ICYMI: Groundhog Day Edition (2/2)

Years ago, I went to Punxsutawney for a workshop of some sort. Stayed in the historic (aka "old") hotel across the square from the library where, at the time, Phil enjoyed some luxurious quarters in the basement. It's very much a small Pennsylvania town (the movie was shot mostly in Illinois). I also remember Groundhog Day as the day Sam Harrison, my geology professor and the trumpet player in our faculty-student college jazz band, would send out his version of a Christmas card. He passed away last year. Happy Groundhog Day to you, Sam. 

Let's look at the reading for the week.

In Edtech, You Either Bet On Teachers Or You Have To Build One

A very excellent, clear-eyed view of one of the central problems of AI ed tech. Somebody-- or something--has to do the teacher job, which, spoiler alert, is a lot more than saying "Here's some practice for this fact. Learn it." Dan Meyer blogs.

Playing Defense

Jennifer Berkshire blogs about Pete Hegseth's plans for the Department of Defense schools, the most successful schools that we have. But their secret sauce is wokeness, so here comes the hammer.

Be Prepared for MisNAEPery

Sue Kingery Woltanski went to a summit thrown by one of the outfits trying to establish itself as a far right school boards association, and she learned many things about upcoming talking points. Less "woke." More of that old standard "Our schools are failing!"

The president’s education order: Trump wants to indoctrinate, too

Jonathan Zimmerman at The Hill points out the obvious-- indoctrination is okay, even required, if it's for Dear Leader's preferred values.

Trump should stay out of what students learn in school

Checker Finn, honcho emeritus of the Fordham Institution, is plenty conservative, but he's conservative enough to remember that the law says DC can't tell districts what to teach.

Trump’s Education Agenda Is a Big Vulnerability

Jennifer Berkshire in Jacobin, pointing out that if there were a party willing and able to oppose Trump and the GOP, education would be a great issue on which to attack them.

In the Wild West of School Voucher Expansions, States Rely on Untested Companies, With Mixed Results

School voucher programs require an organization to handle all the money, and as Alec MacGillis reports for ProPublica, when it comes to finding a company that really knows what it's doing, the pickings are slim.

FCMAT Attacks Weed Elementary

Thomas Ultican takes a look at California's special fiscal crisis team and shows how it really operates. One more example of how takeover models fail.

The Folly of Settled Science

Nancy Flanagan experiences the inevitable NAEP-related flare up of reading wars. 

And Five Hours Later, I Might Have One Single Lesson Plan…

Eduhonesty with an excellent example of how a lesson plan protocol can result in a terrible process.

Did OK’s controversial education chief introduce PragerU to SC schools?

Did Ryan Walters help the faux educators of Prager get into South Carolina? Steve Nuzum considers the question.

Resisting AI Mania in Schools - Part I

Anne Lutz Fernandez is cataloging the top AI sales pitch points, and providing explanations of how to push back. Part II is here. 

Sal Khan and AI Reimagined Schools: Questions and Concerns

Nancy Bailey looks at Sal Khan's attempt to algorithm his way to educating students.

 
How One Professor Deals with Student GPT-Generated Essays

Larry Cuban shares some very practical techniques from one college professor who deals with student AI use. Applicable in high school, I'd say.

Burn! (as That 70s Show Used to Say)

Gregory Sampson on what parents really care about

DeepIrony

Ben Riley looks at the unveiling of Chinese AI. Some good insights and warnings (and this was even before it turned out that the Chinese model was built on the back of OpenAI'a work-- double irony that every creative whose work was stolen to train OpenAI's product was quick to point out).

The Invisible Hand: How Dark Money Is Inventing Prestige for Right-Wing Academics

From the blog Important Context, a report on an "Academy" that exists just to make right wing bunk look like it has academic cred.

The Baby Bump

Well, now, A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that the baby bust is over (and Covid may be one reason). 

Some Notes About Joy Amid The Tyranny

Jose Luis Vilson just had a birthday, and in reflecting on that, he offers some thoughts about how to move forward through the years ahead.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon, I talked about another report showing Pennsylvania's big cyber school and its creative use of taxpayer dollars.  

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FL: Blaming NAEP

It's been NAEP week, prompting all manner of data spasms among any education policy people who weren't already staggering under the weight of Trump's zone flooding. And Florida has a problem.

As long time readers know (hi, Mom!), I'm not one to get excited about scores on the Big Standardized Test, despite the claims that it will tell us How Schools Are Doing. There are lots of reasons to suspect that America's Gold Standard of Testing is not all the gold standardy. And there is one serious lesson to be learned, which is that having all this cold hard data doesn't actually change a damned thing-- everyone just "interprets" it to support whatever it is they wanted to do anyway. 

And if you want to see that principle really in action, let's head to Florida.

Florida has spent the last decade cranking up the voucher and charter volume, proudly came back fast from the pandemic shutdown of school buildings, boosted classical education, plugged the Science of Reading, and even tried to imitate Dolly Parton. 

They have reaped the lowest reading and math scores in twenty years.

Now it's worth noting that, as Billy Townsend told people repeatedly, Florida's success with NAEP fourth grade test scores was a magic trick whose effect would completely vanish by eighth grade; Florida's students would perform worse as they moved up.

So besides pointing at all the various reforms that Florida has thrown at its students, one might also conclude that this year's scores may have just gotten closer to reality.

But Manny Diaz, Florida's underqualified education chief, has another explanation.

It's the test. You see, they are awesome in Florida, but--

However, upon receipt of Florida’s 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, it is evident that the Biden Department of Education’s administration of what was the previously gold standard exam has major flaws in methodology and calls into question the validity of the results as they pertain to the educational landscape in 2024.This is why I sent incoming Secretary of Education Linda McMahon a letter outlining concerns and providing solutions so that together, we can make NAEP great again.

See, the problem is that over half a million Florida students are homeschooling or using their taxpayer-funded voucher to attend private school, so NAEP is only testing the students left behind in public school (this, somehow, is Biden's fault). Since 2022, Florida has gone from 165,000 voucher students to 524,000, and leaving them out has hurt the state score.

I'm not sure that Diaz fully grasps that he has argued here, in print, that Florida has made its public school system measurably worse. 

He also argues that the scores are too heavily weighted toward urban, high-poverty, high-minority districts, which, again, serves as a sort of admission that the state hasn't served those districts well. 

NAEP scores are used for a variety of poor purposes-- misNAEPery-- so I sympathize with Diaz. Who knows-- maybe he'll be able to interest McMahon in a little NAEP cookery. On the other hand, private and home schoolers may share some thoughts with him regarding how they feel about being compelled to take the federal Big Standardized Test.

The White House Dreams Of Ending Radical Stuff

So this week brought us the executive order "Ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling." We have seen this movie before--twice, even. Which version will it be this time?

The State Version

The executive order is a federal version of the anti-critical race theory parental rights laws we've seen passed in various states, with an extra side of faux patriotism. 

Like those laws, it is vague and ill-defined. There are three possible explanations. 

1) It is vague because the offenses are vague in the minds of the proponents, who just want to wave disapprovingly in the general direction of race and gender stuff that makes them sad,

2) It is vague because saying exactly what they have in mind would be so nakedly racist and hateful that they would face backlash that made them sad.

3) It is vague because by being unclear about where the line is drawn, the proponents can achieve a maximum chilling effect as local authorities fall over themselves trying to comply in advance and in the process take the clampdowns further than the proponents could have dreamed.

Take your pick of any combination of the three.

The third option comes with another process attached. After someone takes it way too far, the folks who created the law can express outrage about the overreach and/or blame it on people trying to make them look bad. We have already seen this one, as the Air Force removed material about Black and female service persons from their training over some DEI content, followed by Defense Secretary Hegseth blowing a gasket and declaring, "Don't do that!" Last year in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis claimed that it was his opponents that were trying to make him look bad by banning books willy nilly (it was not). 

There are scary things in here. Teachers may not directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of students, which could include something as simple as using the student's chosen name. Heck, when I was a yearbook advisor, we ran the chosen name of seniors, but I guess that would be a no-no.

Of course, all of the various restrictions and rules would need an enforcement arm. That's part of the edict--the Secretaries of Education, Defense, and Health& Human Services are to figure out how to punish schools for violating the edict. I wrote a few months ago that Trump couldn't both eliminate the Ed Department and also use it to force his will on local districts-- it looks like he has made up his mind. Once again, local control comes with an asterisk--you can have it if you agree to do what Dear Leader wants you to do.

But this brings to mind another old movie...

The Federal Version

The federal government decides to use all the levers (and money) at its disposal to force state and local education to teach what it wants them to teach the way it wants them to teach it. 

That would be the opening act of The Saga Of Common Core. That was followed by Act II: Conservative Supporters of Federal Power Grab Are Surprised When Grass Roots Conservatives Lose Their Damn Minds and Turn on the Core. The movie comes to a sort of anti-climax when federal authorities discover that trying to micro-manage classrooms from DC is a lot harder than they thought it would be. 

One new plot twist-- I'm betting that scrutiny over this edict will vary depending on whether the state is red or blue.

After the trailer

Right now, the edict amounts to nothing more than a preview of coming attractions. So much depends on the regime's ability to figure out how to work the levers of power and figuring out ways to track "federal sources and streams" of money all the way down to a local school districts. 

If they're going to do that, then the whole plan of turning Title I and IDEA funds into block grants to the state will have to go out the window as well. So the whole "states know best" thing is dropped. And, as has been usual, parental rights are only for parents who want what Dear Leader and the Heritage Foundation want them to want. 

In the end, this eo really only settles one thing-- would Trump throw his weight behind the Libertarian dream of smaller government, or behind the theocrat's dream of a nation forced to follow their preferred values. In education, it looks like the theocrats win this round. Local control, shmocal control.

America loses. No matter how imperfectly, this eo will drop a chilling blanket over schools and empower some awful people to be extra awful in their local district. In states that already have installed repressive China-style cultural revolutions, the impact will be minimal. But in other states, this, like the bill to implement school vouchers everywhere, means that state rights be damned--they get the policies they never asked for. 

What Is School Choice Week About

It's National School Choice week, as you will have heard from every right-winged organization out there, including Congress and the White House. But why?

As Truthout reporters Alyssa Bowen, Ansev Demirhan, and Lisa Graves, laid out in a recent article about National School Choice Week, this "school privatization PR stunt is a pet project" of some uber-rich folks like the Gleason and Koch families. It's a fine gig; Gleason heir Tracy Gleasons pays herself over half a million bucks in salary just to run the foundation that runs this single week.

Donald Trump supported the week and the school choice shtick in his first go-round, and he's at it again. And if you've ever wondered why, exactly, folks on the far right are so pro-choice when it comes to education, Trump has done you the favor of providing an illuminating context. Because it's that context that explains much of the "why" behind "school choice."

The MAGA/Heritage Foundation vision of government is simple. Government should protect private property (from threats domestic and foreign) and it should support private enterprise and the free market (except when powerful private enterprises demand to be protected from the free market). Government should not be in the business of helping people or trying to make their lives better-- they should take care of that themselves. It very especially should not be in the business of trying to lift people above their proper station in life, particularly people who aren't straight christianist white men. Mind you, they have no objection to those people getting to a better place if they do it the Right Way (by their own bootstraps and following the rules laid out by the people at the top of the ladder).

Much of what the Trump regime is whining about points directly to their guiding principles. When they say that it's okay for immigrants to get to this country as long as they do it the right way, they're also explaining their rules for social mobility and a social safety net. It's okay for Those People to get food and health care and a house and supplemental income when they're thrown out of work--as long as they do it the right way. DEI is, for these folks, just another open border, allowing all sorts of people to get into spaces where they don't belong and have no legitimate right to be. People who are Right should get to make the rules, and people who are Wrong should not get to interfere with those who are Right. 

In that context, is it any wonder that the same people who want to end social safety net programs and slam the door on DEI and stop the government from performing any sorts of functions outside of protecting property and enterprise--is it any wonder that these folks also want to dismantle public education? Since the days of Milton Friedman, it has been a far right dream to get government out of education.

Dismantle the system. Make everyone get their own kids an education, based on what best fits their proper place in society and what they are able to prove they deserve.

Except that people like the system, and "I don't want to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children" is not a winning political message.

So don't call it dismantling. Call it freedom! Yes, your public school is falling down, but here's a voucher that you can use (at any school that will let you use it). If you'd like to send your kid to a really nice, expensive school, well, you shouldn't decide to be poor. 

The Trumpian/Heritage vision of government seems to be a modern riff on feudalism, where the rich and powerful make the rules and clear away the Deep State, which seems best defined as folks who are inclined to follow the rule of law rather than the rule of what I say goes, and where all the lower clases are forced to contribute to the church. A public education system aimed at providing a good education for all students, no matter the background, has no place in a feudal system.

Now granted-- school choice has collected an assortment of supporters, including people who really believe the free market will make schools better and even people who see choice as one tool to make the larger education system better. Plus, of course, opportunists who see a good chance to make a buck as well as christianists who really like the idea of making taxpayers help fund the church (which is what Those People would be doing if they weren't Wrong). But none of those people are driving the school choice bus.

The dismantlers have a whole long list, which we're seeing rolled out via executive order. Public education just happens to be on it, and "school choice" is the fig leaf they place over the dynamite they want to load around the public school's foundation. 

PA: AI Cyber Charter Rejected--Hard

The Texas business couple who wanted to launch a Pennsylvania cyber charter that used 2 hours of AI in place of more hours with actual teachers has been denied, and denied hard, by the state department of education.

MacKenzie and Andrew Price have pioneered a new school model in which students spend two hours in front of screens and the rest of the day pursuing life lessons, all with no adult involved other than a "guide." The proposed school-- Unbound Academy-- involved a set of interlocking businesses all connected to the Prices. It was going to be a sweet deal allowing them to hoover up piles of Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars. (You can read all about it here.)

Arizona (the "We'll Try Anything Except Support Public Schools" state) said yes to the Prices. Three other states said no, and now Pennsylvania has joined the list of folks passing. The 25-page letter of rejection highlights just how amateur-hour the Prices' application was (You can view the application here). 

Pennsylvania considers five criteria when considering a cyber charter application. Writes the department:

While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.

0 out of 5! That's a hard fail. Let's break it down.

Criterion 1: Unbound Academic has provided no evidence of sustainable support for the cyber charter school plan by teachers, parents or guardians, and students.

Does anybody actually want these guys? The application contained no letters or petitions supporting the school, and no supporters took advantage of the period of public support. The Prices mobilized zero ground troops to show the commonwealth that someone really wanted one more cyber charter in Pennsylvania.

Criterion 2: Unbound Academic lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to provide comprehensive learning experiences to students. 

This broke down to several points. For one, the school didn't have insurance. "We're working on it, and we are totally insurable," they claimed. But they didn't have any quotes other than numbers from their other schools, which are neither cyber charters nor located in Pennsylvania.

They also failed to show that their proposed location was adequate for their offices, especially in light of their proposed expansion. They claimed it was a co-working space. My googling research suggests that it's actually a FedEx where you can rent a mailbox. The department notes that the application was pretty thin on physical details about the office space. And they don't appear to have an actual lease (which is normal for mailboxes).

Most brutal here is the third point: "The Applicant fails to reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances." They appear to have failed to distinguish between general and special ed student rates, and a bunch of the enrollment assumption data turned out to be suspect (and beyond their ability to explain at their hearing). Nor do their figures match what's happening in Pennsylvania's other cyber charters. The Prices do not appear to have done their homework. 

The state notes that the Prices project becoming the 8th largest cyber in the state within five years, but appear to not grasp how churn affects cyber charter enrollment. (Fun side fact-- the letter includes some data about other cyber churn rates, which averages 20% or higher, meaning at least one in five cyber students leaves every year).

Criterion 3: There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards

The Prices included precious little information about their actual curriculum with their magical 2HourLearning program.

The Applicant did not provide documentation or description of the curriculum framework which could have provided evidence that learning objectives and outcomes have been established for each course offering in the Application or during the November 7 Hearing. The Applicant also did not provide any information regarding the number of courses required for students, materials to be used, planned activities, or procedures for measurement of the objectives, nor did it adequately explain the amount of time required for students to be online in order to meet the course standards for offered grades.

The other schools run by the Prices are all private, high-tuition, entrance exam schools. Their cyber proposal was weak-to-empty on programs for special needs or other students from vulnerable groups. Nothing at all for English Learners. 

Nor do they have any plan for professional development of staff. And while the commonwealth has some requirements for inducting new staff into a school, the Prices had nothing at all in mind for meeting those requirements.

During the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant shared that the teacher induction plan builds upon itself, and training would be based on an observed teacher’s needs, using assessment benchmarks along the way to determine future employability.

The Prices haven't hired or worked with teachers before--their private school uses AI and guides, supposedly. Looking at their application, I was a little fuzzy on whether they intend to hire actual certified teachers for Unbound. If that was the plan, there was no plan for onboarding them.

Criterion 4: Unbound Academic’s Application is non-compliant with requirements of Section 1747-A.

This is formal governance stuff, and the letter lists 16 criteria--and how Unbound failed each one. 

Highlights include the need for a board. Unbound has a board of five Pennsylvania residents, but it has never met, and as of the hearing, it had no meeting scheduled. No curriculum. No mission. No actual admissions policies. No suspension or expulsion policies written down. No agreements worked out with local districts for student participation in extracurriculars (in PA, cyber students can still be active in local extracurriculars and sports). No official clearances for student-facing personnel. No clear explanation of how instruction will be delivered. No explanation of what actual hardware will students be issued. No procedure for how student attendance and school day will be defined. No technical support for parents and students. No explanation of how data will be protected. No explanation of how student work will be deemed authentic. No truancy policies. 

Each of these items could have been addressed in either the application or the hearing before the board.

Criterion 5: Unbound Academic fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other public schools.

In all fairness to the Prices, I'm not sure any cyber charter in Pennsylvania meets this criterion. But the Prices were pretty much banking on the AI education thing (which, in their case basically seems to mean Khan Academy and the like). The board saw straight through this pitch.

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents unique opportunities that educators across Pennsylvania are exploring through effective, safe, and ethical implementation. However, the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards. When questioned at the public November 7 Hearing, the Applicant stated that this model was used “in several private schools across Texas”, although the model has been used for Ukrainian refugees in Poland [both examples are other Price operations]. At the time of the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant had not been approved for a virtual charter school, so there is no data that supports the efficacy of this model.

In other words, AI is cool and all, but you guys have only used it on select live students, and since you've never tried it on a cyber-school, nobody knows if it works, including you.

And so

I wish that were the end of it, but the Prices do have the opportunity to revise and resubmit their application, so I suppose we'll see how badly they want this. But in the meantime, hats off to the department for doing their job. 

Trump Ends "Book Ban Hoax"

Amidst all the other slashing and burning of the new regime, we find a press release from the U.S. Department of Education, "U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax." Sure.

There are several things going on here, all worth noting.

On the surface, the action is mostly about dismissing 11 complaints filed with the Ed Department Office for Civil Rights, rejecting the notion that anyone can sue over the removal of certain books. If you're gay and your school district decides to eliminate every trace of other gay people from the district, it's an indefensible and hostile act, but is it a violation of your civil rights? That may be open to debate, but it barely scratches the surface of what's going on here.

The press release opens with reference to "so-called 'book bans'" underlining one of the banner points which is that it's not really a ban because you can probably buy the book somewhere if you really want to, and unless every copy of the book that exists has been thrown into the sun and anyone who tries to reproduce it is jailed, it's not really a ban. By the book banner definition of book ban, no book has been banned ever

But if instead of using a new definition of the word "ban," we stick with what native English speakers have generally understood the word to mean (a person in authority stands at the door and says "you can't bring that in here"), then book bans are what we have, from schools where the book has been barred from libraries and classrooms all the way up to Utah, where students are forbidden to bring even their own personal copy to school. 

So, yes, these are book bans.

The announcement also covers the elimination of the "book ban coordinator" who was to handle all these various cases.

The release also repeatedly describes book bans as a process of removing "age-inappropriate books" or even "age-inappropriate materials." 

That's a hell of a leap beyond the usual demand to remove a book because of "sexual content" or other Naughty Stuff. "Age-inappropriate" is a broad term that can be used to cover anything that authorities want to ban from schools. Anything you don't want children to hear about can be tagged "age-inappropriate."

All of this, of course, in the service of "the deeply rooted American principle that local control over public education best allows parents and teachers alike to assess the educational needs of their children and communities." Because the regime really believes in parental rights, unless those parents are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ kids or want their kids to learn about historic racism or support diversity, equality and inclusion or opposing banning books from the school or--well, they support just the parental right to agree with the administration. Otherwise, just hush. You don't need the right to disagree with the administration, just like your kid doesn't need the right to read anything that the People In Charge say they shouldn't read.

AI Is For The Ignorant

Well, here's a fun piece of research about AI and who is inclined to use it.

The title for this article in the Journal of Marketing-- "Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity"-- gives away the game, and the abstract tells us more than enough about what the research found.

You may think that familiarity with technology leads to more willingness to use it, but AI runs the opposite direction.

Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI.

That linkage is explained simply enough. People who don't really understand what AI is or what it actually does "are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes." 

The researchers are Stephanie Tully (USC Marshall School of Business), Chiara Longoni (Bocconi University), and Gil Appel (GW School of Business) are all academics in the world of business and marketing, and while I wish they were using their power for Good here, that's not entirely the case.

Having determined that people with "lower AI literacy" are more likely to fork over money for AI products, they reach this conclusion:

These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.

To sell more of this non-magical product, make sure not to actually educate consumers. Emphasize the magic, and go after the low-information folks. Well, why not. It's a marketing approach that has worked in certain other areas of American life. In a piece about their own research, the authors suggest a tiny bit of nuance, but the idea is the same. If you show AI doing stuff that "only humans can do" without explaining too clearly how the illusion is created, you can successfully "develop and deploy" new AI-based products "without causing a loss of the awe that inspires many people to embrace this new technology." Gotta keep the customers just ignorant enough to make the sale.

And lord knows lots of AI fans are already on the case. Lord knows we've been subjected to an unending parade of lazy journalism of the "Wow! This computer can totally write limericks like a human" variety. For a recent example, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Microsoft board member, and early funder of OpenAI, unleashed a warm, fuzzy, magical woo-woo invocation of AI in the New York Times that is all magic and zero information.

Hoffman opens with an anecdote about someone asking ChatGPT "based on everything you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like." This is Grade A magical AI puffery; ChatGPT does not "know" anything about you, nor does it have thoughts or an imagination to be used to create a visual image of your life. "Like any capable carnival mind reader," continues Hoffman, comparing computer software not just to a person, but to a magical person. And when ChatGPT gets something wrong, like putting a head of broccoli on your desk, Hoffman paints that "quirky charm" as a chance for the human to reflect and achieve a flash of epiphany. 

But what Hoffman envisions is way more magical than that-- a world in which the AI knows you better than you know yourself, that could record the details of your life and analyze them for you. 

Decades from now, as you try to remember exactly what sequence of events and life circumstances made you finally decide to go all-in on Bitcoin, your A.I. could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we’re often barely aware of as we create them, much less days, months or years after the fact.

When you’re trying to decide if it’s time to move to a new city, your A.I. will help you understand how your feelings about home have evolved through thousands of small moments — everything from frustrated tweets about your commute to subtle shifts in how often you’ve started clicking on job listings 100 miles away from your current residence.

The research trio suggested that the more AI imitates humanity, the better it sells to those low-information humans. Hoffman suggests that the AI can be more human than the user. But with science!

Do we lose something of our essential human nature if we start basing our decisions less on hunches, gut reactions, emotional immediacy, faulty mental shortcuts, fate, faith and mysticism? Or do we risk something even more fundamental by constraining or even dismissing our instinctive appetite for rationalism and enlightenment?

 Software will make us more human than humans?

So imagine a world in which an A.I. knows your stress levels tend to drop more after playing World of Warcraft than after a walk in nature. Imagine a world in which an A.I. can analyze your reading patterns and alert you that you’re about to buy a book where there’s only a 10 percent chance you’ll get past Page 6.

Instead of functioning as a means of top-down compliance and control, A.I. can help us understand ourselves, act on our preferences and realize our aspirations.

I am reminded of Knewton, a big ed tech ball of whiz-bangery that was predicting it would collect so much information about students that it would be able to tell students what they should eat for breakfast on test day. It did not do that; instead it went out of business. Even though it did its very best to market itself via magic.

If I pretend that I think Hoffman's magical AI will ever exist, I still have other questions, not the least of which is why would someone listen to an AI saying "You should go play World of Warcraft" or "You won't be able to finish Ulysses" when people tend to ignore other actual humans with similar advice. And where do we land if Being Human is best demonstrated by software rather than actual humans? What would it do to humans to offload the business of managing and understanding their own lives? 

We have a hint. Research from Michael Gerlich (Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability, SBS Swiss Business School) has published "AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking"* and while there's a lot of scholaring going on here, the result is actually unsurprising.

Let's say you were really tired of walking everywhere, so you outsourced the walking to someone else, and you sat on the couch every waking hour. Can we predict what would happen to the muscles in your legs? Sure--when someone else bears the load, your own load-bearing members get weaker.

Gerlich finds the same holds true for outsourcing your thinking to AI. "The correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking was found to be strongly negative." There are data and charts and academic talk, but bottom line is that "cognitive offloading" damages critical thinking. That makes sense several ways. Critical thinking is not a free-floating skill; you have to think about something, so content knowledge is necessary, and if you are using AI to know things and store your knowledge for you, your thinking isn't in play. Nor is it working when the AI writes topic sentences and spits out other work for you.

In the end, it's just like your high school English teacher told you-- if someone else does your homework for you, you won't learn anything.

You can sell the magic and try to preserve the mystery and maybe move a few more units of whatever AI widget you're marketing this week, but if you're selling something that people have to be ignorant to want so that they can offload some human activity then what are you doing? To have more time for World of Warcraft? 

If AI is going to be any use at all, it will not be because it hid itself behind a mask of faux human magical baloney, but because it can do something useful and be clear and honest about what it is actually, really doing, and not because it used an imitation of magic to capitalize on the ignorance of consumers. 

*I found this article thanks to Audrey Watters