Using de-anthropomorphized language
How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization
artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation
hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence
image recognition → image labeling
speech recognition → automatic transcription
the model shows bias → the model reflects bias
model mistakes → model errors
chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …
hallucination → undesirable output
goal → success condition
prompt → text input
answer → output
Toffler’s call for an education system that prioritized learning, relearning, and unlearning was meant to prepare students for a world of unpredictability and precarity. (Instead of, say, creating not only a school system, but a whole society in which their dignity and safety could be more assured.)
To call for a future in which “AI” demands “unlearning” is to unmoor everyone from time and place and body – who we were, who we are, who we can become. To embrace its version of “unlearning” is to surrender all learning (all agency, all accountability) – about yourself and the world to someone else’s algorithm. The constant “unlearning” that “AI” demands is actually the foreclosure of any future where learning is possible at all.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Hard Fork Interview:
Huang: “Try to get a kid to do long division right now. You know, the multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. I mean, it’s just basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?” Klein: “That’s my question for you.” Huang: “Yeah, I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.”
Why not say it as it is: It does matter to Jensen Huang that we get dependent on him and his machines. He wants us to be as dependent as possible. If we can’t even do a small calculation (in our heads or on paper) without a monthly subscription, then that’s fulfilling his and the rest of the modern aristocrats wildest dreams.
We hope these examples help clarify the inner workings of AI economics.
Yes, thank you. Now it makes sense … *mumbles* where did I stash my guillotine again?
“Have conviction in what you want to share with the world.” – Unsung
On top of all that, we can add what Brownlee started with in his video: overeager A:B tests feel like software’s version of gaslighting. How can you trust an app if it feels like it’s changing without rhyme and reason seemingly on a weekly basis, whose changes are not announced or documented anywhere (small A:B tests never are), and when other people don’t see the things you see?
Are A-B-tests mostly HARKing?
My friend quite convincingly argued that the next hype will be “Terraforming“.
I sure hope not.
If we want something different for children – and by extension, something different for society as a whole – then we probably need to articulate a progressive vision for education. Because we should want to ensure that a pushback on “the digital” doesn’t simply result in the same bad shit, just in analog form.
To Dismantle Democracy, You Subvert Public Schools
The subversion of democracy – at its core, that is what the efforts to undermine public school truly are – has shifted the burden of changing “the system” onto the individual. Such is goal of the neoliberal fantasy, in which everything is reduced to a market transaction.
As such, it’s up to individual parents and individual students to make “the right choices” – even though it’s so clear that the institutions they must navigate are social, both in origin and in practice, and the only way to address the grave flaws that remain in these systems is political. The only way forward is together; our responsibility is shared; it is collective.
