Cultural technologies are more than just inventions. They “fundamentally alter how we think, create, and make meaning.”
The railroad, the telegraph, and the mechanical clock each began as tools, but their intersection created something far more profound. The need to coordinate train schedules across distances led to standardized time zones, fundamentally transforming how humans conceptualize and experience time itself. This wasn’t just about making trains run on time – it reshaped human consciousness, creating new concepts of punctuality, new forms of social coordination, and new ways of thinking about time as something that could be wasted or saved.
We set arbitrary limits on what we believe we're "allowed" to do. This list is helpful to revisit from time to time. Each time I read it, I rethink the limits I've placed on myself.
Sometimes the stated values or purpose of a person or organization are useful in terms of judging what they have intended to do, but intent never matters nearly as much as impact, so we have to treat the actual outputs of that person or system as the ultimate truth when we assess them.
When we spend our energy pinpointing how systems are supposed to work, we lose sight of their actual impact.
by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, and Adrienne Williams
New(ish) technology, same people and problems. This episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 explores the ways billionaires with little-to-no experience in education continue pushing solutions based on... what they guess teaching entails?
Adrienne Williams (former educator and current researcher/organizer) reflects:
Most of what I did as a teacher wasn't actually the learning. The kids pick up that learning very quickly if they're happy and they're comfortable and they've eaten food and they aren't being bullied.
...
When they have ten thousand other things going on in their head, the last thing that's going to help is some vacant AI bot just saying whatever, hallucinating whenever it wants to.
The whole episode is worth a listen, but if you're in a crunch you can read the transcript. Other highlights include:
Bill Gates has a history of unilaterally pushing education "reforms" without consulting actual educators, only realizing and acknowledging they don't work after permanently altering the American education system
Silicon Valley "disrupters" exclusively experiment on students in the poorest, least-funded districts because top-rated schools (where they likely send their own children) don't consider the products to be as revolutionary as they claim
AI platforms tend to provide "blueprints" that are only effective when teachers put in time, energy, and expertise to fill in the gaps
This design reiterates a limitation of LLMs: they lack the understanding and context to effectively follow granular rules about responses to avoid. The only way to completely avoid unwanted responses is blunt, unnuanced filters.
When you’re optimizing for efficiency, you’re getting rid of redundancies. But when patients’ lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital.
As technology educators, coaches, and administrators, we have a disproportionate say in the platforms that are brought into schools. We need to understand what our colleagues need, what these platforms can do, and whether these align.
The biggest innovation here isn’t what Generative AI does, or can do, but rather the creation of an ecosystem that’s hopelessly dependent upon a handful of hyperscalers, and has no prospect of ever shaking its dependence.