You Don't Have to Believe All Those Predictions About AI Because We've Been Here Before

There is a perfectly rational reason for discounting all the AI predictions of AI Evangelists and Ed Tech Consultants.

In the mid-90s, the internet zealots promoted the idea that the web was somehow “magically” to bring us all together. It was what Vincent Mosco called “the Myth of the Death of Distance.” The web was going to bring us all together. It was the end of geography. Too bad it did not happen.

Even the economists got it wrong. It was Frances Cairncross, economist for the journal “The Economist” who wrote in her book “The Death of Distance”:

With the web people would be “Free to explore different points of view, on the Internet or on the thousands of television and radio channels that will eventually be available. PEOPLE WILL BECOME LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO PROPAGANDA from politicians who seek to stir up conflicts.” (CAP EMPHASIS MINE)

What’s more she added this now laughable prognostication:

“Bonded together by the invisible strands of global communications, HUMANITY MAY FIND THAT PEACE AND PROSPERITY ARE FOSTERED BY THE DEATH OF DISTANCE.”

Boy did she get it wrong, like so many other Silicon Valley Seers of salvation by technology. The only bonding that has taken place is social media companies and our personal data.

The web and its demon spawn social media, manufactured by Big Tech, more interested in getting extremely rich, has only made us more polarized and divided than we have ever been. Their algorithms are designed to shove into our eyeballs that which divides us, not bring us together.

As far as the wonderful “bonds of community” wrought by the internet and its technologies with the “Death of Distance? The only thing that has died has been what little genuine human connection we had among many other things.

So, when the AI Evangelists speak of the promise of not having to do those things we hate; when they boast that AI is the educational tool that is going to transform our profession; and that AI will some day figure out all our problems, can you undertstand why one should call them on this nonsense?

The best thing to do is to discount all the prediction nonsense, for no one ever provides the evidence. When they give us a massive list of jobs that will be replaced, consider it nonsense. They never provide any evidence for their assertion.

The last thing educators should do is gamble the lives of their students that all these AI prognostications are gospel. You can’t prepare them for a world that does not exist yet, because no one knows what that world we be like, not even the Silicon Valley CEO Seers nor the Ed Tech AI consultants.