Thinking Like Socrates in the Age of Chatbots
The most valuable skill for working with AI is not knowing how to prompt it. It is knowing how to evaluate what it produces, when to push back, and what question to ask next. The Socratic tradition has been teaching this for 2,400 years. This talk applies it directly to working with AI systems.
Format: Keynote, 40-50 mins. Workshop version available with practical exercises.
What the talk covers
- Why prompt engineering is the wrong thing to optimize for, and what to focus on instead
- The three Socratic moves that make AI outputs dramatically more useful: probing assumptions, demanding evidence, and reformulating the question
- How to recognize when an AI is confidently wrong, and what to do about it
- A practical approach for maintaining your own judgement while still getting the best out of AI tools
Who it is for
This talk is for people whose job is to help others think: L&D professionals, educators, team leads, and knowledge workers who use AI daily and have started to wonder whether they are getting sharper or softer. It is also for organizations that have rolled out AI tools and are now asking what skills their people actually need to use them well.
What audiences leave with
Attendees leave with a concrete set of questioning techniques they can apply the next time they open a chatbot. They also leave with a clearer sense of which cognitive habits are worth protecting as AI takes on more of the routine work. The talk does not ask people to distrust AI. It asks them to stay in charge of it.
Book this talk
To discuss whether this talk is a good fit for your event, the fastest route is a short conversation. Use the form on the Work with Me page.