“We as educators need to educate our students about AI,” is how Ed Tech’s latest pitch goes regarding their new project. Let’s look at what is really involved in that project.
Paul Kingnorth writes in his 2025 thought-provoking book “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity”:
“…we need to understand the consequences of the Machine we have built, and which is now rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers, shopping for individual fulfillment in its global marketplace of goods, ideas, and identities.”
The Ed Tech calls for “AI Literacy” are part of the “Machine” project that Kingsnorth describes here, the project of “rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers” of AI, Silicon Valley’s latest money-maker. Big Tech, as it did with the internet, Web 2.0, social media, has once again activated our Ed Tech establishment in schools to take on the task of transforming students and teachers into proper consumers of their latest cash cow, AI.
Part of this project of Big Tech has been to short-circuit any critical thought about AI as they have made it, about its moral and ethical uses, and even whether we should accept it as presented. They did this through their “inevitability” myth, and their “everybody-is-using-it” myth, both of which are not true and does not have to be true.
They have used these myths effectively in the past, and educational technology has been acting and is currently acting as the proselytizers of Silicon Valley since it beginnings as a disciplinary field. It is a discipline that exists to carry out Big Tech’s latest proclamations, and their latest is to get all of education—students, teachers, parents—to acquiesce without protest, to being blind, perfect consumers of AI.
Educators have no business acting in this role. If anything, they should be fostering critical-thinking individualists who decide for themselves the role, if any, AI will play in their own lives and use. These students can also decide for themselves whether acceptance or resistance is called for. The next generation can demand that AI serve humanity, not those who stand to profit the most from its success.
Reflecting back on thirty-plus years in education and my own role in Ed Tech, I have seen how educators become implicated in this whole project of consumer generation. Now, we see how this blind promotion of technology has not really transformed anything for the good.
Past history tells us, that this AI consumer project will not end well in its present form either, without ensuring that our students, teachers, and parents are able to think for themselves critically about the place and form of this technology in their lives.
We do not have to let Silicon Valley and Ed Tech decide for us.
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