CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

This article ran last week, and it made my ICYMI list Sunday, but you really, really need to see this.

Kevin Roos went to Davos for the New York Times to see what the masters of the universe are up to, and his most striking discoveries was "The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite."

The short version is simple. In public, they are going to talk about how much Artificial Intelligence will improve the workplace. In private, they talk about how AI will let them slash the human workforce to the bone. From the article:

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

Is there any reason to think the advent of AI in education is different? Of course not-- education is a field where the single greatest expense is personnel. If your goal is to bust free some of that sweet sweet public education money, getting rid of live, trained teachers and replace them with a couple of cheap mentors.

Look at it this way. Since the beginning of the modern ed reform era, the dream has been to cut staff costs.

We were going to "teacher proof" classrooms with instruction in a box, complete with scripts, so CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans