AI and Normalizing a Nuclear Renaissance? Worthwhile Curriculum and Human Education in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Reimagining Curriculum Through Posthuman and Dialogic Ethics

Abstract

This study in Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship examines AI as curriculum relative to the “nuclear Anthropocene” (Max Planck Institute, 2023). Framed theoretically by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015), William Schubert’s (2009) “worthwhile” question of curriculum studies, and Ikeda Daisaku’s (1988-2015) peacebuilding approaches to AI, nuclear disarmament, and ningen kyōiku, or “human education” (of dialogue, value creation, global citizenship, and creative coexistence), the study interrogates AI’s growing normalization of a nuclear renaissance imbricated in its development (Castelvecchi, 2024), and considers how AI redefines not just what and how we teach, but why. It calls on educational researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to engage curricularly with nuclearity to cultivate learners to concretize and disrupt the specter of a nuclear Renaissance.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University