This follows from Latour’s argument. An educated person is necessarily a modern person. It less elegantly pantomimes Latour but the argument I really want to make is that we will never have been educated. Modern Menos recall their technical positions from the AI gymnasium so they may perform as AI loopers. It happens and will continue to happen, but those students-cum-graduates-cum-professionals will never have been “educated.”

What are nonmodern pedagogies? Are they part of the population of posthuman pedagogies? For me this is first about nonmodern descriptions of pedagogy and curriculum. There is some of this in Reassembling the Social, including a whole scene between Latour and a student like a Platonic dialogue. I get into this in the final chapter of The Digital Nonhumanities which enjambs Latour’s concept of collective experiments and Ulmer’s electrate collectives to consider electrate collective experiments as a pedagogical mode for responding to the wicked problems of “digital literacy.”

But we have a different situation now.

Now we must account for the AI as educator and hence as “educated.” Can there be any serious refutation that AI’s educate people? of course there can! The argument is that there is no education ever. Instead there is something else that requires a better description and conceptualization.

Conventionally we would say that an AI can teach if it has access to the “content” and has a capacity to interact pedagogically with users. A textbook does this too; it’s just less customizable and interactive than AIs. So are most professors as far as that goes. This is what happens when we conceive of education as a chronological experience/event (and one that never will have arrived). As chronology, education is infinitely divisible and extensible. The whole contractual premise of higher education is that when students get their degrees they will have been educated. Afterward, they will be able to remember their education and that memory has cultural value.

But AIs have it now too. Or how is what an AI knows about chemistry different from what the typical person with a BS in chemistry knows about chemistry? The immediate, obvious answer is that the AI knows much more about chemistry than the college grad, but that depends on what we mean by “knows.”

You could say that the future of humanity is on that semantic tightrope, or you could turn the paper and realize you were looking edge-on and there’s actually plenty of space in the nonmodern media ecology, if you take the time to learn about it.