Brood Parasites

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters

— 7 min read
Brood Parasites
Pin-tailed whydah (Image credits)

Humans have always invested great meaning in birds. No surprise, what with the feathers, the flight. Each week, when I look at all the stories that've been told about education and technology and try to figure out some coherence to the chaos, I think about what bird might best illustrate the thematics – the pigeon, most often and most obviously.

Today's bird is a pin-tailed whydah, a small songbird that can be found throughout southern Africa. The whydah is one of many bird types that are described as "brood parasites." Females of these species lay their eggs in the nest of other birds – in the case of the whydah, in the nests of filches, which sit on the eggs and feed the young. (Unlike that other species of brood parasite, the cuckoo, the whydah young do not kill their filch nest-mates.) This behavior – an "evolutionary strategy" – allows the whydah to offload the investment of raising their young to other creatures so they have time and energy for other activities.

Brood parasitism is not a perfect metaphor, by any means, for the offloading of ed-tech development onto teachers and students, but reading Vauhini Vara's brilliant investigation into how the tech industry is pushing "AI" in schools, published in Bloomberg this week, I couldn't help but think of the parasitism, the vampirism of Silicon Valley. Hence the whydah. Why the whydah. There's a quote in her piece from Tony Wan, a former editor from Edsurge and now a venture capitalist, that struck me:

Tony Wan, head of platform at MagicSchool investor Reach Capital, explained to me that AI education companies benefit from teachers and students flagging inappropriate content and otherwise helping guide product development. To that end, he said, “we often encourage our founders to just get this in the hands of teachers and users as quickly as possible—not necessarily as a refined product. And I don’t mean that in a bad or irresponsible way.” Wan later clarified that this “should not come at the expense of quality or pose risks.”

This offloading of responsibility, this casual but incessant leeching of money and power and data – it's all fundamental to "the business." An "evolutionary strategy," or something. Brood parasitism, except the offsprings here are products, not people.

But when it comes to venture capitalists, perhaps there isn't much of a difference? After I'd started pulling today's newsletter together – after I'd chosen that header image – I read "the big story" in the latest Wired, Emi Nietfeld's article on a venture capitalist's surrogacy – in this case literally, not figuratively: "The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It." Only a few paragraphs into reading it, I thought, "yikes, why is the journalist telling this story" as her source – the venture capitalist in question – is so obviously unwell. But in the end, I think, the article underscores not just how fraught surrogacy can be – medically, legally, and wow my god, I had no idea – but how dangerous this specific VC might be. As Rusty Foster put it, a "case of a rich person being a titanic asshole at the expense of virtually everyone who comes into contact with her."

But there are elements to this story too that, I'd argue, extend beyond this particular case, as there is a growing interest among Silicon Valley elite not just in surrogacy, but in engineering babies – and I'm not taking with the "Mozart for Babies" soundtrack. (Also by Nietfeld in Wired in recent months: "Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It." In The WSJ: "Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies." Ben Williamson on "Educational genomics and embryo selection startups.") And yes, I know some people bristle at the suggestion there's a strong link between "AI" and eugenics – "but but but I'm not racist," they splutter as they clutch their favorite chatbot to their chest – but this is all very much interconnected. Brood parasites, if you will.

If there's one thing you read this week, it really should be Vauhini Vara's article in Bloomberg: "AI and Chatbots Are Already Transforming Kids' Classrooms." If nothing else, it's a good reminder that ed-tech needs much much more investigative journalism. (Contrast Vara's article, for example, with this piece in Vox, a publication funded in part by effective altruist dollars, that wants you to believe that "AI in the classroom doesn't have to be a catastrophe.") Vara's article covers a lot of ground – various deals that various districts have made with various "AI" providers, various educators' efforts to use "AI" in their classes. But it's the inquiry into Alpha Schools that I found particularly interesting, because although there's already been a lot of reporting on Mackenzie Price and her promise of "2 hour learning," this piece finally cracks open the shady political, financial, and technological arrangements of this company.

While the school has received high-profile attention for its devotion to AI, including from the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, what’s gotten less notice is its ties to the administration’s businesses. State filings from as recently as December describe both Legacy of Education (that is, Alpha) and 2HR Learning as subsidiaries of a Texas software firm called Trilogy Inc. While Price is the public face of Alpha, the principal overseeing all of its campuses is Trilogy’s founder, an Austin billionaire named Joe Liemandt who said at a conference last year that he’s spent $1 billion on a mission to transform education using AI. (A Texas business filing by Trilogy in December also names Liemandt as its president and a director; his LinkedIn profile describes him as the chairman.) Price and Liemandt are longtime friends; Price’s husband, Andrew Price, is the chief financial officer of Trilogy and, according to the filings, also holds roles at Legacy of Education and 2HR Learning.

The financial arrangements among these entities is unclear, but the filings suggest that Alpha has been serving as a sort of in-house distribution channel for a corporation developing AI products for schools. Trilogy also submitted the initial trademark applications for 2HR Learning and several education products before assigning those rights to 2HR Learning itself. And positions at both Alpha and 2HR Learning were recently posted on Trilogy’s corporate LinkedIn page.

...

A publication called Colossus that profiled Liemandt in August said that he had lately been building ed tech products at a “stealth lab” staffed by about 300 people and was preparing to publicly launch a flagship product called Timeback. While the article didn’t name the lab, a Texas filing in early August recorded the formation of a company called TimeBack LLC, with Andrew Price named as a manager. A website for a product called TimeBack that fits Colossus’s description, meanwhile, calls it the system behind Alpha’s schools. And Legacy of Education has a trademark pending for the name. The article describes the product as recording a raw video stream of students, monitoring the “habits that make learning less effective, like rushing through problems, spinning in your chair, socializing,” then generating feedback for kids on how much time they’re wasting and how to do better.

Alpha’s privacy policy accounts for this sort of tracking and more, claiming far more access to student information than is typical for companies selling AI to schools, including MagicSchool. Alpha can, for example, use webcams to record students, including to observe their eye contact (partly to detect engagement and environmental distractions). And it can monitor keyboard and mouse activity (to see if students are idle) and take screenshots and video of what students are seeing on-screen (in part to catch cheating). In the future, the policy notes, the school could collect data from sleep trackers or headbands worn during meditation.

Read the whole article, all the way to the kicker, which is also superb.

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