Click here and read this gut-wrenching, inciteful and devastating piece on AI’s impact on education and beyond, by the transcendent Audrey Watters.
Here is a snippet from the end of the piece. But please, don’t read it here, click into the full piece. Slow down. Read every word. If you are not in education, just think about it in your domain. I sure think about it as a person who deeply values community. My take away from Audrey is to pay attention to what gives rise to AI, not AI itself. Read it, please.
We grieve because we love. We grieve because we care. We grieve because we know that the machines do not, and that the community we try to foster — on campus, in the classroom, in our scholarly works — is threatened with erasure. We grieve because we fear forgetting; we worry that people will forget what is beautiful and what is difficult and what is joyous and what is horrible about education. We worry that, if we do not grieve, we give up the struggle to go on, to persevere, to live.
But we do not, we should not grieve alone. We should not be made to feel alone, feel crazed by our grief, feel crazed for grieving. We can, we should grieve together, grieve in public, grieve in protest. Such is comfort – “com” + “fort,” a word that means “with” + “strength.”
Technologies are often wielded in ways meant to imply that humans are weak, messy, slow, stupid, replaceable.
We are strong, messy, awkward, flawed, irreplaceable. All of us.
Our strength comes, in part, from this vulnerability, from our humanity. Together in the flesh. Not isolated, individualized thru some algorithm. We cannot allow systems and practices and machinery to foreclose this humanity, to automate the decisions, the expressions, the explorations that we turn to and that we struggle with in education, in this imperfect but liminal space of learning.
“There is no good way to say this” but to say this: AI is the antithesis of education. It is the antithesis of the future. As such, it is a kind of epistemological death, and I recognize — thanks to capitalism and neoliberalism and imperialism and racism — we have long been surrounded by such efforts; we are grieving already. And yet, we go on.
One final note that I think I’d be remiss not to state, even though there is no good way, or rather no polite way to say this:
Some men (and I do mean mostly men) would rather spend trillions of dollars on an idea that is financially, technologically, morally, and environmentally unsustainable, they’d rather destroy democracy and destroy education and destroy the planet than just get therapy.
