Surrogate robot pedagogy and the racialized inner child

• In Event: Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions: Critical Perspectives on AI and Curriculum

Abstract

Overview
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Processes of learning have long been debated, and yet learning is often considered largely an interior process, associated with reason, understanding, and other Enlightenment images of the inner mind. This paper will discuss how the interiority of learning was formed in contradistinction to the exteriority of racialized bodies, and how this interior/exterior dualism has come to shape a surrogate pedagogy and curriculum associated with current robot-enhanced learning experiences.

Objectives
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This paper seeks to develop an argument that the dualism of interiority/exteriority, developed during the Enlightenment, is inseparable from colonial logics of racial hierarchies, which inhere in the continued pursuit of machine intelligence, along with the new images of curriculum that accompany these technological developments.

Theoretical Framework
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This paper draws from the cultural theory of technology and Black radical thought. In particular, the paper engages Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s (1944) articulations of instrumental reason, as the shift of reason from the human mind to instruments of science, technology, and history. Building on Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of “instrumental reason”, the paper extends Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2007) intervention to trace Man’s attempts to model interiority and as such, Kant’s transcendental reason, in the exteriority of technology, in this case student-assist robots.

Methods & Data
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This paper engages in close readings of relevant theoretical and technical literature on technology and AI. A specific case study of a robot intended to support children’s learning experiences will be studied through the theoretical tools. The encoded behavior and performed curriculum of the robot exemplifies how algorithms instrumentalize a particular kind of interiority, and with it, colonial reason.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
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Forms of human surrogacy are at the foundation of learning in artificial intelligence and the development of robots. As Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski (2019) argue, “the claim that technologies can act as surrogates recapitulates histories of disappearance, erasure, and elimination necessary to maintain the liberal subject as the agent of historical progress” (p. 6). When surrogate technologies turn to the pedagogical process of education and parenting, it becomes what I call surrogate pedagogy; an instrumentalizing of the transparent subject in place of the teacher or parent mediating curriculum, learning and development. This is not simply an effort at momentary intervention to enhance collaborative learning, but also does the generative work of racialization by shaping the child in the mold of the transparent subject (Popkewitz et al, 2021). We find this in the proliferation of learning analytics platforms employing AI both within and out of school, AI-engineered video games for education, and AI robots for children.

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, Teachers College, Columbia University