john Robinson at The 21st Century Principal pushes back against the notion that classroom AI is inevitable.
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.