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2022 was a system reboot. 2023 broke the doom loop. This year is all about turning vision
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into reality. Conference to Restore Humanity 2024 is an invitation for K-12 and college
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educators to build your joyful reimagined classroom. Our conference is designed around
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the accessibility and sustainability of virtual learning, while engaging participants in an
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environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value with students. Instead of
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long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, our flipped keynotes let the learning community
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listen and learn on their own time, then engage in a one-hour Q&A with our speakers. Dr. Mary
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Helen Imordino-Yang makes the neurobiological case for progressive education rooted in her
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groundbreaking work in affective neuroscience. Dr. Carla Shalaby demonstrates the power of
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education as the practice of freedom, honoring young people's rights to full human being. Dr.
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Sousan Jaber elevates the voices of Arab and Muslim students as an advocate for global equity
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and justice. And Orchard View Schools' Innovative Learning Center showcases healthy, sustainable
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community learning spaces for teenagers and adult learners alike. Beyond our flipped keynotes,
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participants will be invited to join week-long learning journeys. Join Trevor Alio on a journey
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to learn interdisciplinary inquiry-based methods to equip students as knowledge producers,
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communicating with zines, podcasts, and more. And understand the ripple effects of modern
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imperialism with a focus on Palestinian resilience and classroom tools for fostering global
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solidarity in our second workshop led by Abir Ramadan Shinawi. We're also featuring virtual
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school tours so you can see progressive practice in action at the Nova Lab, Olin Tangi STEM Academy,
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Community Lab School, and more. The mission of reshaping education systems, of turning vision
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into reality, is vital for a sustainable and just future. Conference to Restore Humanity runs July
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22nd through the 25th, and as of recording, early bird tickets are still available. It's $150 for
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four days, with discounts available, group rates, and parity pricing. Plus, we'll award certificates
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for teacher training and continuing education credits. See our website, humanrestorationproject.org,
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for more information, and let's restore humanity together.
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Hello and welcome to Episode 150 of the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick
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Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by
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our supporters, three of whom are Kimberly Baker, Simeon Frank, and Corinne Greenblatt. You can
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learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org,
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and connect with us anywhere on social media. Were we required to characterize this age of
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ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it not a heroic, devotional, philosophical,
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or moral age, but above all others, the mechanical age. It is the age of machinery in every outward
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and inward sense of that word, the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches,
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and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly or by hand.
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All is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments,
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some cunning abbreviating processes and readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited and
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thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a
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speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron
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fingers that ply it faster. This is how Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle characterized
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Great Britain's mechanized, steam-powered industrial era in 1829. These changes in
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the human relationship to production rippled through the world economy with profound social,
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political, and environmental implications. One loosely organized group, the Luddites,
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emerged early on to smash the new machines and resist mechanization of the mills.
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200 years after Carlyle's age of machinery, we find ourselves sold a new age, the age of automation
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and AI, which promises another transformation in the way we live, work, and learn with similar
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social, political, and environmental consequences. At least, the AI hype cycle is real.
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Sal Khan's new book, for example, Brave New Words, How AI Will Revolutionize Education and Why That's
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a Good Thing, promises to be, quote, required reading for everyone who cares about education,
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end quote. But what should be the relationship of education, automation, and artificial intelligence?
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Should there be one at all? How much power, not to mention student data, should educators seed
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to the new machine in the age of AI? Or should the answer be a 21st century Luddite revival
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and mass resistance to the vision of the future offered by Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft?
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That, anyway, I suspect, will be the argument of my guest today, Charles Logan, a learning sciences
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PhD candidate at Northwestern University. Writing earlier this year for the Los Angeles Review of
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Books, ultimately, the Luddites' militancy and commitment to resistance might be a necessary
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entry point for how laborers and teachers, students, and caregivers can take an antagonistic
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stance towards AI and automation and create a new commons. Thank you so much, Charles,
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for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be chatting with you all today.
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So I think in the popular imagination, a Luddite is like an octogenarian congressperson who doesn't
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use email or someone who's entirely technophobic, perhaps even culturally conservative, right?
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Preserving the old ways against progress. One of the earliest pieces that you shared with me is
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from hybrid pedagogy, and it was written in 2014, fully a decade ago, right? And by an author going
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by torn halves called Toward a Luddite Pedagogy. And I was reading back through that and saw that
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it makes no mention of AI. So it's clearly an idea that existed alongside tech for at least
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that long. So help us understand who the Luddites were. What were they about? And what can we learn
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from how they approached technological change in their own time?
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Sure thing. Yeah, I will do my best to situate the Luddites in history. And working on a piece
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right now with Phil Nichols and Terrell Garcia that tries to track what we've come up with three
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different waves of Luddites. But I think it's important to start with the OGs, the original
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Luddites. So as you mentioned, it's the early 19th century in England, and you have the long
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history of different sorts of cloth workers who all of a sudden are faced with automation. And so
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you have early industrial capitalists who are building factories, who are shifting the nature
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of labor because of these technologies that are displacing people, are allowing capitalists to
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depress wages, and that are having these rippling effects on workers themselves, but also their
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communities. And so these automating technologies are threats to both the livelihood of these
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laborers, but also the dignity in which they conceive of themselves and their work and the
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great traditions that have brought them to this place in history. And so the Luddites are actually
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named after a fictional character, Ned Ludd, who, the story goes, was punished by one of his bosses,
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essentially, and then decided to destroy the automating machine, Spinning Jenny, or one other
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kind of mill. And so emerges as this folk hero, again, in a part of the world where it were not
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strangers to folk heroes like Robin Hood. And then you have, as you mentioned, this loose,
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but also connected set of political projects that go under the name of the Luddites across England
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in the early 19th century. And you have folks who are strategically under the cover of darkness,
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breaking into factories, breaking into factory owners' homes, and destroying what they call
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the obnoxious machines, the machines that were threats to their livelihood, to their dignity.
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And so again, I will emphasize it is strategic sabotage. It is not haphazard. And so as you
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mentioned, over the last 200 plus years, Luddite has become a pejorative. I think I was looking
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at what Dictionary.com has those words of the day and a corresponding image. And the corresponding
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image was, as you said, an octogenarian looking at her phone as if it were a fish.
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And so we've seen these sort of projects then to rehabilitate and sort of reframe the Luddites
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over the last 250 plus years. And so that happened with historians in the early to mid 20th century.
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And then you have moving into the 1970s, what Phil and Antero and I have called the second wave
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of Luddism. And that is a different group of people. You have folks like Kirkpatrick Sale is
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one of the leaders of these new Luddites who are questioning technology at a time of the Cold War
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and sort of the growth of nuclear energies and weapons and environmentalists and pacifists,
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Quakers. And so there's more of a sort of this motley crew and this big tent,
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but unlike their predecessors were often avowed pacifists, as I mentioned. And so they're moving
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away from that original tactic of physical destruction of infrastructure and more of a
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kind of set of beliefs to organize around. And then the term kind of falls out of favor again.
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And it's only been, I would say, in the last sort of, well, you mentioned Torne Havs piece from 2014
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and Audrey Waters picks up on that work from a few years ago. And then you also have this sort
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of growth in a lot of tech critics like Brian Merchant and Paris Marx and others who are
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reclaiming the name and the identity of a Luddite. It is a very fluid term. I think that is something
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to acknowledge that it has changed over the course of time. Now, I think, as you mentioned,
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as we have the Solcons of the world who are doing their best to infuse our classrooms with
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their proprietary chatbots, I think we can look to the Luddites again and think about, well,
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what would it mean to practice this Luddite praxis and what kinds of interventions, what kind of
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tactics, what kind of sabotage, what kind of organizing can be done and inspired by the Luddites
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in the year 2024? Well, let's go ahead and bring in, since you mentioned Solcons,
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since we're kind of transitioning into talking about what would be considered the third wave
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in your take on third wave Luddism here. So you've been skeptical of announcements from
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OpenAI's Sam Altman, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and kind of working in tandem here. And you've been
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sharing your criticism of Solcon's newest book on social media, which I've enjoyed reading there,
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too. So what even is that transformation that they're promising? What tactics of the new
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modern industrial capitalists are the third wave Luddites reacting to? Can you outline that for
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us? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it comes down to the same dog and pony show that Solcon has been selling
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for a long time, and that is personalized learning. And he has this real sort of superpower to
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forget any sort of history, maybe never learned it in the first place, has been strategic about
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his own ignorance. And again, as an avowed Audrey Waters fanboy, she's written about the
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history of personalized learning and begins her book, which is, I believe the title is the
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history of personalized learning, or teaching machines, the history of personalized learning,
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MIT Press, go buy it now. And she starts with an anecdote about Solcon and how he sort of makes
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this entree into education after having been a hedge fund analyst, which, again, I don't want
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to discount the possibility that someone could move from the business world into education and
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bring with them and develop a critical pedagogy. I'd argue Solcon is not that person.
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And so it is, again, I think the story of personalized learning of we can all of a sudden
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flip on this chat bot or open up the chat bot. And here you have a personalized
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tutor who is capable of getting to know you, providing real time feedback, and all of a sudden
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you can achieve greatness. Reading the book, as painful as it is, I think that sense of automation
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of what it's like to be a student, what it's like to be a teacher, I think has the echo of early
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industrialists who are pushing similar sorts of automating technologies. And again, I mean,
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you see who's blurted the book. You mentioned Bill Gates, the current CEO of Microsoft,
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blurted the book. Wendy Kopp blurted the book, who's the founder of Teach for America and his
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very problematic approach to sustainable teaching in our most vulnerable and undersourced communities.
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And again, technology being turned to as a kind of panacea, which again, there's a precedent for
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that. And that's B.F. Skinner and his teaching machines who sought to bring these teaching
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machines into Harlem and other under-resourced communities, as again, answers for complex social
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problems that date back decades, if not centuries. And so this technosolutionism, as again, the kind
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of panacea that Khan is pushing in conjunction with folks like, he refers to Sam Altman as Sam,
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and he went to go see Bill Gates right after he saw Sam. And so there's this very sort of
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chummy group. And so reading this and thinking about Audrey Waters' work and others who have
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been very influential and thinking about, well, this turn to Luddism, what does that offer us?
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Because I think it's important to acknowledge that, and this is something that I've wrestled
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with and thinking about, well, what are potential shortcomings of Luddism, is you can't easily smash
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a chat bot. You could smash the Chromebook that you're using and then have to turn around and
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probably pay your school. And so there's a real kind of limitation to what Luddism looks like
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in the 21st century that I don't think enough folks who have claimed that as an identity
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acknowledge. And yet, I think that that spirit of sabotage of a more militaristic
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stance towards the technology, a more intentionally aggressive stance is helpful because there are,
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right, these emerging technologies. Nightshade, I think, is one of them where you can upload images
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that essentially will poison a data set. And so there are these tools that exist that, again,
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I would argue are Luddite tools. Their makers may not claim them as Luddite, but I think we
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can view them through that lens. And then I also think, right, that skepticism, that organizing
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was, I think, an important piece of the Luddites. The original Luddites are organizing under the
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cover of darkness and these sort of backroom taverns and trying to figure out, what do we
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do about this technology? How do we counter it? And so I think there's a lesson there for teachers,
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for students who are all of a sudden facing these technologies and being told that this is the
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future of education and that organizing is an important piece to pull out from the Luddites,
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as well as those tactics of sabotage, as well as the playfulness of Luddites. So, you know,
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they're writing poems, they are inspiring poems, but Lord Byron is, I think, the most famous poet
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who kind of came to the Luddite cause. They're sending these missives to various political
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leaders and nailing these threatening notes to doors. They're dressing in drag. And so I think
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there's this sense of deadly seriousness alongside that playfulness. And I think there's a lot to be
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said about that playfulness and as sort of like a public pedagogy that we see in education. And
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we see, I think, also, you know, folks who I'm thinking of like Emily Bender and Alex Hannah
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have a wonderful podcast. It's like a live stream. It's called Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000,
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something like that. And they basically just like, I don't know if I can say this on the show,
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shit talk, these latest AI hype, like an article or whatever it might be and across different
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disciplines, including education. And I think it's a profoundly like, educated act to like
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have this show that they then put out and, you know, in a podcast and a newsletter, you know,
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the video and it's hosted, not on YouTube, like, you know, you're not putting money in
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Alphabet's pocket. And so, again, I think there are those tactics of sabotage, of organizing,
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of playfulness, and also acknowledging that even with the historical Luddites, the Luddites and
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their kind of projects were connected, but they were also hyper local to the different regions.
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And so acknowledging that like what we as educators are doing with our students is always
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contingent on context. It's always contingent on the people in the room and the constraints that
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we're facing, given who we are and where we are. And so I think that's an important piece to uplift
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from the original Luddites as well, is that a lot of these different projects, while loosely
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connected around, you know, sabotage and organizing to protect their livelihood and dignity against
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the incursion of these automating technologies that do not have, you know, uniform sets of
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beliefs or uniform goals. And I think that's something that we can also hold on to as we
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think about our own kind of like heterogeneity in 2024 and thinking about what would it look like
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to, you know, practice a Luddite praxis in response to, you know, this age of generative
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AI that we find ourselves in. And I don't even like calling it the age of generative AI.
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I feel like puts it up on a pedestal that it should not be. We don't need to see that ground
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to them. You know, it's this flashpoint of this sizzle of AI in education that will more than
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likely burn out, hopefully sooner rather than later. And I think that's a great way to get into
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the obfuscation that the AI hype cycle, it's the age of AI hype, if it's not the age of generative
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AI, right? It's the age of the AI salesman or, you know, lump cryptocurrencies somewhere in there,
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too. But, you know, as I'm looking at the blurbs for Sal Khan's book, right, from Arne Duncan,
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Tony Blair, you mentioned Wendy Kopp, formerly of Teach for America, now Teach for All,
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again, Sam Altman, Adam Grant, Bill Gates, right, all of these people. And in their blurbs,
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obfuscating something that's a little bit deeper. And I think it's something that you really had
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elaborated on in some work that you shared with me about understanding an ecological framework
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that actually helps us see past that hype cycle and understand the relationships between generative
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AI and how it's entwined with so many other aspects of life. And I think as far as a third
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wave Luddism go, I think those ecologies are really important to recruiting people to see past,
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you know, that obfuscation and that veil of, hey, here's how it's going to transform education. But,
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hey, how is that going to impact the environment or human labor or any of those other features?
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Could you explain what you mean by that ecological framework and why that matters?
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Yeah, I'd be happy to. And so let me start by contrasting it, I think, with the more common
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framework that I've encountered when working with young people and teachers about AI and learning
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with AI, and that's AI literacy. And so I think, right, AI literacy, one of the critiques of
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literacy as a framework that I'm familiar with is that literacy tends to focus on representative
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forms. And so I think that's where you can see, you know, the let's develop an AI literacy curriculum
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that is going to be based on the assumption that these technologies should be used,
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but let's be careful about how we use them because the technology, they're bullshit machines,
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and they're just, you know, mathy math that is going to spit out like predictive text,
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and that text is biased. And so let's attend to the bias and let's be careful
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not to just take whatever comes out of a chat bot as the truth. So there's like that conversation,
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obviously, there's the whole plagiarism conversation, and those are important
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conversations to have, but I don't think they do the work that we need to really understand
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how these technologies are operating, and then also don't open up enough space for interrogating
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and intervening in the technologies. So I'm all for an AI literacy that is expansive in its approach
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that pushes back against the assumption that AI should be used in schools. I'll also note that,
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and this is work that Phil Nichols has done and others around what they call the capture of
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AI literacy and the notion that literacy as a project is a speculative one of sort of thinking
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about what the world could be and in a hopeful place. And so that's when, you know, literacy
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is at its best, but that big tech companies are able to use these literacy frameworks as a means
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of what Lucy Pongrather calls our soft power of governance and framing the technologies as
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necessary, again, with some caveats of like, we know they're biased, and we know they're potentially
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discriminatory. But you know, that's for you all to figure out. And here's this curriculum you can
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use to figure it out. So that, you know, AI literacy, I've got a complicated relationship
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with. The ecological framework, I think, is something that I find more compelling in part
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because it moves beyond just, you know, the interface of a platform on your device. And it
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takes into account these, I just mentioned these obfuscated systems of labor. So you have, right,
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folks often in the Global South doing, you know, ghost work is often referred to the notion of
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unseen labor, where they're training the data that makes AI, AI, and right, AI is people all
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the way down. So they're doing this really gruesome work of labeling toxic material,
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traumatizing material. And so I think that's one dimension of the ecological framework that's
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important to note, labor. I've said it's people all the way down, AI is, but it's all the way down
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into the very, you know, waters and earth and soil and water that make up our planet. And, you know,
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from the mining that goes into producing the computer chips, the materials for the data centers
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in which, you know, the infrastructure of AI is rapidly, you know, being spread throughout the
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world. And again, the amount of water required to cool data centers, to cool the servers that make
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not just AI, but the internet possible. So there's like a real material aspect to the technology that
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I think is important for students to interrogate, especially because, right, these are the young
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people who are going to bear the brunt of climate change. And so I find it increasingly difficult
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to square the narrative that technology, AI technology specifically, is going to revolutionize
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education at a time when that same technology is increasing the effects of climate change,
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is further entrenching the power of fossil fuel companies. There's a headline today about the US
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continuing coal production because we need, you know, for energy consumption for AI production.
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So it is this, I think, hypocrisy and a real set of compromises that I think folks need to
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confront. And this is what I try to do with my own students, is like, if you're going to use these
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technologies, there are real material harms that they're doing to people, to planet, to humans,
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to more than humans. And, you know, you kind of alluded to this, but we also see, right,
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the ideological and financial benefits that go to people like Bill Gates and Sam Altman.
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There's been writing about what's called the test realistic bundle from people like Emil Torres and
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to Nick Garou and this sort of set of ideologies essentially is like eugenics and like the notion
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of like AI as some sort of superhuman, you know, project that is going to, I'm doing this a very
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slapdash version of the test realistic bundle. We'll add some notes in the show notes, I suppose.
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In short, I think what an ecological framework offers is a more expansive set of questions,
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a more expansive set of sort of lines of inquiry than these kind of traditional corporate AI
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literacy curricula offer. Yeah, I was just going back and reading your tweet in response to
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the plan to, or to unretire coal fired plants as power demand from AI surges. And you wrote,
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AI is supposedly revolutionizing the future of education while making the actual future
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increasingly bleak. I don't know if there's like a sci-fi analogy or a monkey's paw or something
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like that, but it's literally as, you know, we're revolutionizing one space and immiserating the
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future in another one. It's just like there's a direct cost related to all of those things.
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I think perhaps like a criticism that I've seen of this Luddism when I had kind of posted a preview
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of our conversation that came up was about its potential to help with assistive technologies,
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the possibility to be a huge boon for disabled people or to even be assistive in the sense of
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providing accurate translation services or transcription services. And I think I'll mix
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my literary analogies a little bit more. My brain is kind of thinking in the sci-fi space, but
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I went to almost kind of like this William Gibson Neuromancer cyberpunk space in the sense where
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you have this overarching corporate structure and evil technology sort of predominates,
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but you have these niches of DIY mutual aid and the like kind of coexisting alongside that.
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That's invisible to the mainstream. I suppose that's not ideal. Or is it like the one ring?
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Should AI be buried deep in a mountain or thrown into Mount Doom? Because simply interacting with
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it has such a profoundly negative and transformative consequence for users and the environment as a
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whole, as you said, like embedding these ideologies at the cost of this invisible human labor. And
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it's a miseration of the environment. So I wonder like, I just don't know how, this is the question
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that I grapple with, right? Like how do we, oh gosh, I don't want to say take the good, but
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you know, like use it for where it could be like for more humane, pro-human purposes, or is it
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radioactive in the sense that it's better off just not to touch it and develop some other
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technologies? I don't know how to resolve this. I'm hoping you'll help me out.
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What do we do?
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I came here for you to figure out my problems, not for me to figure out your problems.
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Yeah. So I mean, again, I would think, you know, what is the, what are the historical
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Luddites from, you know, the early 19th century tell us? And one of the things I get to emphasize
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is that they're not, they're not anti-technology, but they're anti the concentration of power
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into the hands of a very few, you know, white men and corporations. And flash forward, we look at,
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you know, one example that I think can provide a kind of blueprint for assistive technologies
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that you're talking about is there's an organization, Tehuku Media, and they are based in New Zealand
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and they, which is the, the Westernized name of the indigenous lands. And they produce
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Maori chatbots and other AI for like language acquisition and language revitalization.
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And I just saw one of their, like the chief information or chief technology officer came
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and spoke at the university recently. And there's a great episode featuring him on the podcast,
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Tech Won't Save Us. And so, you know, a few attributes of this company and the technology
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that stand in stark contrast to the open AIs of the world is that they take data sovereignty
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very seriously. And so they have these from like cassette tapes to like CDs to digitized
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audio of several generations of Maori people speaking and telling stories. And they've
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approached these people and received their consent to use these stories, to train these
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models to revitalize and maintain their language and to teach people, Maori people, their language.
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And so that to me is one example of care for people, for their stories, for their data.
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It is not an attempt to scale. I think that notion of scale is so problematic in so many ways,
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especially when it comes to AI. But it is a community-based project where, yes, there are
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compute consequences. And I think they're wrestling with how can they use solar? How
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can they use other renewable energies for their projects? But it is done in conjunction with
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the community. And so they've been approached by, I think, OpenAI and Google and others
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to kind of hand over their model or to help them train their other models, these automatic
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speech technologies. And they've said no. And so I think, again, we're thinking about assistive
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technologies in schools or in other spaces. And again, you mentioned these sort of DIY,
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let's fund the DIY groups and learn from one another in a more decentralized way rather than
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concentrate the funding and the compute power in the hands of three companies. Or like NVIDIA is
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the only company who's making the chips to run these technologies. So that, again, I think it
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is in the spirit of the history of glutites. And again, they may not call themselves,
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these Maori folks doing this work, they may not call themselves glutites. And I think that's
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something to acknowledge, too, that if these sets of ideas are helpful, I think that's one of the
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arguments we make, then great. But we also, you know, the glutites, and predominantly the people
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who have claimed that are white men. And so that is something to acknowledge and something to
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grapple with. And even today, I mean, I think, you know, that the group has become more expansive
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over time. So I think that's important to acknowledge. But I think that those tactics,
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the notion of playfulness, of organizing, of sort of community-based solutions to technology
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that embrace technology, and work with people on the ground to think about what are problems that
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we as a group face, and how can we use our traditional knowledge to address these problems
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without then, you know, having to rely on the Googles and, you know, the metas of the world.
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That, I think, is a promising example, is the best example that I've come across
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that I can point to to say it's not either we have AI or we don't. But it's, again,
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these sorts of very grounded projects in community that I think offer a third way forward that I
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think also is in the spirit of glutism. I think that's a great point to bring it back to
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not the notion of technology, but the notion of power really situated in the work of the
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Luddites in really all, perhaps each of those waves. So I'm wondering if you have, you've
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mentioned a whole bunch of different authors, podcasts, anything else. Are there some highlights
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or are there like your top tier hits for people to go find out and learn more about these ideas?
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Where would you point people who want to kind of learn more, perhaps join the third wave of
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Luddism? Yeah, so someone who's been writing about Luddites for a while is Zachary Loeb,
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and he publishes under the name of Librarian Shipwreck. And that is on social media, and he
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has a blog. And he's got a few posts where he also has like a top 15 readings on Luddites,
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because I'm not an expert. Let's be clear, I've done some light reading. And so hopefully,
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if any Luddite experts out there are listening to this, please take anything I say with an asterisk
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next to it. Brian Merchant's book that came out that Phil and Tero and I reviewed for the LA
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Review of Books is called Blood and Machine. I have it here in front of me, The Origins of
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the Rebellion Against Big Tech. That one's great. And that gives you, again, sort of on the ground,
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historical Luddites, but then he fast forwards to contemporary times and looks at different,
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sort of like the gig work economy and draws parallels between the kinds of organizing
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and resistance that contemporary gig workers are doing. Gavin Mueller has a book that came out a
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few years ago called Breaking Things at Work. And that's another one. So I'd say, start with
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those three. And if you really want to do deep dives, folks like David Noble, who's a historian
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and tech critic and others, there's no shortage of work on the Luddites. And I think that is
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in part because they've become a source of interest, again, really only in the last 100 years,
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as historians have sought to kind of rethink and reframe who the Luddites were and the kinds of
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political projects that they were engaged in. Because there is, I think, some debate about
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how organized and how much of like a political project around unionizing and as like a political
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class. And so if you're into that kind of stuff, there's certainly reading for you to find.
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Thanks so much, Charles, for joining me today.
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Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it.
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Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this
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conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening,
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find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website,
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