Education 2Q50: artificial intelligence (AI), catastrophic climate change, or wonderland?

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Although the ink has barely dried on the Incheon Declaration (UNESCO 2015), blueprints are already being drawn up for a new global architecture post-2030. If the technologentsia are correct, the Global Knowledge Economy, which has underpinned the discursive drive for greater ‘quality’ in education in recent decades, is already an outdated imaginary. Recent advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and cloud computing have inspired claims that we are on the cusp of the 4th Industrial Revolution (World Bank 2018), ushering in a new age of productivity and efficiency as part of the Intelligent Economy. It has been estimated that a third of current jobs could be automated by 2030, provoking reflection on how best to prepare students for this turbulent and uncertain future, and nurturing a mantra that emphasises ‘21st century skills’ and the use of digital technology as part of ‘21st century pedagogy’. By 2Q50, the educational experience will be overseen by AI Tutors, traditional employment will become redundant as intelligent machines facilitate more productive economies, knowledge and governance will be automated and perennial ills cured; irreversibly altering the entire future of human civilization.
At the same time, reports of global inequalities, widespread hunger, and catastrophic climate change continue to defy and undermine the humanitarian project. According to the 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world – collectively - has only have twelve years left to make unprecedented changes to limit global warming to a 1.5 C increase. Beyond this threshold, even half a degree change will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat, forest fires, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people, not to mention the devastating effects on nature and mass extinction. In just twelve years - coinciding with the projected achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030 - we will be no longer facing a dilemma of sustaining our current lifestyles, but rather struggling to survive on the deeply damaged earth. By 2Q50, humans will inevitably become an endangered species themselves, their survival dependent on acknowledging the reality of finite resources on Earth, cultivating the capacity to reimagine education, and developing their ability to engage in ‘improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds” (Haraway, 2016, 136).
This panel finds its place between these two starkly contrasting visions outlined above: (i)  the impact of digital technology (and AI in particular) in education governance and learning, and (ii) escalating concerns over environmental sustainability. We see the San Francisco Bay Area, home to both Silicon Valley’s technological visions and some of North America’s most outspoken environmental activism, perched precariously on ‘the edge of Western Civilization’ (Kiedis et al. 1999), as a fitting place to contemplate where we now stand. We seek to underscore that, to date, mainstream educational researchers, particularly those working in comparative education, have largely failed to recognize, let alone discuss, the impending finite-ness of global resources in conjunction with the fictions of the Intelligent Economy, 21st Century Pedagogy, and AI Tutors. What is it about educational research that makes it unable to shift to a view of the World as finite? Could it really be that the assumptions and imaginaries of the Western Enlightenment still hold back educational researchers, even at this critical juncture in global history? While we may debate causes, the consequences seem clear: educational researchers remain unmoved, even oblivious, to the epochal shift that is now upon us, paralyzed and unable to contribute to the deep transformation that has now become urgent. As such, we seek to open space within the field for a different sort of research paradigm – one we tentatively call Finite Futures – predicated on centering ontological alterity through comparative method.
Yet seeking to go beyond merely raising these analytical questions, the panel puts for one possible answer to the paralysis: a return to “wonderland” (Silova 2018), wherein space is (re)opened for “wonder,” “magic,” and “mystery”. This move beyond ‘usual ways of seeing’ follows closely on insights generated in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology. The panel is premised on the possibility that, in addition to identifying the ‘shape of things to come’, it is work within “wonderland” that will enable us to imagine alternate futures, ones that are crafted upon different ontological foundations, and which in turn bring the present into sharper focus. More directly, STS has an established tradition that explores the relationship between utopian literature, science-fiction and society, the merging of fictive and real worlds, and a burgeoning seam that aims to harness the multiple realities (and hence, futures) opened up by the turn towards ontological pluralism in anthropological studies (see Jensen 2018). How might we learn from this to construct new comparative genres that extend beyond mere reruns of Western metaphysics (and Western Man)?

Ultimately, these unorthodox moves take us well beyond the presumed boundaries of comparative education, into a landscape which is open to various ontologies and where zones of indiscernibility, openness to alterity and ‘eerie states’ are commonplace, and in which the leap back and forth between worlds is unproblematic and seen as essential to rekindle the lost ability to ‘think’ in Other ways. Rather than setting one-dimensional standards of quality as the technologentsia urge us to do, we instead suggest that an alternate approach to ‘2Qth century pedagogy’ will consist in nurturing this plasticity (a restyled global competency), cultivating the ability to embrace imaginaries as both fictive and real, and broadening horizons of possibility to enable future generations. What would schools look like who taught this restyled 21st Century disposition? What would this new 21st Century Pedagogy look like? These are questions that a Finite Futures paradigm will eventually need to address. For now, the more immediate challenge remains communicating the most basic issues at stake to a field that has not shown a great willingness to ‘go deeper’. To this end, we once again invite existentially curious comparative education scholars to hop down the rabbit hole – or plug in digitally– as we bring into being Education 2Q50, together.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Euan D. Auld, Institute of Education, University College London

Individual Presentations

• Education 2050: (Comparative) Educational Research for a Finite Future - Jeremy Rappleye, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Education

• Education 2050: intelligent governance and the edusphere - Euan D. Auld, Institute of Education, University College London

• Education 2Q50: World(s) Beyond Human - Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

Discussants

• Karen Mundy, Toronto University

• Casper Jensen, Osaka University