I would frame our higher education situation as follows. We are readying students for future challenges but leaving them unprepared for a future worth inhabiting.

This applies broadly but especially with our response to AI. This is not a failure of effort or intention but rather a structural consequence of how attention–>anticipation has come to organize life.

First, I have to put two familiar(ish) things together. The first is the idea that the human mind (and the AI modeled on it) intelligence is both predictive and enactive. I.e. intelligence is anticipatory. Our mind, our intelligence, prepares the body for the unfolding present by participating in that unfolding. Artificial intelligences are also anticipatory. Their anticipations, their predictions enacted as an output, are what we experience as their responses to our questions. It is not wrong for AI to anticipate the purpose of intelligence is to anticipate: to enact a prediction. Instead, the concern lies in how human and nonhuman anticipatory intelligences anticipate one another.

The second and more familiar thing is the attention economy. When the attention economy (i.e., the financialization of attention) is framed by our understanding of the predictive self, we realize that what humans attend to the most are things that produce uncertainty if not threat directly. When we are satisfied, we go to sleep. Satisfaction is not a state that the attention economy can sustain. Here we might remember Netflix CEO Reed Hastings remarking that sleep was their primary competitor. Satisfaction ends attention. Threat maintains it, even if it is only FOMO.

The outcome of this process where the financialization of attention becomes the financialization of misery is so absurdly Kafka-esque that anyone would be understandably dubious except for one thing. We are all actually experiencing it.

I suspect that this process might account for some of the experience that has been hypothesized by Kyla Scanlon and others as a Vibecession, where many of the traditional measurables of the economy improve but people’s outlooks do not. In theory, that could makes sense if the economic upturn is produced by misery.

30 years ago Katherine Hayles remarked in an interview with Arthur Kroker that the Internet had made concepts like rhizome literal, and in some sense evacuated them of their power. Now we can say the same thing with the control society. We don’t need to be literally plugged in Matrix-style to have our affects modulated by the currents of anticipatory intelligences. This is not about shaping specific feelings: that’s the old style ideology which still goes on. Anticipatory intelligences establish the event horizons and landscape projections within which affect, thought, etc. arise. That’s the control society.

In the university, the concept of excellence, which was already associated with neoliberal flexibility for Bill Readings, becomes interchangeable with readiness. Readiness is institution-speak for anticipation. Readiness is flexibility rethought through anticipation. Not only am I able to change, but I have already changed in anticipation of your need. I am ready. This readiness language permeates the administrative interface with faculty. Right now much of it deals with AI, and maybe AI will be the topic that pushes readiness to an even greater degree of salience within university operations. One shudders to imagine.

However, readiness also permeates student culture, curriculum, and pedagogy. As I noted at the start, we are readying our students to meet important future challenges. Who can really say that we shouldn’t be doing this? Every moment exists as a moment of readying for some future beyond the event horizon.

What if courses were framed as sites where decisive action must occur rather than as preparation for some deferred action? More importantly can action be taken without recapture as romanticized, heroic pedagogy narrative? Because I think somewhere in there is one way of thinking about how students might respond to their lack of preparation for a future worth inhabiting. In the call for decisive action now, we always find ourselves underprepared. We discover our preparations and our tools are inadequate.

Of course we learn and prepare. We anticipate, if we think at all. But we find ourselves in a curious trap of our own making. Would we rather anticipate (with high certainty) a vaguely miserable life? Or live with less certainty? If it is the former then we must ready ourselves for challenges. Are we capable of the latter? Of living with less certainty as a choice?