The Future, Unevenly Distributed

“The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land; while the rest of us, without access to that machinery, remain stuck in an industrial, even pre-industrial past.

That always strikes me as a huge misread -- not just of the fictional tomorrows that Gibson has imagined, but of the realities of various technologies today. The uneven distribution isn’t simply about the “haves” and “have-nots” of the latest in fancy consumer electronics. Rather, it’s about what sorts of possibilities, what sorts of agency, what sorts of freedoms these technologies might afford us. Who even gets to have a future.

“The future is here” -- and let’s just say that “the future” is some sort of automated classroom – what exactly does it look like? What’s the distribution of that future? And for the community in and around that classroom, what sort of future, whose future, does the robot teacher enable?

“The future is here.” Or at least, some version of a rather Gibson-esque dystopia looms threateningly: “Rural NY School District Will Be One of First to Bring Humanoid Robot Into Classroom,” Melissa Manno reported this week for New York Focus. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on the Seneca Nation reservation, has agreed to purchase a robot from Realbotix for use in the upcoming school year. “The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair. ... Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, [Realbotix CEO Andrew] Kiguel said. ‘They’ll be able to say, “Hey, I’m student number 1234,” and then the robot will be like, “Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?”’

“Hey, I’m student number 1234” – number 1234 in a district where about 80% of the students are classified as “economically disadvantaged” and almost 32% live in poverty. Number 1234 in a district where 32% of students identify as indigenous. Uneven distribution indeed.

And Sally, ah Sally. Sally “will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.” The district reportedly will pay $57,590 for the robot, which “unlike other Realbotix robots ... will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording.” Realbotix, “previously known as Tokens.com,” Kotaku’s John Walker informs us, “a crypto company that has since pivoted to the latest fad, after purchasing sex doll maker Simulacra.”

Realbotix, for its part, insists that this new education-focused product and the old, sex companion robot RealDoll “do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology.” But as robotics researcher Julie Walker notes on Bluesky, “a ‘teacher’ robot built by a company whose core embodiment expertise is companion and sex robots is going to carry that design logic into the classroom, whether anyone intends it or not.” And as all the AI-in-education evangelists keep insisting – and have insisted now for one hundred years – the automation of the classroom means that the teacher can focus more on caring for her students, the very gendered practices that these robots (both embodied and as chatbots) also promise.

“We anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee,” the Realbotix press release insists. It gestures at a future that’s both here and not-yet-so. What’s being distributed unevenly in this future isn’t simply gadgetry: it’s surveillance, ideology, racism, patriarchy, control. Dystopia. The sexbot just embodies, makes explicit, what's a more subtle message encoded into the rest of AI-in-education.

The future that’s promised is a return to some imagined, idyllic past, others try to tell us. “Bring back testing,” we hear over and over and over, as though the polycrises faced by schools and students and communities are because too many people balked at bubble-sheets.

“The Debate Over Standardized Testing Is About to Converge With Two Scary On-Campus Realities” Nick Ripatrazone writes in Slate. Those scary realities that demand a return to more standardized testing and, by extension, better “standards," he implies. The latest college students – those who’ve somehow made it to campus without adequate SAT scores – simply aren’t “college-ready,” he argues. “Already hampered with budgets cuts and bloated class sizes, professors will now regularly be tasked with remedial instruction in all subject areas, not merely in unique situations. Without standardized testing as a reasonable barometer of student skill, colleges will be flooded with students of unknown abilities. American higher education might not be able to withstand such a crisis.”

Related: “Janet Napolitano Helped Kill the SAT. She’s Reconsidering.” by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin.

And of course, plenty of the pressures to keep and expand testing don’t simply come from the tsk-tsking professoriate or contributors to The Atlantic. They come from tech companies, who’ve profited from the push to digitize not just teaching but testing. (These two are, as education psychologists insisted a century ago, inseparable – that is, if you see the classroom as simply a laboratory where students can be trained and tracked and measured like mice in mazes.)

Meanwhile...

“Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price,” Jill Barshay reports. (I’m not sure I really even believe the “save time” bit, to be honest.)

“The End of Homework? Teachers Grapple With Cheating in the Age of AI” by Greg Toppo. (Obligatory reminder: Generative AI is itself built on data theft and plagiarism. It’s pretty rich to expect young people to look at a world rife with fraud and exploitation and then not cheat. These are the values one implicitly encourage when one tells them they must use “AI” to secure their future.)

“To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology,” Kathryn Palmer writes.

I’m willing to retire the “ed-tech’s Cassandra” title – trust me, I’ve never really wanted it – because damn, I would not have predicted that Colin Kaepernick, of all people, would become an ed-tech villain. And yet here we are, with Kaepernick and his AI company Lumi Story AI engaged in some awfully shady shit across multiple school districts.

I mean, it’s bad enough to sell schools a product in which students’ imagination is co-opted and corralled by “AI.” But to use his celebrity as a marketing gimmick to quite literally buy students’ and shape superintendents’ support is pretty gross.

Back in May, 404 Media wrote, in horror, that “Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI.” Parents too were angry that their children might be recorded – audio and video – in order to “develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality.” What about privacy protections? How would this data be used? What rights did families have to consent or to refuse, and what would be the implications of the latter – that is, how would those children who opted out retain access to their classmates and teachers?

None of these sorts of questions come up in a similar sort of research scenario, described in a story this week in The 74 – a reminder that too often, education technology journalism gets far too excited about the education technology at the expense of the very humans involved: “Nebraska Head Starts Use Vests With ‘Talk Pedometers’ to Boost Early Literacy.” In this particular project, preschoolers’ conversations are recorded; their vocalizations quantified, analyzed. But here, rather than a privacy invasion, the technology is framed as a superpower.

The reference to the pedometer in the headline should immediately give us pause because those fitness devices sold the world on the importance of “10,000 steps” – a figure that was always more about marketing than an indicator of some threshold for actual health. (Indeed, the “30 million word gap” is a problematic and questionable framing in and of itself.)

I missed this story, by former Edsurge writer Stephen Noonoo, when it was published a couple of weeks ago: “How ISTE turned EdSurge into slop.” And maybe here I do wish to take that Cassandra moniker back again and remind you that “yeah. I told you so.”

I think I’d quibble with some of Noonoo’s characterizations -- less his starry-eyed memories about his time at Edsurge, but rather his description of ISTE, which he insists is “not a media company.” To be sure, ISTE is now an ed-tech exhibit hall, with an education conference attached. It remains, ostensibly, a membership-based organization, offering professional development services. But it has always also been a publisher -- a media company. Its origins (founded: 1979) can be traced back through Dave Moursund’s Oregon Computing Teacher magazine, then The Computing Teacher, and then Learning and Leading with Technology.

That said, I think one would have to be pretty naive to think that ISTE acquired Edsurge because it was ever interested in some sort of Platonic-ideal of “journalism.” ISTE has always been committed to telling a particular story about the use of computers in the classroom. (In a nutshell: you simply must.) It has been financially obligated to tell a particular story. And that story isn't teachers' or students'; it's industry's.

That's the future that ed-tech journalism distributes, unevenly.

And finally: one of the things I always notice about the writing we now readily identify as “AI” slop: the prose LLMs generate reveals how this technology was trained on precisely the style of chirpy market copy that comprised the Edsurge newsletter (indeed, so much of online writing). In his book Language Machines, Leif Weatherby reminds us that generative AI does not create “cognition”; rather, it churns out “genre.” And the genre of slop that now fills the pages of Edsurge is merely a sad copy, an echo of the genre that was there before.

Today’s bird is the black-crested titmouse, not to be confused with the tufted titmouse – although both are simply ridiculously cute birbs and have been classified as the same then different then same then different species over time. The black-crested titmouse can be found in Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas (and apparently as a “vagrant” in New Mexico, but no judgment, man). According to Wikipedia, “The black-crested titmouse's song is ‘five to seven rapidly delivered slurred phrases peew peew peew peew peew’.” That’s not especially helpful verbiage for identifying the bird, particularly as I read that as sounding much the same as a child, holding their thumb and finger like a weapon, vocalizing gunshots. A Mexican titmouse stand-off. That's where my silly brain goes.

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