If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into the early fall semester. I don’t mean the fear that AI-based cheating is going to destroy education as we know it—though who knows, it still might—but the mad dash among many universities and colleges to announce AI procurements and partnerships. While there are signs the AI fever is breaking elsewhere, largely due to declining corporate adoption and cash burn rates that would strain even the most ketamine-diluted circulatory system, and despite evangelists as zealous as Sam Altman talking about a bubble, university administrators across the country are all in on AI. If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, maybe you don’t see much reason to care about this, but you should care, because the effort to jam AI down the throats of students and faculty is a canary in the coal mine of much broader labor struggles across professional sectors. We’ve already seen AI tools used to justify redundancies, layoffs, and forced adoption at the end of a pink slip, even as it appears those same tools may actually be a hindrance to worker productivity.
The widespread use of these tools, in both school and work, feels like it’s driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy: the promise of an employment landscape only AI itself can imagine. For example, the co-founder of the asinine-sounding Alpha School, MacKenzie Price, went on Kevin Roose’s New York Times podcast recently and pulled this whopper out of thin air: “60 percent of the jobs young people will do don’t even exist yet.” Alpha School, if you aren’t familiar, is an “AI-powered” private academy that claims to “crush academics” in two hours, while the rest of the day is devoted to entrepreneurship and financial literacy. Grim shit. Sure, Price sounds like she’s peddling nonsense (she is), but the chair of the San Francisco Fed, Mary Daly, recently said something similar on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. The normalization of this kind of hysterical prognosticating means that people don’t even bat an eye when the CEO of an AI start-up advises young people that AI will shortly make pursuing a degree in law or medicine a waste of time, which could be better spent meditating. While this ranks low on the scale of insane comments by tech CEOs—see literally any part of Sam Altman’s recent Bloomberg interview—there is some value to this particular kind of intellectual labor automation fantasy. Attempts to automate such education-intensive professions as law and medicine have so far been plagued with both difficulty and scandal, from hallucinated case law to reduced ability in doctors to spot certain cancers.
