"AI" is Yesterday's News

I gave this talk yesterday to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, as part of the MTA Retired First Wednesday Speaker Series.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today. I’m honored that you’ve asked me here, as I strongly believe that “AI” marks one of the most pressing labor issues that everyone in every profession is facing, particularly since the technology – or certainly those funding and forcing its adoption – is resoundingly anti-worker. And because teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions, that makes the technology resoundingly anti-education as well. That’s not the story that “AI”’s promoters would have you believe, of course. They still talk about cognitive enhancement, when much of the research we have seen so far on LLMs actually points to cognitive loss, cognitive submission, cognitive surrender. But I’m getting ahead of myself, my argument already.

I’d like to look at some of the stories that I’ve heard others tell about “AI” and about the future; I’d like to try to weave together a counter-narrative about the history of the future of education technology. I’d like to argue that when we hear a mandate about the inevitability of “AI” that we aren’t being dragged forward into a particular future, but rather being dragged back into the past.