Jonathan Salem Baskin

School is boring? The answer can’t be attaching kids to AIs and demoting teachers to “primarily provide motivational and emotion support.” 

We’re being conditioned to accept AIs as the de facto interface, intermediator, and manager of our experience of the world. Throwing in some marketing spin is no big deal for a deal that’s already been spun.

Amidst all the speculation about AI solving problems great and small (while potentially destroying all of humanity in the process), we’ve lost sight of what it’s already doing to our work and lives: It’s remaking us into peasants.

AI models have been purposefully designed to do more, and do it faster and more often, and thereby ingratiate their decision making — both in response to our queries and, with evermore regularity, anticipate and guide our questions and subsequent actions — into every aspect of our work and personal lives. How could anyone test those consequences?

Two recent research papers on the near-future of AI development use 216 pages of often impenetrable blather to tell us something that could be summarized in two words: We’re screwed.

“We must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” the President’s executive order said in mid-January, as it introduced biases of misjudgment, error, stereotyping, and the primacy of unfettered and unaccountable corporate profitability into the development of AI systems.

The idea that students or teachers can constructively outsource their study or work responsibilities to a thinking machine should be unthinkable. Just replace the label “AI” with “my really smart friend” and consider its applications.

Award-winning writer Jeanette Winterson thinks that an AI model can write good fiction and that we need more of it. She goes on to wax poetically about AI being an “other” intelligence and that, since human beings are trained on data, AI provides “alternative ways of seeing.” Ugh.

Every Federal employee walking out of an office with their belongings in a file box is a reminder of the blunt and brutal transformation that’s underway, and the fact that we’ve not been told nor participated in a conversation about what we’re going to get from it.