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 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 ToolsSal Khan's 2023 Ted Talk: AI in the classroom can transform educationBill Gates: My trip to the frontier of AI educationBackground: Cory Booker Hates Public SchoolsBackground: Cory Booker's track record on educationBook: Access is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial InequalityBook: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-IdealismPreviously on MAIHT3K: Episode 26, Universities Anxiously Buy Into the Hype (feat. Chris Gilliard)Episode 17: Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp)Fresh AI Hell:"Streamlining" teachingGoogle, Microsoft and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in 'AI overviews''Whisper' medical transcription tool used in hospitals is making things upX's AI bot can't tell the difference between a bad game and vandalismPrompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language modelsYet another 'priestbot'Self-driving wheelchairs at Seattle-Tacoma International AirpotCheck out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.Follow us!EmilyBluesky: emilymbender.bsky.socialMastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBenderAlexBluesky: alexhanna.bsky.socialMastodon: dair-community.social/@alexTwitter: @alexhannaMusic by Toby Menon.Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.