Present Company Excepted
“Generative 'AI' is here to stay." We hear this a lot. But a reminder: this is not a statement of fact. It is an assertion, but it is merely speculation. The future is unwritten – much to the consternation of those who’d like very much to dictate its shape.
There are many things that could happen that make the latest version of “AI” impermanent, least of which being that most technologies don’t last forever. They are displaced, replaced by something else -- which, to be clear, does not necessarily signal some sort of scientific advance or technological improvement, even if we like to think of things this way. Sometimes the shift is cultural; often, financial; and sometimes -- and this is what we should always always remember -- the shift is political. Collectively, we decide to do things differently, to allocate our time and resources elsewhere.
We needn't even gesture towards some far-off future to see falter those claims that LLMs are inevitable and inescapable forever and ever amen. Even now, one can find places in which generative "AI" usage is being curbed -- for example (but not only!) in the school districts that have initiated various moratoriums and bans.
"We can't go back to 'before' ChatGPT” -- a frequent addendum to the “‘AI’ is here forever and there’s nothing you can do about it” sort of utterances. And there, sure, there I’ll agree: we can’t flip the calendar back to 2017 and block the publication of “Attention is All You Need” or farther back still and convince Sam Altman to attend the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine (or something) instead of Stanford. Maybe that’d make a good plot for a SF movie; but time doesn’t work like that.
But memory does. So does imagination. We often invoke the past in order to critique the present as well as some presumed future. We often find comfort in thinking about “what was,” on both a personal and society level. Certainly the invocation of nostalgia can be deeply reactionary -- Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” most obviously. But looking to the past isn’t solely the purview of the right-wing. Think of the renewed interest in the Luddites, for example, and what they might still have to offer as a radical critique of industrialization, capitalism, and labor.
Nonetheless, I would like to see more from those who are pushing back on “AI” and ed-tech in schools what their vision and goals are for what should happen instead. Admittedly, I am wary here when I hear some prominent writers and pundits wax nostalgic for some idyllic (that is to say, largely invented) childhood pre-smartphone. We can't "go back" -- and not because there's something ludicrously archaic about classrooms filled with books or paper, good grief; but because calls “to go back" are easily, and indeed far too readily, politically and pedagogically regressive.
(Related: Jennifer Berkshire’s new essay “What’s Left for Public Education” on the Left’s failure to articulate a progressive agenda for education policy.)
I would like to see recognition too that the burden of these shifts falls largely on teachers. Of course, the burden always does -- whether the shift is new technology or no technology. The burden is spread unevenly across different schools too because of the inequalities in our school systems. A mandate, as we have now in NYC, that limits students’ screen time will play out quite differently in those schools that do not have access to textbooks and other printed materials (not necessarily because they got rid of these things post-COVID Chromebook adoption, although a lot of that has happened; but because they never did).
A move away from education technology, I’d argue, can’t focus simply on the products themselves. Yes, we have to unwind the ways in which the tech giants have become part of the fundamental infrastructure of how schools and classrooms function: how teaching and learning are even envisioned, and certainly how they are “managed.” We have to think about why (and to whom) products like the learning management system have had such great appeal. We must consider the kinds of pedagogical practices and, no doubt, surveillance practices that these technologies have developed, both overtly and implicitly, and -- thanks Skinner! -- have reinforced. We should weigh how the datafication of childhood demanded by the tech industry has worked, hand-in-hand, with the datafication demanded by the testing industry.
If we want something different for children -- and by extension, something different for society as a whole -- then we probably need to articulate a progressive vision for education. Because we should want to ensure that a pushback on “the digital” doesn’t simply result in the same bad shit, just in analog form.
What turns the promised liberation into enslavement are not the products of technology per se — the car, the computer, or the sewing machine — but the structures and infrastructures that are put in place to facilitate the use of these products and to develop dependency on them. – Ursula Franklin
Links, All Over the Place
Via The Wall Street Journal’s Julie Jargon: “Middle-Schoolers Are Seeking Out AI Friends Instead of Real Human Ones”
“Bedazzled Campus Surveillance,” as Flowing Data calls it. Or “How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance,” from the MIT faculty newsletter.
Sasha Mudd on Kant in Aeon: “Reason is more than a tool.”
Mathias Schäfer on “The death of web development education”
Angela Chen on “MIT’s AI Report, Translated for K-12”
Dan Meyer says he’s got “Six Important Findings from the AI in Action Learning Tour.” I’m hardly one to challenge the title, let alone the math, but I count more than six important insights in that email.
It’s a Futurism link, so yeah. Apologies. I suppose you could watch the original interview between him and Ezra Klein. (But yikes. Might I suggest you do something else with your one precious life, my friend, other than listen to podcasts?) Anyway, “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay.”
“It’s sinister that Meta’s Muse AI mascot is so cute,” writes Victoria Song. (The parallels between Big Tech and Big Tobacco are striking.)
Via The Hill: “Education Department formally rescinds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students”
From The Hechinger Report’s Sarah Butrymowicz: “From kindergarten to disciplinary school: Texas sends kids as young as 6 to harsh alternative campuses”
Related, no doubt, the ongoing coverage from Ben Riley on AlphaSchool and its bootcamp and outdoor “survival school.”
Via The New York Times: “The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go”
Today’s bird is the coconut lorikeet, a parrot in the Psittaculidae family found in Indonesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and other nearby islands. According to eBird, this lorikeet’s “in flight sharp screeching squeals betray its presence.” Like those other stochastic parrots, I suppose.
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