The Extra Mile

It's really happening! I mean, I even updated Hack Education with the news.

Here'a little bit of what my book-writing process looks like:

I read. A lot. I read stuff online, sure, sure. I already lament not having access to academic journal articles. So for now, I'm reading books – books in print and out-of-print. I read. I underline. I make notes in the margins. I have started an annotated bibliography of everything I've read for this project: it contains the book's thesis; my reaction to it – not just "loved it" or "hated it" but what it made me think, what questions it raised/answered, where I need to go next; and I compile a list of good, meaty quotations that I might want to include or reference.

I have another document that, at the moment, contains a list of ideas that I want to explore and address. Right now, this includes things like the history of intelligent tutoring systems; the history of intelligence testing; debates about behaviorism versus cognitive science; how computer science imagines "errors" versus what we (think we) know about how the brain handles "errors" versus how educators do so. Something about memory. Personalization. Robot teachers in science fiction. Expertise/expert systems. That sort of thing. It's a long list, and some of these ideas will become chapters and some will become sections and some just be paragraphs or sentences or passing mentions. Some ideas I'll chase and chase and chase and they'll end up in that other document, the one where I cut-and-paste all the stuff that doesn't quite "fit."

I don't know yet what I'm going to say. How could I? I am still learning. I'm reading, thinking, writing, thinking, re-thinking, re-reading, reconsidering. It's a lot of work. But that is the work. That is the work of research, that comes before the hard hard work of actually writing.

You can say – and plenty of folks now do – that AI will do this for us, if not now then soon; that this new machine intelligence – OpenAI whatever – is so sophisticated that these sorts of tasks that I'm doing are totally unnecessary. Inefficient. A waste of time.

I do not believe that for a minute – that is, I do not believe that the machine is or can be "intelligent" in the way that a human can. I don't think that generative AI and LLMs work the same way my mind does. I don’t think it can make the sorts of weird-but-fascinating connections that good writers always make — the pigeons of ed-tech sort of stuff.

Nor will I ever ever outsource these key aspects of my work as a scholar to that of the machine. To do so is very very dumb – not just intellectually, but politically.

Artificial intelligence, as it is now and always has been imagined, is not simply about some powerful solution that mimics and surpasses the human brain – that sure makes for a nice story though. It is about labor. It is about the automation of labor. As the new form of automation, AI works much like the old forms of automation: extracting value from workers. Extracting intellectual value (and all labor – thanks Gramsci – is intellectual labor). AI is part of a long-running effort to profit from workers' knowledge, workers' intelligence, to bring our bodies and our minds under the control of the factory-machine. “The factory” might look a little different now, but it’s still Charlie-Chaplin-esque widgets we’re supposed to be twisting and clicking.

AI has profound implications for teachers and students, not so much because of "intelligence" but because of work. The former group, of course, comprise the largest union in the United States and are profoundly overworked and underpaid. Teachers have long been told by education technologists that the devices that are being pushed into classes will be "labor-saving," that by off-loading mundane tasks to machines, teachers will be able to spend more time "caring." If you start the clock at Sidney Pressey – and why not – we've heard this story for 100 years now; and it seems just as false a narrative as ever.

And while every student who's ever existed has at some point asked, "why the hell are we even doing this mundane task?!" the idea that we'd change the work we expect from students to be less meaningless, less routine rarely seems to cross reformers' minds.