A refrain among the profiteers of automation is that the technology they’re selling will decrease everyone’s workload. But it has been shown time and again that automation intensifies labor: whether it means that employers require laborers to fill the other six hours of the day with more work now that they can supposedly do their old jobs in two or that the expectations for what one should be able to produce in eight hours increases their work to twelve, it’s definitively true that automation intensifies and immiserates work.
But rarely do employers say as much explicitly.
I promised a colleague that I wouldn’t put them in an awkward spot but I am told that this week someone at the teaching center at their university sent out an email recommending faculty apportion 90 minutes a week to informing themselves about AI. The recommendation is cited as coming from Mark Watkins, writing for higher ed administrators’ trade rag, the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
It’s a very boring piece with all of the same slogans and platitudes about the inevitability of AI becoming a vital part of modern life, so important that teachers have an obligation to teach their students how to use it responsibly (if I hear one more time the comparison to Sex Education as if natural biological impulses were the same thing as using software, I will scream). The inevitability here is a foregone conclusion (begging the question of in what ways AI will be a part of life, what kind of AI???), but let’s take Watkins on his own terms.
How can educators do this without being informed themselves, he asks?
Set aside 90 minutes a week to educate ourselves. That’s the magic bullet. It’s a simple three-step process requiring 30 minutes of reading the curated list of industry shills he handily provides. Then spend another 30 minutes using AI from his handpicked list of platforms. Finally, spend 30 minutes “reflecting.” He goes on to state:
At this point, you may be thinking: I don’t have a spare 90 minutes a week to read, explore, and reflect on generative AI. But really, that is very likely the minimum amount of time that it will take you to become informed enough about AI to offer the type of practical advice that students desperately search for about their own AI usage.
This is an unserious piece that collects all of the mantras and canards so easily debunked by Bender and Hanna in the The AI Con. And there is, indeed, so much more out there to read, and I encourage anyone who takes a professional interest to do so. Here’s one list of books that I provided for Art in America, in which I gathered scholarship under the headings, bias, extraction, augmentation, operation, the so-called, categorization, and power.
But the key here is that I teach and research this material, have been publishing on it since 2020 and am writing a book about it (snapshot of the gist of it in Artforum here). As I suggested when interviewed by Kathryn Palmer for Inside Higher Ed, none of my labor on this issue has been made compulsory, and yet locking educators into a compulsory regime of technologized education is precisely what profiteers and opportunists are attempting to do.
None of this will ease the labor of education. It will only intensify the worst parts of it.
So I’m grateful to Mark Watkins and to his mouthpieces sending out emails informed by his recommendation . I’m grateful to have someone articulate so clearly how AI will not in any way shape or form save educators time or exertion. In fact, all AI will do is require that we work more, harder, and on the parts of our job that shouldn’t even be our job.
Starting with his one cool trick of just 90 minutes a week.