Episode 45: Billionaires, Influencers, and Ed Tech (feat. Adrienne Williams), November 18 2024

From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires with no education expertise keep using their big names and big dollars to hype LLMs for classrooms. Promising ‘comprehensive AI tutors', or just ‘educator-informed’ tools to address understaffed classrooms, this hype is just another round of Silicon Valley pointing to real problems -- under-supported school systems -- but then directing attention and resources to their favorite toys. Former educator and DAIR research fellow Adrienne Williams joins to explain the problems this tech-solutionist redirection fails to solve, and the new ones it creates.
Adrienne Williams (bit.ly/3COaij2) started organizing in 2018 while working as a junior high teacher for a tech owned charter school. She expanded her organizing in 2020 after her work as an Amazon delivery driver, where many of the same issues she saw in charter schools were also in evidence. Adrienne is a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a Research Fellow at both (DAIR) and Just Tech.
References:
Funding Helps Teachers Build AI Tools (bit.ly/495HIp4)
Sal Khan's 2023 Ted Talk: AI in the classroom can transform education (bit.ly/4fIagaL)
Bill Gates: My trip to the frontier of AI education (bit.ly/419wYo1)
• Background: Cory Booker Hates Public Schools (bit.ly/3Oq1an7)
• Background: Cory Booker's track record on education (bit.ly/3V8zp6o)
Book: Access is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality (bit.ly/4fOtQCw)
Book: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism (bit.ly/4i7l7Ni)
Previously on MAIHT3K: Episode 26, Universities Anxiously Buy Into the Hype (feat. Chris Gilliard) (bit.ly/3CHny8V)
Episode 17: Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp) (bit.ly/4fFu0Mc)
Fresh AI Hell:
"Streamlining" teaching (bit.ly/3Z8qy5S)
Google, Microsoft and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in 'AI overviews' (bit.ly/498RXsW)
'Whisper' medical transcription tool used in hospitals is making things up (bit.ly/3AYY868)
X's AI bot can't tell the difference between a bad game and vandalism (bit.ly/3OoLfFt)
Prompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language models (bit.ly/3Or4P47)
Yet another 'priestbot' (bit.ly/3V72xuw)
Self-driving wheelchairs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airpot (bit.ly/3AW3sHy)
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park (naomipleasurepark.com).
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.