Is AI Being Oversold in Schools? A Quick Look Back to the 1990s and 2000s Would Say Yes Because Teachers Are AI-ed To

Techno-promoters, to use a term that Larry Cuban used in his 2001 book “Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom” have used a distinct set of “interlocking assumptions” to justify the expenses and adoption of technologies since the push  to put PCs in every classroom and wire schools for the internet.

These “interlocking assumptions” can be captured in the following:

• availability = increased use
• increased use = efficient teaching and better learning
• efficient teaching and better learning = higher achievement and better educated and capable workers.

These assumptions (by the way come directly from Cuban’s 2001 book) have not proven to be true at all.

Ed Tech and school technology boosters have been using those assumptions to the point that they are clichés. They are as tired and worn out as an old 386 PC sitting on a shelf gathering dust and are not true.

The problem is, you can map the same assumptions on current efforts to push AI into schools. For example:

• If AI is available to students in classrooms, then there will be increased use by teachers and students.
• If students and teachers increase their use of AI in the classroom, then more efficient teaching and better learning will occur.
• If there’s more efficient teaching and better learning, then students will be better educated for the workforce and experience higher achievement.

You really have to hand it to the Ed Tech world and Ed AI boosters; they stick to the script, and not a single speck of out-of-the-box thinking here.

That’s the problem with all of the AI hype and push into education; there’s nothing original, absolutely nothing original about it.

Ed Tech and AI boosters are so enamored with the tech, they can’t stop to have single critical thought. They are unable to criticize the current claims being made about AI and have bought into the gold rush to integration.

Like computers, AI is being “Oversold and will likely be underused” just like computers were when Cuban wrote his book. 

And, I would say for the exact same reason: teachers, those in the classrooms now, are being trained on and marketed to; they are being coaxed and made to feel guilty; and they are being called out of touch and a Luddite if they resist.

Just like Cuban pointed out in 2001 about computers: teachers are not being given a say on how and whether AI is useful in their teaching and in their students’ learning.

If I were into betting in long-term prediction markets, after all the AI boosterism’s push into schools is done, we will get the same results we have with all the other technology integration efforts, which is a lot of money, time, and effort wasted with little to show for it.

You would think Ed Tech and AI boosters would use some different kind of promotional playbook with a new set of assumptions, but alas, when you have a unquestioning “fundamentalist faith” that technology will bring salvation, you keep waiting for your messiah.

Trump's Relabeling Artificial Intelligence Is An Attempt Divert Attention from the Harms It's Causing by Giving It Messianic Status: It's a Ruse

Trump's renaming of artificial intelligence to "super intelligence" is his attempt to try to claim some kind of "miracle-forming status" for the technology.  A messianic status.

He's trying to elevate to a status whose pursuing is above question. Its pursuit is worth sacrificing the environment. Sacrificing even people.

It is worth diverting all the energy and water resources needed, even at the expense of people.

It is an attempt to elevate the technology to almost a deity status.

He, as all the tech billionaires who surrounded him are working for power and money, and not the interests of this country or humanity. It's greed and power at its worst.

It will always be artificial intelligence, and even using that term is not entirely adequate because it assumes that there is an intelligence presence like that of humans.

Sherry Turkle Nails the Problem with Generative AI and Chatbots in a Single Book: Every Educator Needs to Read This One

What happens when we talk to machines? Lean on chatbots as if they were human? Turns out there are some serious consequences to us as humans, according to Sherry Turkle, in her new book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.”

Set aside the anecdotes of efficacy and the narratives of salvation by chatbot that are circulating by AI boosters, you really have a technology that has the potential to fundamentally change us, and in ways that have consequences for ourselves and for society.

Silicon Valley and AI boosters are whooping it up about their favorite technology and the miracles it has wrought, but there are more insidious consequences if we start talking to these chatbots and treating AI as if they were a human.

Turkle captures those consequences at length in this book. In short, they

 “don’t teach us what we need to know about the give-and-take of real relationships, or the friction, risk, and complexities of love. They don’t show us how to deal with loss by internalizing what is gone. They take on work assignments but don’t care if we have a sense of mastery or agency.They are good at keeping us busy, but can’t give us a sense of place. And they don’t teach us about empathy, or about human lives that are always embodied, social, and lived in shades of gray.” p. 218 

As I read Turkle’s take on generative AI and chatbots that people starting treating as companions, and as human, I think I get it.

Generative AI and chatbots have the potential of crippling us as humans. Of turning us into hermits in our homes where speaking to a chatbot is more real than with a person in the world. Of shielding us of the very things in life, though difficult, are necessary for our growth.

Even worse, this technology of human impersonation, because its design is always to tell us what we want to hear, can extend a narcissistic mirror to us where we are deceived in believing that we can’t do wrong; that we are geniuses; and that all our answers are found in machines.

I have read through Turkle’s book once, but “Wow!” there is so much there, I am sure I will stew and read and reread and write on this for sometime.

 The practical take for now, at least for me, the problem with chatbots and generative AI happens when you treat its output as human and forget the machine that generated it. That action alone degrades us as humans and elevates what is just machine to our level. We should not let ourselves be dazzled by magic!

I highly recommend “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines” by Sherry Turkle. 

Every educator needs to read this one in order to put, not just generative AI and chatbots in their proper place, but to potentially help students to keep the proper perspective on all technology in age of constant AI and technological hype. 

 More to come to his book.

When Educational Leaders and School Technology Leaders Became AI Cheerleaders and Delivered Their School Children to AI Companies

A recent “round table discussion” (See article link at bottom) among education and technology leaders is more like a “Cheering pep rally for AI” than a critical discussion about AI’s place in our schools.

This incident is an excellent example of school leaders serving as a conduit for providing AI companies direct access to school children as uncritical users and consumers of AI.

At this so-called "round-table discussion" there was not a single voice of critical dissent (at least not reported in article) or pushback on AI and what it is doing to our environment, our society, and possibly to our children's minds.

It seems as if every single leader at this round table was a voice for OpenAI, or Google, or Anthropic. They might as well be on their payroll.

There are many school leaders who see their role to deliver students as users and consumers of the latest Silicon Valley tech all in the name of “preparing students for whatever age is brought about by the technology.”

They all assume that there's going to be "an AI-shaped workplace" without mentioning anything that a major goal of AI companies is replacing employees. It is might more likely be a workplace dominated by AI where employees are minions serving the machine in lower paying jobs.

Are there no critical thinkers among school leaders and educational technology leaders? There should be. The consequences of AI are going to be enormous for all of us. We're not talking about calculators here. We're talking about potential technologies that impersonate humans and the AI industry has made it clear it intends to replace workers and their jobs.

There was a time when educational leadership was about advocating for students and not the latest offering from Silicon Valley.

(Portrait of a Graduate in the AI Age, Tech & Learning)

When the Altman's and Amodei's of This World Say Their Technologies Are World-Ending, Digital/AI Literacy Involves Interrogating Their Words

If we’re going to teach digital/AI literacy, then at the forefront of those efforts, we should be examining statements like this one with our students:

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” Sam Altman

I can’t help but wonder what good great companies are if the world has ended, but we have FOR WAY TO LONG given technology companies and their leaders some kind of elevated status in our world. It’s time to interrogate them and their work and to unveil what it is they are really doing in our world. What’s more, we need to teach our students how to do it.

Even if one sets this crazy statement aside to Altman’s ego-mania, or even some kind of twisted marketing-promotion, these kinds of statements are worthy of close interrogation, and that’s what a true digital/AI literacy program should do; not just examine the technologies, but examine the entire marketing, promotion, and culture surrounding these technologies.

The simple fact that someone would make this kind of statement is important for critical examination. Such questions like: “What kind of person would continue to advocate for a technology that is world-ending?” is exactly what we should be teaching with all technology literacy.

Instead of using digital/AI literacy to program our students as users of these technologies, we need to teach them to interrogate all aspects of them. Quesitons like the following should be central to AI literacy:

-Who is going to benefit the most from these?

-Why are the leaders of the companies that develop these technologies making apocalyptic statements, and yet, still continuing to make those products?

-What kind of values does a human being hold who makes these statements and yet charges full steam ahead in developing such a product?

-Why would we want such a person even be leading these efforts?

-Are their values my values? Are they values that align with the good of all of us?

-What can I do as a user/non-user of their products do to counter the damage their products cause? Should I even be enabling these individuals by using their products?

Being technologically literate means being able to see everything about that technology, not just being able to use that technology. It means being empowered with critical knowledge to make one’s own decisions about what technologies we should value.

Digital/AI literacy should never be about user conformity.

We need to equip students to question and interrogate the technologies and the claims being made by those who stand to benefit the most from them. When they make insane statements like this, we have in our hands words that can tell us a great deal about the values of the makers of these products which will always be embedded within them.

Proposal for Decentering Devices From Your Life and at the Same Time Put Influencers Out of Business

I stumbled across some interesting advice regarding how we take back control of our thoughts, our lives from our devices and their makers. It seems to be sound advice.

We must learn how to “manage the information flows into our minds in order to hear our own voice” according to Nate Anderson, author of the book “In Emergency, Break Glass.”

We manages those information flows very simply:

-By gaining control of our notifications by turning them off so that the device does not dominate our own thoughts. We put ourselves in control of the technology and remove ourselves from the control of the device and its makers.

-By engaging in the mental discipline that is focused on restricting words and ideas in a healthy manner so that we do not gorge our minds on internet garbage to our own detriment.

We are capable of thinking for ourselves when our minds are not flooded with the ideas, thoughts, and voices of others and when we are free to choose the “when” of that information flow.

Social media, the web, all technology floods the mind with these voices and ideas, and by controlling the flood of notifications into our lives and by restricting ideas, throughts and voices that are a detriment to our own lives, we gain a freedom from devices who are engineered to make us do the opposite.

Social media is a torrent of what everyone else has to say and is thinking even if it is not good for us.

These two actions rip the influence from the “influencer” and just turns them into another voice out there. Who needs them anyway?

How Wrong We Were as School Leaders Bragging about One-to-One Technology Ratios and Other Frivolity Driven-Measures

Remember as a school leader bragging about your school’s one-to-one computer ratios as if that was some kind of badge saying we had entered the 21st century? How mistaken we were!

Schools are notorious for using such frivolous measures of quality and status. It’s like bragging that your school has a 98% attendance rate, yet, if what students do during that increased presence is no more instructionally sound and effective, it is a meaningless statement.

The same applies to technology. We get tangled in the numbers like computer ratios and numbers of teachers trained in AI, like that really tells us anything.

We like to call that data-driven, but in reality, it is frivolity-driven leadership and education. 

School letter grades are mostly derived from this frivolous data, so they are basically a measure of frivolousness. Well, one thing school letter grades do well is provide a pretty good indicator of our students’ sociodemographic status.

So what really matters about technology and how can we measure it so we can boast about it? 

I am not really sure on this one. All measures can be used in a frivolous manner too, even test scores. I suspect there isn’t any one measure worthy of being a bragging point by itself, but we often do it anyway.

In a world where schools are constantly trashed by various industries and tech companies for the purposes of generating a market, education suffers from low self-esteem, so we listen to any critic offering their latest take.

If a person who has an interest in selling you a technology or any product for that matter and tells you schools suck and I can help you, most of us already are listening.

Our mistake as school leaders we use frivolous data to justify our existence, and we allow others who want to use us a market to use frivolous data. Educators need to be much more critical and ask the tough questions of any claims made by tech companies and their boosters.