Zachary Kaiser: Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: The Political Economy of Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations

Zachary Kaiser (Michigan State University): Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: The Political Economy of Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations

Abstract
In this talk, I will argue that the utility of generative artificial intelligence for higher education under capitalism appears as the result of a particular kind of fiction—a fairy tale—that serves to structure social reality and reinforce the legitimacy of capitalism. This is in spite of a preponderance of evidence that counters even the most seemingly reasonable genAI boosterism, particularly as it pertains to higher education. The fairy tale of AI’s utility for higher education, and society more broadly, is deeply dangerous, and, therefore, must be delegitimized. To do so, I will seek to marshal a heterogeneous collection of “ghost stories.” Perhaps the most famous ghost is the “spectre” invoked by Marx and Engles. But the ghosts to which I refer here are ghost stories in the sense of lost futures, futures that were never realized, but that, maybe, we can resurrect, that can become their own structuring fictions if we can let them loose on the world. Such ghost stories do not inherently carry the legitimacy of capital, they have not become hegemonic models for new ways of living and being in universities or in society. But, perhaps by sharing them, synthesizing their most salient lessons for us today, we can begin to, as J.K. Gibson-Graham writes, “excavate the possible.”