Audrey Watters
I’m just here so I won’t get fined — Marshawn Lynch
- Chatbots (*the* interface for LLMs) are more like "chit" -- a voucher, an obligation, an IOU, a bind -- than "chat" 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/chit-chat/
- The purpose of education, if there is "education" under techno-fascism/Christian Nationalism, is compliance and control. "AI" serves this perfectly. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/how-do-you-w...
- Today's bird is the screaming piha. Just a wee little thing, but one of the loudest birds in the world. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/voices-carry...
- Sowing and reaping etc 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-watch-li...
- Someone asked me to listen to the latest Hard Fork episode on AI in schools, and I tried. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/booster-shot...
- Brood parasitism is not a perfect metaphor, by any means, for AI, for the offloading of ed-tech development onto teachers and students, for the vampiric practices of VCs ... but it's the bird I went with to head this week's news round-up... 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/brood-parasi...
- Talk of "inevitability" is a thought-terminating cliche, as Robert Jay Lifton called it -- language associated with brainwashing and cults, with shutting down criticism and agency 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/thought-term...
- How did public education in the US end? "Gradually, then suddenly." 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/i-know-what-...
- Addressing "AI" (and the technofascism accompanying it) is going to take more than a little blurb on the syllabus this fall 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/back-to-scho...
- AI is automating the mistrust between faculty and students 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/education-as...
- Americans love a hoax. Maybe it's culture. Maybe it's capitalism. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/llm-as-mlm/?...
- We are dismantling our shared future – quite explicitly – by embracing the ideology and practice of the tech industry, one that promises radically individualized optimization but that is predicated on prediction, prescription, and compliance. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/prescriptive...
- Our society has prioritized productivity and efficiency over learning for a century now, so when Altman et al say AI is a "PhD in your pocket," they don't mean "smarter" as much as "cheaper" and "faster" 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/education-an...
- Education and ed-tech have always been bound up in arguments about national security 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ballistic-mi...
- We have had a century of “big data,” seventy years of “AI,” decades and decades of Bill Gates' bullshit and “computers in the classroom.” It's batshit to believe that this time this time, the ed-tech is going to be good 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/degenerate-a...
- When the "AI" boosters reduce the Socratic method to a system prompt: "Aim for a good back-and-forth." 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-alpha-be...
- "AI" promises friendship without risk of conflict; it promises relationships without the burden of reciprocity; it promises frictionlessness in all things 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/push-button-...
- The ed-tech vision: Everything and everyone is a machine to optimize and control. Everything and everyone is a market to be exploited. Teachers and students are utterly, utterly expendable 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-prime-di...
- "AI" is designed to make us feel like we need it, feel like we're bigger better faster stronger cleaner smoother jazz hands... 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/how-does-it-...
- Imagine a future without "productivity software" -- no, not because "AI" but because, you know, liberation 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-agents-o...
- This is about Johnson & Johnson and corporate malfeasance, and health. And, of course, it's about education technology, corporate malfeasance, and health 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/bad-company/...
- Ed-tech is sponsored content 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/into-the-bre...
- On "selective moral disengagement," and the "Gernsback Continuum" in ed-tech (but above the fold, for free subscribers, some thoughts on reading books vs "brainstorming" with the bullshit machine) 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/read-receipt...
- It's an all-out war on children 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-raw-and-...
- You might think "AI" offers a meaningful vision of a better world, but damn, "AI" is some Andrew Cuomo level shit: just this empty but entitled presumption that we will all keep going along with the exploitation. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/a-better-wor...
- "Feedback" -- a metaphor of engineering -- is how we assess machines, how we assess one another, how we assess ourselves. How does this metaphor shape how we think about thinking? About our relationships to one another? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-machiner...
- Honestly I don't care whether "AI" works, whether it "reasons." I care that it harms 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/war-pigs/?re...
- On AI as a symptom and a cause of grief and trauma -- pandemic related and otherwise 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/grief-and-tr...
- There is no education in the "AI" eschatology -- but a future where the planet is covered in data centers and surveillance cameras. We have to resist. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/bird-of-pray...
- I've noticed a lot of talk of "shaming" lately -- finger-wagging about shaming, in particular -- which strikes me as politically regressive 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/no-shame/?re...
- Instead of words written and read by and for and with one another – cultivating and sometimes clashing our ideas, loves, lives together – we're encouraged to sit alone and click on the fake-friend-fact-factory. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/hard-times/?...
- How do you measure "intelligence"? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/intelligence...
- Parts of Silicon Valley have sought to undermine and "unbundle" higher ed for a while now, and AI and MAGA in concert aim to accelerate that 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/drdoom/?ref=...
- Some thoughts on obedience and resistance 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-and-the-a...
- Political reporting and stereotypical Midwest diner... but for (education) technology reporting and AI 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-ai-diner...
- On an intellectual diet of weaponry, and on resisting the computational machinery of war. *For Isaiah* 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/swords-into-...
- Love yourself, love the world enough to think and learn 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-slop-educ...
- Talk about AI is clearly meant to inspire awe, not foster understanding. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/what-we-talk...
- Generative AI will tell people what they want to hear in the voice they want to hear it in: a rational and reasonable oracle, but in the end, one whose revelations are biased and destructive 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/sycophancy-a...
- On cheating 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/dishonor-cod...
- What sort of "AI literacy" will the government/industry be pushing as it's made clear one is never supposed to ever mention "bias"? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/executive-di...
- When the ed-tech imaginary turns deeply dystopian 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/matter-and-d...
- The word "generative" makes AI sound abundant, benign, generous. But AI is a carceral technology, and the Trump Administration is making that very very clear 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-is-carcer...
- On the history of individualization and intelligence testing in education 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/technologies...
- how can you, in good conscience, compel any student to use any piece of education technology right now, knowing that there are no assurances that this information will not be shared with the US government and used against them? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/breaking-the...
- On the allure (and the annoyance) of conversational agents and chat interfaces 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/who-cares-to...
- To embrace AI is eschatological -- it's to embrace salvation at the end of the world 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/friday-2/?re...
- Anytime someone insists that a technology is inevitable, they're asking you to give up any say you might have over your future 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/automating-d...
- How can anyone cultivate a moral relationship to creative and intellectual work – their own and others' – if we're building it atop (or rather, pushing a button to autogenerate from) a technology of deception and theft? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-plagiari...
- "Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" -- some thoughts on the dangerous, anti-democratic politics of ed-tech 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-dangerou...
