Technology Is a Technology (of Oppression)
AI isn't the world's greatest evil. It is a small part of the world's greatest evil. [LINK DROP]
Good news! The rural upstate New York school district that spent almost $60,000 to bring “Sally,” an AI-powered human-esque robot, to its classrooms, has paused its plans. The school board had partnered with an AI startup called Realbotix to introduce the bot in order to theoretically teach kids about technology. But the plans hit a snag when the New York State teacher’s union pointed out that Realbotix’s sister company was a hyperrealistic sex doll manufacturer.
The union also voiced concerns that the bot would be the first step in replacing real-life teachers with further iterations of humanoid AI machines. Which, parents and community members said, is the last thing kids needed in an era of falling-apart schools and overcrowded classrooms. “They just need to hire more people who are willing to put in the effort for the children,” one community member said. “They need more interaction with the children than having some robot raise our kids.”
The controversy over Sally makes sense, of course. But, in some ways, nixing Sally is kind of shooting the messenger (thankfully one that can’t feel). Or, really, it’s like trying to deal with the knotweed in my yard that attempts to destroy everything else: I can pull out the leaves and stems as much as I want, but it’ll always grow back unless I kill the roots.
The real problem here is not one robot threatening a teacher’s union; it’s that we have completely devalued the education system—and the very idea of thinking—in this country. And at the same time, not by coincidence, placed way more value in technologies of automation.
If we think of any system—the education system, our political system, systems like AI and robotics—as technologies (like, in the Foucaultian sense), then what we’ve been doing as a society for way longer than the current AI boom is privileging technologies that enrich the already-rich and devaluing ones that are more socialist and that thus help foster equality (public schools, for example).
A real blind-spot, in my opinion, in anti-AI discourse is that AI is not really a distinct thing. Whether you use ChatGPT or Claude or refuse to use any of them, you are likely already using AI when you interact with any piece of personal tech these days. Your feeds are governed by AI-assisted algorithms. Your web search is too. Your doctor is probably using it to help diagnose you (more than 80 percent of doctors use AI regularly).
The problems with these technologies is not that they’re somehow vastly different and worse than, say, the technology of the iPhone or the technology of Facebook and Instagram. The internet was never good. It was invented by war profiteers back in the 90’s. The difference is just that generative AI is the latest and furthest node on a spectrum of industrial technologies that have an explicit (but most-often unstated) purpose of destroying the cohesion and and quality and equality of our society—making us lonelier, more depressed, less educated—in order to enrich a select few people.
In the post-war era of the West, other technologies were considered more important for the continuance of capitalist society—the technology of education to train people’s brains to be effective workers in an increasingly knowledge-based economy; the technology of offices to house workers while they worked; the technology of parks and subways and so on, so that the people in those offices could get to and from them, and not kill themselves from ennui after exiting them each day.
But those things are increasingly unnecessary for capitalism to function these days. And if they’re less useful to the goings-on of capitalism, then they’re going to increasingly be considered too expensive for the capitalists to maintain.
So, it’s not that AI is a direct threat to education, it’s that the rise of AI and the fall of education are two sides of the same coin. In the same way that rural communities were devalued and destroyed by the rise of the technology of the factory once it became more profitable to make things out of metal than it did to grow food, we can see the devaluation of education as a much broader devaluing of the service-based, knowledge-based economy of the post-war era.
Which is headlines like the following ones keep cropping up: