I wasn’t sure how to title this, so that’s the best I got.

Here are my circumstances:

I work in Education, as an IT professional. As a result, I have some influence (I’m not a director) over the pedagogy in the school system I work in. I say that because so much of the education process happens digitally via Chromebooks and iPads.

AI has come up recently. The consensus is this:

  1. We can’t prevent people from using AI (both Teachers and Students).
  2. Students, however, shouldn’t be using AI to complete classwork.
  3. Blocking anything just creates a cat and mouse game, and we have no control over what people do outside our network.
  4. AI Tools are here, we have to educate the staff on what they are, how they are used, and how to navigate students potentially using them.

So the department has decided, to ensure we’re covering our bases regarding COPPA, to adopt Google’s EDU offering for Gemini, since they “assure us” that our engagement with the system “will not be used to train future generations of Gemini”. There is no delusion among the team that this could just be a lie, but, they are the ones making the claim of privacy here, not us.

Here is my conundrum:

I have been generally keeping my opinions to myself in these meetings. I’ve convinced myself that my opinions are not “helpful” in the short run because they’re often rooted in systemic issues outside the scope of our small team. If people are curious, I can expand on what these opinions are in the comments.

Yesterday, I had an extended, but casual, conversation about AI with a member of my team who is responsible for engaging with Teachers and doing integration work. I described my concerns with AI, and it’s regular use, using what I understand about the relationship between machines in the labor process. That being: Machines replace a part of the labor process, which means the laborer no longer needs to perform that part of the process. The process in this context being: Researching, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Creative Writing, etc. Basically, everything a primary school student is supposed to be learning/doing. Once you’ve accepted the machine inside the labor process, you become subservient to its design. That is to say, you’re getting Googles version of lesson plans, Googles ideas about pedagogy. She agreed with my assessment of the problem, which was validating. Generally, my analysis is accepted when provided I would say, but often the “problem” I identify appears larger than us, and as such negates the usefulness of the analysis.

The issue that I’m struggling with is that I can identify these issues, see these systemic problems, chart a path toward the larger problem it is going to create down the line, yet I can’t articulate how to mitigate these issues at our level, or struggle to identify appropriate next steps. It feels like I’m squandering an opportunity to shift the course of our little corner of the EDU space. I’d rather not sit by and “Surf the Kali Yuga” as it were, but I also don’t want to be a lone dissenting voice who never provides solutions.

Does anyone else have struggles like these, either at work, or in other contexts? Interested in your thoughts.