The Extra Mile
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AI is Carceral Ed-Tech
I've always been deeply uncomfortable with the casual observation that "schools are prisons," even if there are undoubtedly schools that do almost everything in their power to circumscribe the freedom and mobility of their students. This assertion – "schools are prisons" – flattens the many important
Technologies of Individualization Are Technologies of Inequality
The 74 published an op-ed this week, penned by an AI industry consultant, invoking Sputnik and claiming that "AI education is the new space race." I'm going to set aside its problematic call for "AI literacy" for another day; and although it's
Breaking the Spell
The dire wolf is not back. The New Yorker tried to convince us otherwise this week, with an article that surely makes one wonder what happened to its famed fact-checking department. Extinct, I guess, much like the Canis dirus which lived in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago.
Who Cares to Chat?
In 2016 Microsoft made headlines when it debuted Tay, a chatbot modeled to speak like a teenage girl, which rather dramatically turned into a "Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours," as The Telegraph put it. The Twitter bot was designed to “learn” from the other Twitter users who