear it a lot, this thing about we have some certainty and we are We have always had massive uncertainty, but we had religion.

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: Religion was the intermediary between And we trusted religion. And trust is the intermediary between the unknown and the known. And religion helped you deal with the unintelligible, with why people suffer, not that they won't suffer, but how to bear the suffering, and with why bad things happen to good people, the question of morality and evil. So, we had a system in place that helped us with the ethical and the existential dilemmas of our lives. I don't think we were less or more uncertain. Except for a very short period in time after World War II where my generation had a kind of a boundless optimism. But, for the rest, I think that what we have lost is the mechanisms that we used to use to deal with our uncertainty, not the fact that we have more uncertainty.

Sal Khan: No, that's a good point, too, because you're right. For most of human history, the uncertainty

Esther Perel: Did you grow up in religion?

Sal Khan: I did not grow up in a religious family. And, you know, but I agree with you. I actually think you're going to see a revival of religion or religion-adjacent types of structures. And I actually find that that can be exciting. I think that's going to be that could be a good thing. And you're right, even though I might say, "Oh, singularity, what's it going to be like in 2 or 3 years? Uncertainty." The reality is for most of human history, the uncertainty was, "Where am I going to get my next meal? Oh, that neighboring tribe wants to come and kill us. Oh, my child's probably not going to live until they're 5 years old." Now, most of those things aren't our concerns. Most, especially in most of the developed world, we're not afraid of feeding ourselves and they are these more meta-level things of human purpose and what's that AI going to be able to do. But in a society in which, even if you have uncertainty around your crop or where you're going to find the next food, at least you have certainty about your place in it. You have certainty of "Oh, where you fit in." And religion can provide some of that framework, cultural traditions...

Esther Perel: Rituals.

Sal Khan: Rituals, and I think that's the scary thing is that we don't know what our place is going to be in this world. And what excites me, though, is it's an opportunity to build, rebuild, you know, maybe resurrect some of these things that have been throughout our history and we realize we need it, religion, rituals, other forms of connection, cultural relationships. We're going to have even more abundance in terms of people serious people are talking about diseases being cured and understanding the cosmos and breakthroughs in science. Incredibly exciting.

Esther Perel: But they are all human plus AI, right?

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: I think that at point what needs to shift is the human versus AI has to become the human plus. There is something in the power of these two there's something about a thing that augments me. I mean, you know, if I can call you soon. I mean, I remember the fax of the first mobile it's like and I was all the time excited about the rapidity the speed with which I was going to be able to communicate with people who are far away.

Sal Khan: Yeah.

Esther Perel: All right. We got time for one more.

Esther Perel: All right. Okay, I'm going to you know what? Read because we want one that takes us a little bit in a different direction. What do we still have to learn as humans? A ton.

Sal Khan: Man, are we actually getting better at living or just better at optimizing? I think that is probably the best question.

Esther Perel: Because when I look at love and AI I think that we at this moment are optimizing intimacy into something that is manageable, measurable, and disposable. And we have borrowed metrics and markets to love. This is one of the most incredible things because if there is something that has never been defined in data, it's love. It's not a feeling it's a condition it's a state it's an action it's a verb that you conjugate it's so many things. And are we getting better at living or better at optimizing? I think that from a relationship standpoint there is something really powerful and questioning or questionable for me in how much we're bringing a technological approach to relational dilemmas when relational dilemmas are often not problems that you solve but paradoxes that you manage.

Sal Khan: I represent. I think we're hopefully transitioning from an optimization state to a thriving state. My gut said

Esther Perel: How do you know that?

Sal Khan: Well, for decades now and as a child of the 80s, we all Gordon Gekko on Wall Street famously said greed is good. Capitalism won the Cold War. You know, we all fixate on GDP, where the stock market is going. And you know, I used to be a hedge fund analyst before I did Khan Academy. And you see that people are optimizing they're optimizing around the things that they can measure, which are which is oftentimes money or some other measurable thing. And it's not that those are

Esther Perel: From a relationship standpoint

Sal Khan: Oh, yeah, those are

Esther Perel: The optimizing is when people embrace romantic consumerism.

Sal Khan: Oh, yes.

Esther Perel: When they commodify each other and they go with a shopping list looking for a life partner. That's an optimization.

Sal Khan: That is an optimization.

Esther Perel: That's not money-based.

Sal Khan: But I think it comes from this it's a very similar

Esther Perel: is capitalism. Emotional capitalism.

Sal Khan: It's the same what is my return on investment?

Esther Perel: Yes.

Sal Khan: I'm going to put this in and I need to maximize what I get out. It's the exact But I think it's all related culture. I think we're starting to get into a phase now. You know, I have many people in my circle who have done very well on some of those optimizations. At least say the monetary optimization. And they're realizing that yes, if you're barely getting by and you're stressed about it that those first few dollars have a lot of incremental benefit to you. But beyond a certain point and most people are probably further than they realize.

Esther Perel: Incremental benefit is a bit of an abstract concept for something that gives people survival and ability to care for their

Sal Khan: Well, that's huge. That's what I'm saying. It's a huge benefit early on, but at some point it's a smaller and smaller. But they're just used to optimizing for that. And as you point they might take that same mentality and optimize for their relationships and then be frustrated that they're thriving because their relationships are either they never find that perfect optimization or they don't.

Esther Perel: Or they're looking for the perfect and they resist the good because they're looking for the perfect. Is can I do better? Can I do better? How much more can I get? And many in fact it is the greed transposed to can I do better with my hacking? Can I do better with who I'm living with? Can I do better on my dating?

Sal Khan: 100%.

Esther Perel: It is emotional capitalism 101.

Sal Khan: I never thought about it that way, but you're right.

Esther Perel: You know, what is fascinating is how the emotional realm, the psychological realm has entered the business world. And we talk about safety and trust at the same conversation as we talk about performance indicators. And we talk about vulnerability and all of these things. There's a whole vocabulary that has entered the workplace. But the same thing has happened from the workplace and the business world into our intimate lives. Return on investment, hedging your bets. What's the deal we're going to strike?

Sal Khan: Yeah. What's going to happen when we break up cuz we're going to break up eventually, you know?

Esther Perel: It's not till we die, it's till love dies.

Sal Khan: Exactly.

Esther Perel: You know.

Sal Khan: But hopefully that's changing. I think we are seeing and this goes back to I think you're going to see spirituality and adjacent things to spirituality. People hopefully invest more in each other and hopefully we get back to thriving.

Esther Perel: You're optimistic.

Sal Khan: I'm Yeah.

Esther Perel: I mean I'll join you.

Sal Khan: I'm hopetimistic.

Esther Perel: That's I like that. I like that. I'll join you on the train of hope.

Sal Khan: Let's do it.