The Extra Mile
"Well, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time." Except he didn't, of course.
Mussolini sought to convince the world that fascism delivered Italy into a technologically efficient order; and the story was part of the dictator's careful (and successful, even) crafting of a mass-media mythology. As Victoria de Grazia wrote in The New York Times in 1994 when the far Right again won political office in Italy,
The story that Mussolini made the trains run on time arose in the late 20's and gained credence abroad mainly because of well-heeled British tourists who considered the hopelessly refractory Italians governable only by dictatorial means.
Mussolini nurtured this myth, knowing that a well-run train system impressed bourgeois opinion. His regime built magnificent central stations and upgraded the main lines on which businessmen, politicians and comfort-minded tourists sped between Milan and Rome. From 1926 to 1936, the State Railroad Corporation was a model agency. But that's not the whole story.
The railroad workers' union was dissolved and nearly 50,000 employees were fired on political grounds. The toll for work accidents on heroic projects soared. As the direttissimi whizzed by on schedule, aged commuter locals filled with workers were shunted onto sidings.
Folks seem to feel pretty compelled to say something nice about AI. (Y’all have better manners than me, maybe.) And even those who are otherwise skeptical that the technology will be of much use in, say, classroom instruction, will offer that maybe it’ll help with the various bureaucratic tasks that take up far too much of teachers’ time/energy.
Artificial intelligence will make the trains run on time, or something. It won’t, of course.
AI will be rolled out as part of the coming (or ongoing, rather) austerity — not to make teachers’ work easier but to make school operation cheaper, to make administrative decision-making more opaque. It won’t mean there’s less bureaucracy — to the contrary, capitalism demands management, and an information-hungry management technology will demand more information-generating policies and practices. There will be more bullshit work with AI, not less. Nonetheless, AI will justify its existence with the sort of mis-remembered boasting about efficiency and efficacy that’d make Mussolini proud.
