So let’s keep first unprinciples in mind here. We humans are the impermanent, semi-autonomous ejecta of a spinning mud ball. There’s no necessary purpose or value to us, the mud ball or anything else. In this context, thought doesn’t really go anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go. It’s pointless outside of the arbitrary material-historical context in which it arises. That’s its point… in time and space if nothing else. We just have to keep seeing Sisyphus’ smiling mug.

While we wander our lives along the trackless, empty desert of the real, we hallucinate the structures that regularize our wanderings from Deleuze and Guattari’s famous schizophrenic to goose-stepping. Those hallucinations are reterritorialized in social assemblages. Thus we create the structures of meaning that organize our lives. Obviously life isn’t meaningless. People experience meaning all the time. The task is to understand what meaning is (as an unfolding, as a non-deterministic becoming, as an emergent phenomenon).

But this is where we encounter a problem with thought and thus with learning… and thus with education and AI. The problem is that we confuse the content of meaning (i.e., what is meant) with meaning itself (which is an activity). We get this from Plato and others. It is the concept that knowledge is a priori and must be remembered. This then governs us, the current residents of Plato’s academy, who also ascribe to predetermined learning outcomes where the point of pedagogy is to make learning predictable. Education is not about learning. It’s about control and ROI. Everyone wants learning to be more predictable than the stock market. Such up to these rooms. Fill out these forms. Check those boxes. Do it for four years or so. Get a degree. Get a good paying job. Live a good life. And you’ll even get into heaven where you’ll enjoy an eternity of bliss. Guaranteed. That’s what people want. Just tell them what to do and they’ll do it.

Humans are easy like that, and generally not very bright. Plato thought so too, which is why he favored philosopher-kings (i.e. men like him) over democracy.

AI is good for all this because the mass market appeal of AI is that it will finally bring an end to thought. The AI can tell me what to do. It will know better. And it can probably massage my cognitive processes along the way through the delivery of customized media. In the context of the Platonic academy, an education in AI (which is apparently what everyone now desires) is training on being the human-in-the-loop. The machine has been trained and now the humans must be trained too. The answer is already there. The task is for the student to recall it. Of course the AI already “knows.” So an education in AI is an education in recognizing knowledge as it is produced algorithmically.

The thing is humans learn anyway. They learn because they think in ways that can never be fully territorialized in the state image of thought, even when it is powered by AI. Learning is what happens when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. As no one can really control what happens, students learn at university despite the educational structures that are designed to prevent that from happening. Students are only supposed to think what we tell them which includes most importantly not doing just thinking what we tell them. It’s the repressive hypothesis at work. Also pedagogy just fails to deliver on the regular, thankfully.

This can be understood as the playing out of what Derrida describes with the university without condition. Only in a university without condition could one approach a curriculum of learning. Once the university is conditioned, it ceases to be about learning but the university cannot exists without there being certain conditions.

So I’m not saying we’re doing it wrong. Remember the whole shebang is inescapably pointless. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to be pointless.

That said, I am curious about the other possibility… of an AI and a university that are not built on an image of thought.