Any educator who embraces AI on the basis that students will need to engage with AI in the world of work has missed the point that AI is a fundamentally anti-worker technology which will immiserate students' prospects of getting work and their experience in workplace itself.
Having correctly called out these systems as bullshit engines, what do you see as the promising forms of resistance and/or compelling alternative visions?
Any educator who embraces AI on the basis that students will need to engage with AI in the world of work has missed the point that AI is a fundamentally anti-worker technology which will immiserate students' prospects of getting work and their experience in workplace itself.
"no room for real outliers but sometimes will invent its own" really nails it ✊
"The real work of restructuring reorients the focus from toxic tech to developing techniques for redistributing social power, such as people’s councils and popular assemblies, and for enrolling them in the processes of prefigurative change" [6/n]
"Generative AI is a commitment to growth at all costs, to expansion over lived experience. A pivot to decomputing is a way to reassert the value of situated knowledge and of context over scale" - 'Public policymaking: from AI to decomputing' [5/n]
"Rather than applying AI to policymaking, the focus should be on decomputing; a strategy of reduced dependency on computational scale and of maximum participation by affected communities. Calculative reasoning is no substitute for reflective and discerning judgement" [4/n]
"The embrace of AI is a commitment to extractivism and the transfer of control at a level that supersedes any actual policy" - 'Public policymaking: from AI to decomputing' [3/n]
"Diverting people at scale from educational pathways or from the benefits they need to survive constitutes an algorithmic filter for who is welcome in society and who isn’t. AI’s solutions tend inexorably towards necropolitics" [2/n]
"Evidence already suggests that the entanglement of algorithms with policy solutions leads to the arbitrary scaling of unfairness and cruelty" [1/n]
My new post for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation - 'Public policymaking: from AI to decomputing' www.jrf.org.uk/ai-for-publi...
AI seems to offer many benefits to public policymaking, but it can't address the tricky structural issues that impede actual change.