We first began to understand what Behavioral Economics was telling us via the work of Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Dean Karlan. The easiest way to summarize their work is that it, and the economic reality of 2008, murdered the Rational Actor. Even Alan Greenspan said he is dead. Economic decision making was never driven by economic reality and perfect information to drive economic decision making was never the market’s goal. There is no economic gravity pulling the market to an optimal state. Economic decision making is driven by human desire and each human's condition and informed by whatever source of information each human trusts. Building trust in information sources is not an intentional process, either by the readers or the writers, building trust in information is quixotic at best.
This means there are two options:
We (gov, civil society, individuals) actively build an information ecosystem that provides trustworthy and verifiable information that readers can use to triangulate facts and build understandings that inform decisions that have a high likelihood of improving their lives.
We let "the market" inform people and build, no … not build … we accrete a Library of Babel where truth, lie, manipulation, fabrication, prophecy, serendipity, inaccuracy, faith, discovery, ... are all indistinguishable.
Of course we choose #2. More accurately, we refused to choose so we got #2 but that is the gravity of Capitalism. And now Capitalism is actively deconstructing anything that might look like #1. This is the reason we killed Public Broadcasting, this is the reason education is under attack, not because of some set of static truths being offered but because education and public media are part of an intentional effort to build a fertile information ecosystem and information triangulation skills to build understandings.
Global Positioning Services need AT LEAST 4 satellites and in reality many more to tell you where you are. If those satellites where owned by organizations or individuals that were motivated to convince you to move in a specific direction then they could introduce inaccuracies to misdirect you.
Remember when that person said “alternative facts“? I don’t think that was a fortuitous look into a masterful 3D chess conspiracy. It is just a mindset. Facts have purpose in the Capitalist media ecosystem. This means that Capitalism generates alternative facts. This is necessary for the Library of Babel to serve the purposes of many messiah’s.
First, destroy the intentional information ecosystem then replace our ability to triangulate information with Large Model Generative Artificial Intelligence. This is a design choice. This is the purpose of the technology. With a tremendous amount of work it is possible to bend LM GenAI, to bend this master’s tool to do work that benefits labor and learners but our ability to do this will diminish over time. It is possible for people who existed in the before times to navigate this sterilized info chaos but that is now anachronistic and soon it will be only Don Quixote who can do it.
One of the most impactful papers I have ever read about Large Model Generative Artificial Intelligence is Ontological capture: AI, childhood, and the algorithmic governance of becoming. The premise is that culture shapes our understanding of ourselves, of what it means to exist and how we derive our understandings. This is of course not a radical thesis. As a teacher, what I see holding this up is Constructivism, the idea that humans build our understandings from experience. Again, broadly understood and largely uncontroversial.
The consequences for childhood and civic life under AI infrastructures are stark. Writing, we argue, is thinking; it is a psychological contract between teacher and student, sustained by attentiveness and care. Writing, is not a vehicle for thought but its condition of possibility. To write is to externalise cognition into a relational space where meaning is co-constructed through reading and response. In educational terms, this means that writing does not merely record ideas; it shapes them through rhythm, syntax, and affective investment. When automated systems intervene in this process, they may reduce writing to transaction: obliterating the slow, recursive labour through which ethical relation is formed.
What the #AIinEdu influencers will tell you are silly things like “AI is here to stay” and children will be left behind if we don’t teach them to use AI. And then they stop talking. Arms folded, head sharply nodding once, barely audible “hmmmph”. Cause that’s all that they have. #AIinEdu influencers are willing to risk children’s understanding of themselves and their world -- the fundamental goal of education -- so that children are “prepared for the workforce”, an idiotic goal given that nobody knows what “the workforce” will be in the future or really, what it is today. We need to prepare ourselves to be positive agents in our own lives and there is certainly no workforce where personal agency will pivot on the ability to write a f@#$ing prompt.
It is a reasonable conclusion to draw that, as of this moment in time, children who do not use LM GenAI will be better prepared to make positive decisions in their own lives than children who do, but that is more difficult today than it was yesterday.
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