Education in the Age of AI: Education as a Social System for Realizing and Advancing Capability Continuity

This conceptual paper reframes education in the age of generative AI through the concept of Capability Continuity: the capacity to form, preserve, transfer, adapt, and further develop capabilities across changes in time, people, and environments. It distinguishes Knowledge Transfer from Capability Transfer and examines the transition from human-only capability to Human-AI Collaborative Capability. A five-stage model—Formation, Preservation, Transfer, Adaptation, and Development—is proposed as a framework for reconsidering education, educational assessment, lifelong learning, and succession of expertise. The paper further connects education and AI engineering through Capability Continuity as a common higher-order principle and argues that AI-era education should expand human capability while preserving human agency, judgment, and responsibility.