Taking seriously the noise and free-floating anxiety
I’ve always enjoyed Helen Beetham’s writing, and her more recent work on AI has filled a gap for me after Audrey Watters shifted gears. With this post, I’m most interested in the ending, in which Helen reflects on how much time it takes to refute the bullshit.
She links to notmy.ai which outlines why AI is a feminist issue (clue: patriarchal by design, embedded racism, precarious labour).
[W]hen I started a blog about critical approaches to technology in education, I never imagined that generative AI would fill my own horizon. It has not been entirely fun. A colleague recently described it to me as ‘the constant intellectual labour involved in having to take seriously the noise and free-floating anxiety’, and that labour feels increasingly pointless. Talking ‘AI’ down is still talking about AI, it still adds to the vortex of attention. There are other many more important things in the world to be anxious about (though ‘AI’ seems set to make all of them worse).
AI will probably give paying users a new interface on their work and play that will be fun for a while, and then invisible - part of an ever-more-immersive life online. When ROI falters there will be another story (or a newer, better, ‘smarter’ version of the AI story) to sell hyper-productivity and automation to businesses, and to keep driving capital towards the biggest platforms. I just keep thinking that the idea all this has something to do with knowledge or learning is so obviously detrimental to education, and so obviously stupid and wrong, that education will find a way of talking back. Or - because alternative stories are available - will tell these stories confidently, so I can think about something else.
Source: imperfect offerings