Should We Subject Our Students to AI Products as They Now Exist? There Are Reasonable Objections

What is most objectionable about the current iterations of AI that we have available? Here’s what’s most objectionable:

AI has been developed by Silicon Valley Companies with questionable motives and with Silicon Valley CEOs who have repeatedly demonstrated that they will sacrifice the well-being of everyone and the world community for profit. Their ethics are aligned with selfish gain. That will lead to an AI that ultimately serves their ends and not anyone else’s—just look at what has happened to the web and social media as well as all smart technologies.

Another objection has to do with the drive to sacrifice the environment and natural resources at all costs in their pursuit of profit. Their push to create massive server farms are depleting water supplies, forcing more fossil fuel use, consuming vast amounts of resources to create a monster with will perpetually consume more and more, pushing human needs aside.

Still another objection is that Silicon Valley and AI creators are pushing full steam ahead in creating a machine that can further pollute the world with misinformation and so-called “AI-Slop” that pushes people further into schizophrenic world where people are lost and unable to experience the world as it is.

Next, AI is also objectionable because it is a misguided effort to re-create human intelligence in a Frankensteinian effort to replicate ourselves. Such efforts rarely end well as history and our own literature tells us, even if it is possible. This recreation of “human intelligence” is being attempted without any clear definition of what such intelligence is. In other words, Silicon Valley is creating intelligence as it thinks it is, which is problematic because they do not share our human values.

Finally, AI offerings today are objectionable because there is an intense lack of trust when it comes to sharing any more data with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Silicon Valley has not been great stewards of what we have shared with them, using our own data to profit while making us more unsafe. These companies would sacrifice your data-well-being in a minute for profit, and they’ve proven it.

When I advocate caution or even resistance to Ed Tech AI evangelism and AI generally, it is usually due to these objections. Silicon Valley has proven untrustworthy most of all, and I would not do anything to be further complicit in connecting them to the even greater data sources of our students freely sharing information with their products.

Social Media and the National Enquirer Condition

Social media sites like Linked-In suffer from what I would call the "National Enquirer Condition” (NEC). That's why the information offered on social media must be read with a highly critical eye. Social media has become the new 21st century tabloid.

The National Enquirer, if you remember is a Tabloid that uses sensational headlines and photo covers to lure and entice grocery shoppers to pick up and purchase their so-called news magazines. 

Content was only as important as to its ability to attract eyeballs. 

Social media suffers immensely from NEC, not because it provides a platform for quality content; but because it provides a platform to spread content that engages, where Truth does not matter, nor does quality content.

What matters is whether or not you focus on eyeball attraction above all else. Quality and truth are secondary.

Post every day, even if you have nothing to say and the machine spread your content like a manure spreader.

The end result of the National Enquirer Condition?

Social media platforms become malarkey megaphones. All content is degraded and tarnished. Promotion is the game not having something worthwhile to say.

And, if you still don’t get enough eyeballs gaming the Enquirer algorithm, you can pay to spread it as well.

Watch Out for AI Snake Oil Salespersons and This One Tactic

I’ve noticed a recent AI promotional tactic that AI Evangelists have been employing with increasing frequency. (It’s used heavily with other products and technologies too.) It goes like this…

AI is not the problem…

_________ is the problem.

(Insert in the blank whatever object, service, or notion that is being promoted).

For example, if I were selling a consultancy that helps schools develop AI policy, I would say the following:

“AI is not the problem,

Lack of sound AI policy is the problem.”

But there is a deception in this promotional tactic, that the savy leader needs to know about. It involves using the tactic of “inoculating the target against any idea or misgivings that AI has problems.” Immediately the statement “AI is not the problem” tries to place it beyond question. That’s deceptive.

Deceptively, that is not true. AI has plenty of problems technically, morally, and ethically and much has been and is being written about it. There are also problems inherently instilled within these products, but by immediately deflecting attention from the issues, one is prevented from even going there, and focuses on the product being sold.

If a product promotion requires deceptive and manipulative practices to make a sale, is the product really worth it? But perhaps that’s just modern sales for some. 

Watch and be critical at all times. AI snake oil salespersons abound.

When It Comes to AI, the Field of Ed Tech Acts Like a Fundamentalist Religion

Has the field of Ed Tech become like a “fundamentalist” religion? In some ways it has.

Ed Tech as a field appears to sometimes take it by faith that there are no instructional and educational problems that can’t be solved by technology.

As a corollary to this solutionistic view of technology, any technological gadget or invention has some kind of application in schools if only it can be found. And, it is responsibility of all educators to integrate these gadgets otherwise they are going to be left behind.

At its core, Ed Tech is in some ways like a fundamentalist religion. It requires that one keep these two principles of faith at all times. It dismisses any questions of technology’s central place in education. 

If one questions a new technology or whether it really has application in schools, that person is declared a heretic or an obstacle to progress. There is no room for dissent.

This is perhaps as Big Tech, Ed Tech, and consultants would have it it seems. What better way to invent, market, and ensure adoption and their prosperity? If critical talk about technologies such as AI are short-circuited from the beginning, then these benefactors of that tech win. 

The problem is, sometimes students lose due to negative consequences, only to be experienced years later.

Why Talk About Ed Tech Integration is a Bad Idea?

Why is all the talk about integrating Tech into education a bad idea? Here’s why?

The issue is the idea of “integrating.” To “integrate means to combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole.”

This notion of “integrating” implies that teaching and learning and educating are somehow “incomplete” or not whole, and that the tech to be integrated is somehow AUTOMATICALLY going to bring about that wholeness. Not so, as history has shown us many, many times.

To speak of “integrating” a tech is to assume it is whole and sufficiently able to offer a solution to whatever instructional problem ails the teaching act. Often, these technologies are not whole by themselves and they come bundled with a whole host of unintended and sometimes nasty consequences. (That just means the teacher now has to spend inordinate amounts of time addressing these side effects.)

Instead, the Ed Tech conversation should always be about ADOPTION. This immediately reframes the entire Ed Tech conversation. 

Ed Tech companies would help education even more if they designed their products as a solution to specific problems, instead of wasting time trying to get teachers to find ways to make their products useful and legitimate.

Their products should be solutions to specific educational problems, not solutions in search of educational problems to solve.

The reason the whole Ed Tech goal should be adoption instead of integration is because the “act of adopting” places that teacher as a AGENT in the process. No longer are they subjected to Ed Tech; they choose the tech tools they need.

Educators as “adopters” have the power to investigate technologies, ask the tough questions, and if they find it inadequate as a solution; they can veto it.

In the ED TECH ADOPTION model, the teacher is empowered to make decisions about the tools they will use or not use.

In the contrast between Ed Tech integration versus adoption, a tech solution is truely evaluated for its usefulness in specific teaching situations.

It's Time to Rethink the Teacher Shortage Problem and It Does Not Involve Pay

 Perhaps the real problem with the shortage of teachers is that fewer and fewer people want to do the work as it has evolved over the past 30 years or so. 

When I started teaching in 1989 teachers operated in classrooms that allowed for independent creavitity, initiative, and excitement. There were no testing surveillance systems. You could operate without the intrusion of administrative experts and consultants who claimed to know how to teach content better than you. Parents were generally supportive of teachers and were not engaged in antagonistic tactics to what you were doing. They came to you if their were problems usually, and the teacher could work with the parent.

Classrooms have become culture war zones. They are places where the teacher often receives less and less professional deference. Instead, there are so many voices out their saying, “No, you need to do it this way, not that.” In a word, teaching has been transformed into a mechanistic scientific management task where one is surrounded by a troup of experts all telling the her/him how to do the job. 

There is no art to teaching anymore, because the administrators and their cadre of experts have transformed the instructional act into a scientific management work task.

It’s no longer rewarding to be a teacher. So, the answer seems to be in focusing on pay. Certainly you can find someone willing to do this work for the right pay, the idea goes. The problem is apparently you can’t pay enough for someone to do the teaching work today because fewer want to do it.

The reality is, teaching has lost what librarian-researcher Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe.” 

Vocational awe is defined as a set of notions that Librarians have about their institution and themselves. To have vocational awe, the worker has to believe in their institution’s goodness and rightness. Also, the worker has to believe that their profession, the work they do is inherently good and sacred. In other other words, the worker believes their work is a calling, which means they will endure and persevere in the work tasks because of the good, sacred and worthwhile big picture.

Teaching has lost this vocational awe. Schools are constantly labeled failing by everyone. Even administors focus on the negative always in an environment of so-called continuous improvement. In addition, the teacher’s work is no longer seen as sacred, as special because it has been turned into tasks to be carried out scientifically. The teacher’s institution and the teacher’s work is fundamentally degraded by a system paranoiacally obsessed with trying to improve or change, in the worship of constant innovation.

What’s more, administrators and school HR recruiters can no longer capitalize on “vocational awe” to fill teaching positions. That’s because the “awe of teaching” and “being a teacher” is gone. 

The profession of teaching has been destroyed by politicians who want to cut budgets and continuously impose new requirements on teachers. 

It has been decimated by administrators who think they know how to teach so well, they constantly intrude into classrooms with their so-called coaching and feedback, treating teachers as if they don’t know anything. 

The teaching profession has been decimated by a consultant industry made up of experts who say they know teaching better, even though some of them spent less time in the classroom, and sometimes no time there.

The teaching shortage problem will not be solved by pay alone. 

It will certainly not be solved by relying on the vocational awe myth any more because no one is buying it. 

The teaching problem will only be solved if those who have degraded the work of teaching to the point that no one wants to do it, no matter the pay, are convinced to change their ways. 

No one wants to be a teacher anymore because vocational awe no longer exists.

Teaching Students About AI or Any Technology Just Might Be Shortsighted and Morally Wrong

Should our schools be focused on training students how to use AI above all else? No. Here’s why…

In the 1990s, I taught at a high school located in an area where 3 major fiber option manufacturers had set up shop, and they partnered with our schools to prepare students for the kinds of jobs they had to offer.

I attended multiple PD sessions, guided by district personnel and trainers from these three manufacturers. The goal was to train teachers to teach students the kinds of skills these manufacturers, and others like them, valued in employees.

I went back to my classroom and dutifully and conscientiously taught those skills because it was my job to teach students for the jobs in their future.

Fast forward 7 or 8 years later…the fiber optic industry tanked when demand fell. These manufacturers closed plants, merged and merged again, and laid off workers and shifted jobs to foreigh countries. Many lost their jobs, perhaps even some that I had dutifully prepared for that future.

The point here is business and manufacturing often live and survive in the short term and the now. They no longer provide lifetime careers. If profits can be made by shifting manufacturing elsewhere, they move. That’s how it is.

As educators, to prepare students for any jobs that exist currently or even hypothetically in the future is also shortsighted and potentially morally wrong. The current job situation will change when companies find the grass greener elsewhere, and trying to teach skills for jobs whose existence we are trying to predict or guess about is gambling our students’ futures. That is wrong.

The Seers of Silicon Valley have gotten much wrong in the past. I bet their predictions about AI will be wrong as well, or at least far off the mark.

As educators, we need to teach students, not for theoretical futures. We need to teach them everything that will allow them to live, adapt, cope, and survive in uncertainty and be decent, critical human beings.

Obsessively focusing on AI or any technology of the day is as shortsighted as most businesses currently operate. Sure, knowing what AI is, its faults, its capabilities, its limitations, its effects on culture and the environment, are all needed, but not placed at the center of all learning.

The point is, we do not need to do Silicon Valley bidding and teach students to be dutiful users of AI or any technology; we need to teach way beyond that to a world where AI has passed into banality and life has moved on to even greater things.