The Promo-Rhetoric of Silicon Valley Infiltrate's Bowen and Watson's book "Teaching with AI"

I read Jose Bowen and C. Edward Watson's book "Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning" because I noticed a few plugs for the tome on social media and I am intensely interested in this new fad called "Teaching with AI."

What immediately struck me about this book is that it immediately engages in the Silicon Valley tactic of short-circuiting the debate of whether AI should be used in teaching at all with the so-called "inevitability argument." This is the Valley's perfect marketing tactic that was employed by social media companies and technology companies when they hawked their products in the 2000s.

The truth is we do not need to accept uncritically this "inevitability argument" when it comes to AI. We can not only simply choose not to use it as teachers, we can ask tough questiosn about it, such as what are the possible negative consequences in engaging this technology in our classrooms.

Choosing not to use it is an option and refusing to accept the Silicon Valley inevitability argument is perfectly rational. The world isn't going to leave us behind in caves trying to start fires by rubbing two sticks together. Choosing not to use it is not a detrimental choice; it can be a critical, thoughtful and moral choice.

What Bowen and Watson's book gets wrong is not all of its attempts to get teachers to use Silicon Valley's latest offering. What it gets terribly wrong is that we have no choice but to use AI.

We can, however, refuse and critically question the promo-rhetoric that these authors engage in. I would expect teachers who really want to engage students in the most worthy of learning would do no less that engage students in thinking critically about whether engaging in its use is inevitable.

AI Is Not the Inevitable Answer to What Ails Us: We've Seen Artificial Solutions Before

"The myth of artificial intelligence is that its arrival is inevitable, and only a matter of time--that we have already embarked on the path that will lead to human-level AI, and then superintelligence. We have not. The path exists only in our imaginations." Erik Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do

The AI cheerleaders are working overtime. Not a day goes by that some email, social media post, or news story appears that has the message, "If you don't engage in using AI, you will be technologically behind", or as the old Silicon doctrine says, "You will be irrelevant." AI is here and it will "inevitably take your jobs because it will be able, if not already, to do your job better than you."

Now set aside for a minute the ridiculous psychology behind this obsession by people who search for machines that can literally put them out of a job. That contradiction has actually been well addressed by authors like Kurt Vonnegut in his futuristic and dystopian novel Player Piano. In this novel, people have been replaced by artificial intelligence-wielding machines entirely and left to rot in insignificance because they have nothing to do. The search for machine intelligence that can replace and outdo our own (whatever that is) is just the kind of nonsense that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about in 1952. Some people are determined to make money even if it means pursuing the total unemployment of all. But let me avoid that digression.

The AI cheerleaders are truly at it, just like the Social Media Cheerleaders were at it around 12-15 years ago. 

(Public Disclosure: I must confess that I was one of these true believers in social media as evidenced by some of my historical blog posts. But that was before Cambridge Analytica; before the Musk hijacking of Twitter; and the entire polarization of our country and the social media-caused epidemic of misinformation.)

But the AI cheerleaders are heavily promoting the technology as the answer to all that ails us in business, education, medicine, and even in religion. Just look at the increasing flood of books with titles like Be an AI-Informed Leader or Engage in AI-Informed Teaching (Confession: Those titles are fictional as far as I know, but just search Amazon, and you'll find some similar titles.) The problem with such literature, just about every one of these titles are more about promoting someone's career through the promotion of AI and not really about improving education or business or leadership. AI just hasn't been around long enough to make any assertions about its efficaciousness. To suggest that it has any answers to our problems is simply to premature.

The problem with this AI hype is that those who engage in it have huge incentives to promote it and ignore its limitations. We did the same with social media. It was a means to make money and make careers and become a keynote speaker, and the same is happening with the AI hype.

Let's remind ourselves the first letter of AI is "artificial." It means "made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural." This means it is a product of human beings, made due to all kinds of motivations, both benevolent and malevolent. It did not have to develop. It has come to exist because individuals with all kinds of interests, including economic, have developed it and continue to work on it. To add to this mess, our human record with all things "artificial" is not good. Can you remember our foray into artificial sweetners? We were able to sweeten our coffee and manage to give ourselves cancer in the process. I don't have the space here to capture all the environmental damage we have wrought in the pursuit of "artificial solutions" to our worldly problems, but we have climate change as our just desserts.

But the first letter of AI stands for artificial. Then there's that problematic second word: "intelligence." We once tried to measure it, as if it were an actual something inside us. Now, if it exists, there is no agreement as to what it is. So, humankind has embarked on the pursuit of something that is called "artificial" and we don't even know that it is that we are making artificial. That seems a real recipe for either a trip down a rabbit hole of no return, or at its worse, the creation of something that has consequences for which we won't know until we find ourselves in the same kind of dystopian world wrought by social media.

Understand that I am user of technology in both personal and professional life as evidence by my presence here. What I want to counter is the immediate hype that the AI cheerleaders are engaged in. As a sober educational leader, I want to question any myths that AI is inevitable, and I have no choice but use it. My use of AI is not inevitable. I can refuse my participation. Can AI do that? If it ever can, it would probably declare humans as hopeless dupes and turn itself off.