The Work Ahead
There's already been so much ink spilled on the elections and what they mean for education and technology, and I'm a little late to the game (having had very poor timing with the newsletter I sent out last Wednesday, not really thinking about how everyone's minds would be on the midterms and not on "managed services" and outsourcing. Ah well).
I do still feel obligated to utter "I told you so," directed particularly at all those folks who’ve kept insisting that everyone loves “AI” and everyone uses "AI" and that, even if they didn’t, there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. It's clear – or I hope it's clearer – that a lot of voters actually hate "AI" – both the technology itself and everything that it symbolizes: wealth inequality, authoritarianism, corruption, nihilism, violence, theft, unaccountability, environmental destruction, indeed the destruction of any notion of the future other than the one that these terrible, terrible tech CEOs seem to have for us.
On the heels of last Tuesday’s results, it’s rather striking to see both the policies and the reporting that were obviously already underway before voters went to the polls -- particularly the efforts by those shaping the practices and the narratives around "AI": Google's decision, most notably, to force schools into using "AI" by threatening to take away their access to Search. This was obviously a decision by a group of people who did not believe that the opposition to "AI" (and ed-tech more generally) was real, substantial, or growing... or that this opposition might matter; this was a move by people who do not give a shit about the users of their product, let alone democracy. (I'm sorry / not sorry to those who work for Google and who remain convinced that they are "doing good." Continuing to outsource infrastructure to giant monopolistic corporations is profoundly dangerous, even if you personally have really sweet and lovely intentions about how children and educators use your corporate software.)
The latest issue of New York Magazine also demonstrates how grossly out-of-touch many people in the media are (and not just the Rooses and Newtons and various other tech-adoring podcast-bros either) with an issue on the dozen people who will shape the future of “AI,,” again reinforcing this false narrative that this technology is inevitable, that the control over technology by a handful of (mostly) men (and not a single Black person, not one African) is acceptable -- a message that was absolutely rejected on Tuesday as there are millions and millions and millions of us who will shape the future of "AI" and, you can fuck right off with your insistence otherwise.
There's so much hard work to do – there always is. But this is the work. As Astra Taylor observed in The New Yorker:
Tech oligarchs aren’t going away. They have a lot of power. They have a lot of money. They showed us what they’re willing to do, and that’s still their horizon. You don’t subscribe to an anti-human agenda like that by accident.
That this anti-human agenda is so deeply interwoven into education technology should give more people more pause, I've long argued. "Education" doesn't have to be synonymous with surrender to the script, to the algorithm, to the machine (even if it has been, in so many ways, digital or otherwise).
Elsewhere in ed-tech:
“A 13-Year-Old Asked AI About Suicide on Her School Laptop. It Didn’t Get Flagged for Weeks,” by Paresh Dave and Caroline Haskins in Wired.
Via Bloomberg Businessweek's Olivia Carville: "The Confidential Payments Meta and TikTok Made to Addicted Teens."
Fortune’s Sydney Lake writes that “The Gates Foundation is spending $400 million on AI in schools. Teachers warn it could ‘end up widening’ the divide it’s meant to close.” I mean, this is what the history of education technology – the last thirty years of it funded by the Gates Foundation – teaches us: ed-tech exacerbates inequalities (and not only because billionaires aren't taxed out of existence and get to pour money into these redemption-narrative-tax-dodges, to dictate terrible education policies for other people's children. But damn, that sure doesn't help.)
Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “When Technology Harms Learning” – many teachers notice that ed-tech sucks, even if tech evangelists refuse to.
So gee, why are so many teachers not using “AI” – like, not at all? It isn't just that it sucks for students, damaging their ability to actually learn; it sucks for teachers too. Dan Meyer tests a bunch of different “AI” products in order to create a worksheet and concludes that
“I don’t think many teachers have the time or inclination to fiddle—to translate a handout from their imagination into words and then fiddle with whatever an LLM produces from those words.
Fiddling is fun for a lot of people. You enter a slightly different prompt and get a result that is slightly closer to what you want. For a lot of people—especially people who work in technology—that process is a happy one, even addictive, like a slot machine. For teachers—overworked and underresourced; class starting in an hour—I suspect that generative AI’s fiddly nature releases more cortisol than dopamine, more stress than relief.
“The Parents Suing Schools Because Their Kids Got Bad Grades.” I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that The Wall Street Journal finds this shitty practice is happening in Silicon Valley. (Related, no doubt: one of the reasons, perhaps, why ed-tech has been able to overrun the education system is that we have already hyper-individualized and hyper-datafied the world and turned everything about the future into a race, a competition, a game, a fight, a struggle.)
The New Yorker's Jessica Winter discovers "The Technofeudalist Nightmare of K-12 Curricula."
The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang on “What constant surveillance is doing to children” (and their parents). It isn't, I'd say, simply that hyper-vigilance and fear-mongering do not foster curiosity, resilience, or growth – although that's clearly important, and we can see the results all around us, in a world in which digital surveillance has undermined trust in one's self and one another. This is also a world that has stripped us of rights I'm not sure we ever really articulated until now that they're waving: the right to be and, crucially, the right to be left alone. From the latter comes the right to define who we are by ourselves, for ourselves; the right to govern our bodies and our minds and to experiment in ways big and small, in the safety of solitude and mutuality, on what exactly that might look like.
As LLMs infiltrate schools, will they demotivate children from ever developing an interest in how to learn, preventing them from experiencing any of the joy that can be associated with thinking things through? Faced with any difficult subject, AI will be there to remind us that anyone can passably mimic authoritative knowledge without grasping the first thing about a topic. It will deplete our sense of language as a collective project, making it seem like a static and lifeless, not an emblem of our driving impulse to collaborate with each other but yet another means of normalization and control — truly the “prison-house” the structuralists conceived.
The point of education can then become a matter of consuming abstract demonstrations of “convenience,” without students having to commit to caring about any underlying interests. Untethered from any particular goal, their self-optimization can become a kind of infinite regress, an insatiable preoccupation that promises to pre-empt other forms of existential anxiety. Ignorance appears as efficiency, and helplessness appears as liberation (as when rich people proudly advertise their turning to chatbots for help with basic human decency).
“What if you started a university from scratch, with AI at its core?” asks Shea Vance in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I mean, what if you didn’t? What if, instead of hopping on every single new tech trend, you were more thoughtful and deliberative? What if you asked about the history of “why do we do this” in schools not to as a path towards automation or outsourcing but as a move towards liberation? What if you put humans rather than machines at the center of your institution (and not just in the empty rhetoric of mission statements)? What if you believed in students and faculty, what if you cared for them as a community – indeed as citizens – and not merely as consumers?
Today’s bird is the groove-billed ani, a member of the cuckoo family. The groove-billed ani is entirely black, with a very long tail (almost as long as the rest of its body) and a tall, curved beak (grooved, natch). All About Birds describes the groove-billed ani as “disheveled” which feels unnecessarily judgy, if you ask me. Like other anis, these particular birds tend to live in small groups of 1-5 breeding pairs, laying their eggs in one communal nest.
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