On Cyber-Social Learning: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an idea that not only promises too much; it elides the irreducible differences between human intelligence and the electronic manipulation of binary notation. This chapter does three things. (1) In broad historical and philosophical brushstrokes, it critiques the idea of artificial intelligence. The development of computers is discussed from a long historical perspective, as well as recent developments in computing capacity, focusing particularly on generative AI. (2) The chapter examines human-computer interaction as a relationship of two fundamentally different kinds of ‘intelligence’—so different that the words ‘human’ and ‘artificial’ barely warrant the right to describe the same thing. Computers can indeed automate a good deal of cognitive and communicative work as they radically extend human natural capacities in unnatural ways. (3) The chapter proposes an alternative orientation to understanding and using AI that we call ‘cyber-social learning’. This stands in contrast to the idea that artificial intelligence is unabashedly a replicant of human intelligence. Thus, we ask the question, what does this mean for the social project of education and the role of computers in learning? A concluding section proposes an action program in a ‘manifesto for cyber-social learning’.