“Teaching for Transfer” is an operative concept in rhetoric and composition studies that address the concern that the learning experiences of first-year composition courses be transferable to future academic and/or professional writing contexts. It is not a concept without critics, but I would describe it as deeply embedded in disciplinary best practices. Following the basic…
Keep readingWhen we are refusing AI, what are we refusing? A CS field? A commercial product? An ideology? A story? And what does AI refuse of us? What does the higher ed story of AI refuse of us and our students?
Keep readingAs we know, utopia is nowhere, literally. Much of the literary movement of “anti-anti-utopianism” can be understood as a recognition that utopia’s seek to go nowhere and dystopias are what result from the attempt. It might be useful to reframe this as anti-anti-nowhere-ism, but probably not. This confusing triple negative might be resolved in the…
Keep readingEzra Klein has an interview with Naomi Klein today regarding her new book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. Klein’s mirror-world has part to do with her being confused online with Naomi Wolf (90’s feminist turned conspiracy theorist podcaster). But that’s just one interesting story of mirroring that’s part of…
Keep readingAmong Paul Virilio’s well-known concepts is that each new technology creates its own accident. I’ve discussed this earlier suggesting that generative AI creates the accident of AI-generated versions of all former accidents. We can think of this as alternative or as a different way of describing the same accident. An epistemic collapse occurs when there…
Keep readingAI output can claim no knowledge or ethical responsibility but both knowledge and consequence are produced as the output turns a building into rubble. There are humans in (and on) various loops. We could hold them accountable as the ones who know and who bear responsibility. They might take legal ownership but they do not…
Keep readingToward the end of his life, Timothy Leary began discussing the possibility of the internet as electronic LSD. Chaos and Cyber Culture is an amazing and curious artifact of the early web. There you might learn how to become an amphibian, as Leary claimed to be. Without romanticizing his provocative positioning, there has long been…
Keep readingIn the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we might consider Nietzsche’s remark that the human “intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance.” Mythologically, the AI is a non-human version of the human intellect, but could it ever have…
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Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence