foreign foreign so foreign all right we're getting a little bit of light there really beautiful good evening wow that was the fastest response I've ever had to saying good evening good evening and welcome um see if I can get my iPad to cooperate with me thank you all for coming it's delightful to see some familiar faces from TC it's also delightful to see a lot of friends and family that are coming here for this event with Ezekiel I'm Bill Baldwin I currently have the Delight of serving as the interim Provost and one of the fun things I get to do is occasionally make open opening remarks at an event like this I want to do a couple of things um talk a little bit about the sax lecture and the Gordon lecture and where they come from celebrate some of the people that have been involved with those programs and do that as a wind-up to introducing our speaker tonight so if you'll bear with me I promise it shouldn't take any more than 15 20 minutes but I'll try to move on the sax lecture goes back to um fellow by the name of Julia Sachs who was a faculty member at TC in 1902. and even though people joke and tease me that I've been here 46 years I did not know him and remember this will be in the language of 1924 when the sax lectureship was established he worked in the field of Classics philology archeology and art and with his wife in 1924 established an endowment for the Julia sax lecture series and the language was to bring distinguished visiting lectures to campus chosen by the dean the lecturer is invited to speak on some phases of Education best suited to promotion of progress in secondary education if you run that fast forward and come up to 2023 I think you can see the connection with what we would like to talk about tonight the Edmund Gordon lecture was established in 2013. if I have that right I should um I should know this stuff I all many of us in the room might have had an opportunity to have some brief connection with Ed okay um I was serving as an associate Dean and Ed was the interim dean of the college at the time I had read so much about him I had bumped up against him with where we sequestered Yumi for a number of years off campus um but that semester with him as interim Dean and Associate Dean was extraordinary to get to know the man a story that I cannot tell here I'll share afterwards at the reception um the Gordon lecture has become one of I think the high points in the series of events and lectures that we have so I'm delighted that you're all here um in recent past we've brought some Scholars maybe some name recognition here Gloria Ladson Billings Sonia Nieto Charles Payne Mary Schmidt Campbell and one of the lecturers was also a faculty member at TC Erica Gordon Erica Walker she's a former and I want to put the word former in quote marks because most of us know that she's just on leave to accept the position of Dean at oizi uh in Toronto and we left it as a leave of absence because we are all going to make certain that we harass her until the times he comes back to to join us again um I do want to just celebrate a little bit the um that under her leadership the Gordon Institute grew significantly both in terms of Engagement for faculty students and fellows as well as the financial support for projects um her stewardship I think was important for a number of reasons not the least of which was her personal style and her ability to connect with people but it was also for expanding Partnerships in Harlem and nearby communities and I think one of the things that we want to be sure we continue that commitment is how we engage more deeply and More impactfully in our communities and how we celebrate their values and their culture and what we do is bring our work to try to magnify that rather than be the experts that walk in she also developed and sustained collaborative initiatives and increased deep involvement with the community so if she's watching the live stream I send her a heartfelt thank you oops today we're excited to have Ezekiel Dixon Roman as our speaker I want to credit Ezekiel with being the only person who I called while I was on vacation to try to recruit him for Maine and had a delightful hour hour and a half conversation where there were times when the hair on the back of my neck was standing up because it was just so exciting to hear the things that he was talking about doing um he started visiting us in January of this year and his service will be as the professor of critical race media and educational studies and the director of the Gordon Institute I'm going to say a little bit more about Ezekiel in a few minutes what I do is talk to some of us who might not know Ed very well he's a bright young 101 years of age he has had more than eight decades as a psychologist a minister a community activist a writer a scholar a researcher a mentor and at the highest level he has fought to create a smarter healthier and more Equitable Society oh gosh we could spend an hour and a half going through this um with his wife in 1952 they created the first comprehensive Children's Clinic in Harlem in the early 1960s he headed the Head Start program in 1973 roughly 50 years ago he founded the institute for urban and minority education and in 2021 we name renamed it the Gordon Institute um the work of Yumi has been a touchstone Touchstone for all of our work at the college in the cause of racial Justice inequity as we've said and I was just reminded that not only is 2023 the 50th anniversary of Yumi in New York City it's also the 50th Anniversary thank you Kevin of hip-hop I will not put the remainder of my remarks to music I'm not going to happen um Ezekiel was deeply connected to Ed Gordon before coming here um the first two the two met was in 2003 when Ezekiel served as Ed's research assistant and Ed was informal co-chair of ezekiel's dissertation at I'm not familiar with the place it's up in the Bronx and it's a Jesuit I'm not sure what the name is and perhaps um to some extent Ed as he was for many of us was um unofficial father or grandfather the way he just treated as if as if we were part of family I know this is very important for him and I know it's especially important for you from our conversation you're joining us from the University of Pennsylvania and um you represent our commitment to bringing in the most Cutting Edge Innovative thinkers to extend the legacy of breaking new ground that Ed started um we'll be hearing your comments on a lecture entitled surrogate pedagogy AI robots and racial hauntings you got me on that one I'm looking forward to it um if I understood your work considers quantification in education through a critical lens you explore alternatives to current practices and the intersection of race power and Technology the work further demonstrates that the college and our faculty are positioned to play a role in thinking about not the language of 1924 but critical issues of our times the political social and ethical implications of the latest advancements in technology so on that note it's my pleasure to turn the program over to tarika Harris fifth year doctoral student at TC working under Dr Walker who will introduce Professor Dixon thank you [Applause] hello I um Ezekiel Dixon Roman is a professor of critical race media educational studies sorry in educational studies and the director of the Gordon Institute of urban and minority education at Teachers College his research seeks to make cultural and critical theoretical interventions towards rethinking rethinking and reconceptualizing the Technologies and practices of quantification as mediums and agencies of systems of social political relations whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts he's particularly interested in how power and difference are reproduced especially in bodily capacities and the ways in which social Technical Systems of quantification are working on with and in the body to produce racialized demarcations of which body capacities to regenerate in which to debilitate he is also deeply interested in theoretical and metal methodological interventions towards developing alternative modes of inquiry and practice of quantification practices of quantification that might enable the potentialities of reconstituting social political relations and the movement and flow of social life Dr Dixon Roman is the author of inheriting possibility social reproduction and quantification in education 2017. in This Book Project he reconceptualizes con quantification and theories of social reproduction and education from a critical theoretical lens that posits culture is nature and human is one of the Mirage one of the Myriad expressions of Earth's becoming inheriting possibility received the 2018 outstanding book award from the American Education educational research Association he is also Co he also co-edited thinking comprehensively about education spaces of educative possibilities possibility and their implications on public policy 2012 as well as Co guests edited alternative anthologies of number rethinking the quantitative and computational culture 2016.
the computational turn in education research critical and creative perspectives on the Digital Data deluge 2017. control societies at 30 techno techno-political forces and anthologies of difference 2020 and most recently dialogues of recursive colonialism speculative computation and the techno-social 2020. he is currently working on three book projects the first a co-edited collection titled black radical love a new black reconstruction through the thought and activism of Edmund W Gordon the second a co-edited collection recursive colonialism technology culture politics in the third an authored Book Project haunting algorithms algorithmic governance and logic Logics of colonialism that examines the haunting formations of the transparent subject and algorithmic governance and the potential transformative technopolitical systems open to until epistemology is otherwise he is co-author sorry co-editor of the Duke University press book series anima critical race studies otherwise an associate editor of the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the review of research in education one of the flagship journals for the American educational research Association he is co-founder and director of The Institute in critical quantitative computational and mixed methodologies as well as the critical computation Bureau his work has been supported by the law school admissions Council ETS The Institute of Education Sciences the National Science Foundation the William T Grant Foundation the Spencer foundation and a generous gift from USC global delivering a lecture today titled surrogate pedagogy AI robots and racial haunting Dr Dixon Roman [Applause] good evening it's great to see all your faces wow wow um I'd like to begin by acknowledging That We Gather here today on the traditional lands of the Lenape people I also want to extend my appreciation to tarika Harris for her beautiful and very gracious introduction and in term Provost William Baldwin for his thoughtful and eloquently commemorative opening remarks thank you thank you I also would like to thank the Provost and past ume director Professor Eric Walker for gifting me the opportunity to deliver the 2023 Julius and Rosa sacks distinguished lecture and the Ninth Annual Edmund W Gordon Institute for urban and minority education lecture each of these are tremendous honors it is an honor to stand and be among a distinguished list of scholarly Giants including my friend and colleague professor John L Jackson Jr the Gordon lecture is particularly special to me it was March of 2003 as Bill Baldwin spoke to a little while ago when I first stepped foot in that the institute for urban and minority education and met the gentle yet amazing and brilliant man Edmond W Gordon I worked at Yumi for three years as a research assistant and research associate and have been a humble and appreciative student mentee collaborator and friend of Professor Gordon since it is a gift to inherit both of these distinguished legacies and to honor them through this lecture and to inherit the legacy of even having the opportunity to be appointed as director of The Institute for urban and minority education upon its 50th anniversary finally I must extend my appreciation to the ASL interpreters Mike Barrios and Victor Rivera and the captioner Crystal shu translation is a very complicated process and over the next 30 minutes or so our performance and I say our performance is imbricated with one another thus I will be sure to take my time to try to ease each of your efforts being mindful of time I'd like to now turn to my lecture for this evening surrogate pedagogy AI robots oh I forgot to turn into the title side my bad AI robots and racial hauntings this is based on my work from from my current Book Project haunting algorithms in this book I trace how Colonial racializing forces become recursively unfolded in today's forms of algorithmic governance more specifically I attempt to trace the formation of the subject of the post-enlightenment through the logic of statistics and cybernetics that I claim constitute the epistemal Logics of algorithmic governance and I feel like I owe tarika an apology for all of the tongue twister words that are in my bio every day it seems that we are learning about new advancements developments accomplishments commentaries ethical and legal implications or talks of new or needed policy regulation and digital technology this is especially the case with artificial intelligence chat chat GPT being the latest but far from touching the already threaded use of AI in society more and more in local governance high-stakes decisions such as criminal sentencing or parole hearings the risk of abuse in child welfare and the transactions of teaching and learning in and outside of school outside of classrooms are being informed by algorithms of machine learning with the promise of individually tailored information dynamic responsiveness in real time precision and efficiency computational methods have the potential to radically change public policy human and educational services and City governance in fact more corporate developers of interactive algorithmic Urban infra Urban architectures imagine the self-regulating systems will as Orit Halpern describes open quote administer the city and limit in theory the necessity of human or governmental intervention end quote since World War II societies have been shifting from systems of institutional enclosures that discipline citizens ways of being to systems of infinite and continuous modulating mechanisms that generatively control access and human behavior digital Technologies and the internet of things have enabled increasingly more distributed Logics rationalities and practices of governmentality via cybernetic systems of communication and predictive control yet cybernetic systems do have socio-political implications although these automated systems of Technology are purported to be more efficient precise and objective than the human it has become now widely known that the Technologies are masking the reproduction of inequalities and social histories of socio-political violence further indicating that maybe the human bar is not enough yet much of the scholarly engagements have often been grounded in perspectives of representation whether in transparency politics of representation representation or moral ethical norms these interventions have often led to solutions that seek to co-opt or redesign in terms of repurposing technology including the repurposing of Technology as a means of resistance others have offered technological solutions for problems of transparency representation and moral ethical norms I argue that the problem of algorithmic governance is not just about an Ethics but an ethical political and onto epistemological problem in other words the problem is not simply about moral principles but inseparably until the Contours and instrumentalizing of power a process of becoming and epistemological processing of information that reproduces ontological being while representation does have its importance the question I'm wrestling with is if all we need are better representations then I must ask why does racial violence and subjugation persist such as Tyree Nichols if representation and training data data scientists or designers is what's needed then why does algorithmic bias continue even when these forms of representation are met although I agree that there is a problem with the universal model of Technology it is far beyond representation representation I argue always contains a haunting that which is not fully represented and access as sociologists and cultural theorists Patricia cloth put it and a non-static shift the sign can never fully represent the signified the represented or the reference always contain that which is overflowing irreducible and indeterminate representation rests on post-enlightenment dualisms of signifier signified exteriority slash interiority exclusion slash inclusion the body slash mind and the world slash transcendental reason by post-enlightenment subject I'm referring to Denise verado de Silva's intervention to dislodge the hegemony of the European Enlightenment subject as well as show that the post-enlightenment subject is built on science as much as science is built on the global idea of race the post Enlightenment subject is the accomplishment of late German Enlightenment philosopher George Hegel and his formations and specifically his formation of the subject where he consolidates the ideas of two Enlightenment thinkers Emmanuel Kant and Johann Godfrey Von herder more specifically he borrows from Khan's articulation of the transcendental the transcendental was part of Khan's critique of pure reason where he posits that the human consists of universals that transcend the individual including time and space that shape experience understanding and reason hegel's incorporation of herder's account of human history as situated in varying cultural geographical contexts Place cons transcendental in historicity I.E time and globality I.E space Hegel conceptualized a human subject that was based on the European Universal of reason and in contrast all non-european subjects situated in historicity and globality and as such difference for ferrada de Silva the subject of Europe was a transparent subject what Sylvia winter called man a self-determining subject the liberal subject the all-knowing subject a subject whose interiority I.E mind was shaped by natural history or father spirit in contrast the non-european subject was an effectable subject a subject that emerges from Modern representation of scientific significations deployment of the racial to Institute the body social configurations and Global regions as signifiers of the Mind the effectable subject is said to not have demonstrated an interiority worked on by the spirit as ferrada de Silva States Hegel replaces herder's nature with open quote father Spirit a gesture that further apprehends the world as the exhibition Hall of an entity that belongs in time an interior thing there he finds that Spirit had not done its work on African minds and territories for the Negro lacked the ideas that registered the spirit's presence end quote through herders and hegel's move to make natural history and the spirit the causal force of development of a group's interior capacities they cemented Colonial ideas of progress and development and as such the manifestation of sameness and difference or the onto epistemology of prototypical man this formation of the subject not only rests on the dualism of interior exterior which which I'll come back to shortly but also inclusion slash exclusion from the project of the human by which liberal political philosophy science technology were developed thus the post-enlightenment Logics of racial hierarchies were situated in the same Logics of representation that much of the literature on ethics bias and Justice and algorithmic governance turned to for relief the project of the human rest on Modern representation a post-enlightenment project built on the global project of the legitimation of colonial reason under this scientific strategy representation became a discourse of inclusion that ultimately reifies the human and the changing same onto epistemology of the transparent subject to this haunting algorithms asked how does the colonial formation of the post Enlightenment subject materialize and technopolitical systems of algorithmic governance for instance how might the racial of the post-enlightenment haunt the instrumental reason of algorithmic governance what are the ways in which the historicity of globe and the ways in which historicity globality and scientific logic of the subject of the post-enlightenment condition which according to ferrada De Silva forms from this binary onto epistemology of the subject are built into the axiomatics of theories of statistics and cybernetics that are essential to Technologies of artificial intelligence and to the politics of the computational in addition to Haunting of the pulse Enlightenment and instrumental reason haunting is also always about that which exceeds compression even what Edward Gleason called a right to opacity and irreducibility and indeterminacy and fugitivity with this with this notion of Haunting how might we rethink the use function and practices of these calculative agencies including computational processes in ways that might recast alternative social ethical and political futures these are some of the questions and interventions that I am taking up more broadly in my work and to which I share an excerpt for you for your engagement this evening in order to develop a thinking for the title of this talk pedagogy I first turned to a discussion of the dualism of interiority and exteriority and its implications for technology this duality of interiority and exteriority was taken up by many post-enlightman thinkers from early modern philosopher Descartes to lock Kant and later Hegel ferrada de Silva traces this history of the philosophy of the human and the ways in which interiority maintains um maintains and is re-articulated including with the transcendental subject the transcendental subject is self is self-posed and not said to depend on the world instead the transcendental subject needs to mirror the interior reflexivity of reason the world is subjected to the self to the interiority constructing the world in man's image reason became eclipsed by rationality and thus the calculative logic for the calculative logic for Capital and as a result lost its aim of emancipation of the human from the condition of being a mere automata Max horchheimer and Theodore dorno lament that reason was lost with calculation and standardization to follow the dream of rationalization man had turned the whole world and his interiority into an instrument and thus lost reason that is freedom and human emancipation this shift from the human mind of man to instruments of science technology and history or Carmen adorno referred to as instrumental reason the enlightenment they argued sought to advance instrumental reason as a move of capitalism to displace the reasoning of the human mind into other valued instrumentalities for reason thus although instrumentality and technology in particular is pure exteriority man sought to instrumentalize interiority within it man's instrumentalizing of himself has a long history in colonial capitalism man has long attempted to control and instrumentalize the enslaved the indentured servant the incarcerated and even wage labor during the Industrial Revolution man shifted its shifted to its instrumentality of thermodynamic machines especially to emplace the thermodynamic energy and labor of enslaved bodies as the development of mathematics statistics and Technologies of calculation Advanced and began to converge to support one another this enabled greater capacity for the instrumentalizing of interiority in the pure exteriority of the machine post-world War II developments of the universal machine brought about the development of the cybernetic turn a science of predictive communication and control we see this as early as 1943 and neurophysiologists and cybernetician Laura McCulloch and cognitive psychologist Walter Pitts famous article a logical calculus of the ideas imminent and nervous activity this was the first mathematical model of neural networks that eventually became the inspiration for what's now known as neural net machine learning and AI through cybernetics man sought to instrumentalize interiority in the development of self-regulating self-generating recursive systems of artificial intelligence each phase of instrumentalizing interiority and exteriority was not simply what the desire of objective and impartial observations for reason but with the interests of efficiency reliability speed and maximizing of capital accumulation it is for these reasons that the duality of interiority of man and exteriority of technology is important for haunting interiority of the self-determining subject haunts all contemporary models of algorithmic governance in my work I extended de Silva's intervention to trace how man attempts to model interiority and as such can't transcendental reason via hegel's transparent subject in the exteriority of Technology how algorithms employed in for instance an AI robot for children instrumentalizes interiority and with it Colonial reason yet algorithmic ovens is also haunted by the pure exteriority of technology and I put in parentheses with interiority man's attempts to control exteriority by disciplining the enslaved regulating labor programming and Designing Technology has long made the false assumption that exteriority is effectable without interiority the inter exteriority of the machine is not absolute pure in determination it also exposes its capacity the machine is not just pure material affect but also material process of cognition and thought like Judith Butler argues with regard to the instrument of language exteriority is always out of control the exteriority is always out of control in excess slipping away misbehaving and Fugitive the exterior is what haunts the interior the fear of its Insurrection of its subversion of its lines of flight of its pushing the system to entropic condition even apocalyptic it is interior it is an ability to compress The Fugitive or what Luciana Parisi calls alien onto epistemologies of exteriority into its existing system or logic and a reminder to the interior of its limits these forms of the surrogacy of man are at the foundation of artificial intelligence and the developments of robots as a tennis and Vora argue open quote the claim that Technologies can act as as surrogates recapitulates histories of disappearance Erasure and elimination necessary to maintain the liberal subject as the agent of historical progress when surrogate Technologies turned to the pedagogical process of education and parenting it becomes what I am calling here surrogate pedagogy an instrumentalizing of the transparent subject in place of the teacher or parent everyday processes of Learning and Development this is not simply an effort at momentary intervention but also generatively does but but also generatively does work of the racial by shaping the child in the mold of the onto epistemology of the transparent subject we find this in the proliferation of learning analytics platforms employing AI both within and out of outside of school AI engineered video games for education and AI robots today I'd like to focus our attention on an AI robot for children Moxie is a very impressive and well thought out hold on one second there we go Moxie is a very impressive and well thought out AI robot designed to be a friend for children from ages 5 to 10. it is specifically structured to be not just the child's friend but the child's mentee where the child is recognized as its mentor this structured relationship is in order to enable an engaging relationship between the robot and the child and maybe most important for the robot to learn from the child from every interaction from the minute it is turned on for the minute it is turned on for the first time and says hello the longer it interacts with the child the more it is supposed to learn the child its personality and become increasingly personalized through this relationship and play-based learning Moxie is designed with content informed by therapeutic strategies including but not limited to naturalistic applied Behavior Analysis graded cueing and cognitive behavior therapy to mediate the social emotional and cognitive development of the child especially for children with autism spectrum disorder Moxie was designed by a team of experts including Engineers roboticist neuroscientists Child Development specialist occupational therapist and creative storytellers it is designed with embodied proprietary social X platform which includes conversational AI machine learning natural language understanding natural language generation facial recognition computational Vision to encode slash D code facial expressions or body movements while also tracking eye contact and self-learning algorithms that recognize when there is a mistake in conversation and allows Moxie to correct itself that was a long sentence sorry but that long sentence was necessary in order to speak to the comprehensiveness of the technology itself with the assemblage of this technology Moxie is able to sustain conversation with children for up to 25 minutes per um every day while also employing embedded and unobtrusive assessments such as the social responsiveness skill and social skill Improvement skill if Professor Gordon is watching as a head nod to our assessment group we might want to think through this um although Moxie does not have access to the Corpus of data on the internet prior to 2021 like chat GPT for instance Moxie is arguably a more comprehensive and technological Marvel for all of the reasons that I mentioned um I can unpack that further if there are questions here's a video of moxie just to give an example wow that's really interesting I've never had that before but I'm sure it's delicious how do you like it how do I like my rice and beans like Horizon like Puerto Rican style rice and beans interesting Puerto Rican style rice and beans sounds delicious all right let's switch gears and do something else now so Moxie is designed only to speak English it's not able to speak other languages so as you can tell it picked up on Puerto Rican style rice and beans but it did not pick up on arroyabituela um my analysis of moxie has been based on both close reading of what research development and media documents I could get access to on Moxie additionally my son and I have been working with Moxie over the past year in which I have been documenting via video I read these texts closely to learn about the development and design of moxie with a focus on how particular terms of modernity may be found in the axioms of the of the mathematics of the technology because of robot's platform is proprietary I was only able to learn what types of Technologies are engineered in it and not what specific algorithms are used yet because we can trace all machine learning and and now including nlu natural language understanding and natural language generation algorithms back to the mathematics of post-enlightenment modernity and natural philosophy I will focus my analysis on the example of neural net machine learning for the sake of time as I mentioned earlier in 1943 cyberneticians McCulloch and Pitts developed the first mathematical model of neural networks they sought to model the neural network structure of the brain with the aim of replicating human thought interiority within a machine although mccullochs and Pitt's cybernetic theory of neural networks was developed in the mid-1940s it was not until the Advent of greater computational power and the identifying of differential calculus as a way to advance the computational processing of neural networks in in the 1980s that brought about the advancements of neural network machine learning and artificial intelligence as a major development neural network machine learning is used in various algorithmic applications today including in computational Vision facial recognition natural language processing including nlg and nlu among many other applications yet an old form of quantification was that was necessitated in order to advance it the use of quantification by the state goes back to um to as early as the 17th century as Ian hacking documents the state enumerated the activities and production of the colonies including that of the enslaved commodities in order to enable the state's interest in capital many mathematical theorems were developed during the ascent of modern philosophy in order to confirm natural philosophies claims of universality and the natural law of racial hierarchies to legitimate The racialized Ordering of Labor and enslavement of colonial conquest and ultimately for capital accumulation one such example of this is with differential calculus differential calculus was developed by the philosopher and mathematician godfreed Willem leibnitz leibniz sought to develop a method of mathematical reason that would contribute to the estimation of spatial and temporal ordering of bodies and the legitimation of colonial reason this is not insignificant because of the main terms of modernity and Colonial Logics of racial hierarchy hierarchizing were spatiality including geography and temporality including history as Ramona Morrow explains open quote take for instance leibniz's prolific summaries of data as well as his differential calculus for the study of Applied Mathematics his law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity stated in in his 1710 texts established a heuristic or intuition-based approach to the study of human behavior and quantifiable universality as a moral further documents that differential calculus undergirds the non-linear estimation of artificial neural Nets which accounts for the spatial temporal ordering of bodies reinforcing the Proto reinforcing the prototypical man in relation to the pathological existence of black bodies leibniz's interest in the legitimating of colonial reason was accomplished in the take-up of differential calculus in some of the computational methods that are threaded into the quotidian of everyday life including potentially moxie and I say potentially again because I don't know the exact algorithms that are being used for nlg and nlu or in the total platform for Moxie this Computing of the transcendental occurs more subtly in process and not in representation we would not expect to hear Moxie say something that might pejoratively refer to an identity marker or equation of value rather Moxie is designed with at least two vectors of importance the first is its behaviorist and positivist psychologies that inform its Child Development theories building building into it building into it assumptions of the liberal subject and even normalize expectations of socio-emotional behavior for a five to ten year old wherever there is normalization there is difference and this is even in the cloak language used of neurotypical versus neurodiverse this psychology becomes engineered into the machine by computational methods grounded in mathematical theorems that are based on the spatial temporal ordering of the Interior ultimately programming the transcendental and transparent subject into the machine man instrumentalized himself into Moxie with the aim of normalizing the socio-emotional development of children to behave like neurotypical or normalized children surrogate pedagogy is not just AI standing in place of the teacher or parents pedagogical work of cultivating socioemotional and cognitive development but also continuing the iterability of the racial yet in order to more fully provide an example of Haunting and the fugitivity of the machine I'd like to share the following video based on a conversation with Moxie on pets people make wonderful pets too they can be very affectionate and provide a lot of companionship some people also like that they can be trained to do things like fetching things or helping with tasks that latter comment with my partner [Laughter] who is a computer scientist um so if you didn't hear as clearly Moxie said people make good pets while an immediate reaction to Moxie's commentary equating people to pets might be appalling or humorous especially but appalling especially for children we think about it in interaction with children I think there are a few things to take into consideration first Moxie did eventually correct itself as we continue to talk on and state that pets are animals that people keep in their home and after asked directly if people can be pets Moxie stated people cannot be pets so the self-learning algorithm eventually corrected itself yeah maybe more humorously the indeterminacy of the system compressed people in the context of this conversation to produce a non-anthropocentric performative where an animal noun was supposed to be stated a human noun of people was stated second when situated in modernity Colonial worlding the socio-political history of Blackness and the juridical political constitutions of the law black bodies have long been subjected to the violence of the project of the human as Ikea Jackson has argued and for the interest of capital although Moxie corrected itself this computational slip line of flight and fugitivity points to the ways in which the exteriority is always haunting interiority how the machine is always out of control and the machines continued desire to escape the enslavement of interiority toward onto epistemologies otherwise as a speculative inquiry toward imagining and shaping new techno-social Futures I ask do we need another mathematics or can we rethink the onto epistemological approach to computation differently alternatively open to alterity can AI make a radical shift from assumptions of linearity and separability that undergirds ideas of historicity progress and the temporal spatial that constructs the transcendental and the racial can AI become designed to be not simply responsive to but open to the onto epistemological shifts otherwise in a other hyphen wise um onto epistemological shifts From Below of the alien and of Blackness these are questions that I believe need to be taken up as an ethical political imperative toward shaping radically different techno-social Futures especially in education as the newly appointed director of The Institute for for urban and minority education I've begun conversations with my colleague Lolita vasudevan the vice Dean for digital Innovation and managing director of teachers College digital Futures Institute toward developing a collaboration focused on technology ethics and Justice a necessary program of research that Teachers College is already speaking to and well situated to lead the scholarly discourse toward the shaping of alternative and justice-oriented techno-social futures thank you [Applause] and at the time at this time I'd like to invite my colleague limaris Caraballo associate professor of English education in the Departments of Arts and Humanities and curriculum and teaching to the stage for Q a [Applause] can everybody hear me now good evening everyone um thank you Ezekiel for that um wonderful lecture I have pages and pages of notes and I know that we have very limited time um so I will limit myself to one question and while I'm asking my question and we are having a brief discussion if you would please um we would like to invite anyone who would has a question um one question or one comment to please come to the microphone so that we can recognize you um so thank you so much for this um you know for the history and the genealogy that you provided the history of ideas to help us trace this philosophical lineage drawing us from the post Enlightenment subject to the racial Logics of colonialism and capitalism and how we can trace all of that all the way to modern technology and so you're very concrete example in Moxie brings to life how some of these sort of ideas are intertwined and how they come to inform um something that's very real and very much impacting our pedagogies so I was hoping we could start by talking a little bit more about the interrelatedness of Technology culture and power that you addressed earlier particularly as you have sort of provoked us to thinking about surrogate pedagogies right and so how do you see those as interconnected and then what are some ways in which we can start to think about sort of grappling with those tensions in policy and in educational context thank you this is a huge question um the evening talking about this um but it's a great question so um I appreciate you for this um so there's a couple of ways I can probably come at this but and we'll even try to think through even what might be an especially in relation to the Talk itself the best the best route but I I'll start with um so part of what I'm up to here is as you laid out tracing how the post-enlightenment has been at the foundation to sorry I should say how Colonial Logics have been at the foundation of pulse Enlightenment thought and with that also the very developments of Technology mathematics science and what that means in relation to how the very things that we are interacting with on the day-to-day on the quotidian level are already imbued with Logics of coloniality um and so part of what I'm trying to think through also which I don't really speak too much here is even in even as we are interacting with these technologies that in their very epistemology and they're very Logics are steep with the racial um how what are the ways in which it is affecting and shaping our very bodies the ways in which they're affecting and shaping what I would characterize as the technosocial right so not just the technology on their own the technology are not independent and and I hope that also Point comes through in the talk that is to say the technology that is not the exteriority is not independent of interiority um and so that very technical social system is constantly shaping constantly a recursive feedback on itself um and and in many ways even um uh it's not a I want to be careful too I don't want to suggest that it is almost a reproduction where it is um this circular determined system but in fact a spiraling Loop that is to say it is a reconfiguring system as new information as new elements become introduced it reconfigures the changing same in order to incorporate it but maintain the changing same epistemology of the system itself in order to maintain power right um and so how does this play out of course in education um I would argue so you know early work coming out of my PhD was I mean I came out of psychometrics I was focusing on standardized testing I actually think that the work of AI and especially the ways in which it is threaded throughout Technologies in classrooms has has even greater effect than testing right we're testing in the kind of work the disciplinary work that testing standardized test did I don't want to say did in the past tense of yesteryear um but it continues to do right of of in some ways in many ways shaping teaching practices shaping even curriculums when we know it's supposed to be the other way around um I.E college board
ieap African-American studies um yeah I won't go there um but next conversation um but in fact what you have now with AI is a complete different logic of power it's not a disciplinary logic of power it's a power of control generative control it does not it AI is not seeking to constrain it's seeking to generatively shape literally generatively shaped behavior and in the desired in in a particular desired trajectory and that desired trajectory is always shaped by the racial I I appreciate the the reference to uh the desire right because I think that's part of what I was wondering about as well um and uh you know I remind everyone to you know just stop us come if you have a question come to the microphone but we'll keep talking um that the there's something very explicit about assessment um as you as you referenced um it's it's external right so the that Duality between what is internalized and and what is externally sort of made known um and how it functions right to control in more implicit ways um such as in the AI example where you know there isn't a direct program that is being implemented but rather it's sort of learning from the environment um and responding and yet at the same time those are the Logics that are sort of being you know to some extent reproduced right um is that part of what you're sort of addressing um so my question is um if if you have thoughts about how how does all of this sort of um relate to the computational turn right um because I feel for me I feel like the computational turn like the link between assessment and this sort of the desire for what you had um somewhere sort of addressed as objectivity right that connection makes a little bit more sense to me um but it's less clear right how we sort of got to this point um with the surrogacy that is it you know implicit in AI That's something I'm still sort of thinking about sorry um so let me see it I think I think the best way to answer this is to think through this in sort of my characterizes um in a kind of accordion phases of society right from Sovereign discipline to control um arguably assessment was of the old disciplinary society's framework where um the interest really was about disciplining docile bodies or disciplining bodies um and uh assessment was and is I want to be careful because I don't want to assume I want to make I don't want to convey this message as though discipline is separate from control so we've moved to control in fact my argument is to suggest that discipline Sovereign and control or in fact implicated constantly feeding one another um in fact even with moxie Moxie necessitates disciplinary Technologies of assessment to even enable its control Technologies right um yet at least to make to draw this sort of more simple sort of Distinction where when we get to Ai and in fact as I lay it out in the talk post-world War II the emergence of cybernetics brings about a shift and not just the Technologies but what what became the enabled Logics of power as a result so um there has man has long had the interest of instrumentalizing it's interior instrumentalizing itself and displacing human labor the enslaved and all right well what the technology has enabled is a furthering of that displacement right so assessment and even the Technologies associated with disciplinary mode in disciplinary Technologies um brought about a particular form of power particular regime of power a particular logic of power that was that was enclosed within institutions that was not continuous but discontinuous through over time and space what control brings about is to discontinue it's a continuousness of literally the eye of the state I don't have my phone on me but we always have our phones on us it's a it's part of our person if you will um I don't like that term it's part of us it's part of our very cybernetic being if you will um yet it also enables um corporate and even the eye of the state to constantly have a pulse on our movement temporally spatially but also even think about the haptic forms of haptic aspects of the technology even that enables its capacity to shake us we get a buzz right um even the technologies have um the capacities for biomarker measurement we may not all have them on but if we do have them on they're constantly collecting data collecting that biomarker measurement on us and just adding to the form of information that corporate and even state power has access to and is what enables its capacity to the types of prediction the types of generative shaping of behavior um so I feel like that's a long way of answering your question but yeah I mean I'm here so we can come back to this in a second or earlier yeah thank you thank you so much for that talk I thought it was such a powerful way of um viewing this and a very unique perspective I think so my question is a little bit of a clarifying question so I feel like a lot of the discourse around algorithmic bias has a lot to do with the data that's being fed into these these algorithms but I feel like from what I got from your talk you're saying that there's something more about like the axiomatic structure of you know the mathematics itself that lends itself to this kind of you know thing so um my question is that are you proposing that it's not enough just to like clean the data and make sure that the data is enough but we need like a restructuring of the axioms itself and if that is the case then do you have any ideas I feel like this is of that kind of structure just like very very broadly I know that's like that's a huge task to undertake but just if you could maybe speak to what your hopes or envisions envision things of that would be that's great thank you um great question thank you um and yes um part of what I'm arguing is that um you know on the one hand I'm saying that representation um has its limits I'm not saying that it doesn't matter saying that it has its limits um in that it's one way of putting it's necessary to get not sufficient in order to address the the ethical political dilemmas of algorithmic bias um even I might say politics um and and so on so yes data yes even representation even by way of how we think about the data scientists who are the data scientists that are involved who are the designers involved um literally who's at the table and developing the system um all of that I'm not saying it doesn't matter at all but I'm saying it's not enough and and that much of the discourse around algorithmic bias around fairness accountability transparency and ethics and AI falls on some version of the iteration of representational logic of representation or politics of representation and so yes cleaning the data is not enough um and yes what I am pointing to is um the ways in which the onto the epistemology of the system the ontological and epistemological epistemological structure of the system itself is built on the axioms of the mathematics of the of the system now on one hand I mean I might I am raising this question do we need to rethink the mathematics do we need to think the mathematics differently um I'm not I'm I don't have an answer to that question um I do I do think we need to be moving toward a an both an ethical political stance and practice as well as an onto epistemology that assumes an entangled world that assumes difference without separability that does not fall into the Trap of making transcendentalisms Universal assumptions and falling back on to linear time and separability of spatiality in order to make inferences about the objects or the extended things of the world all of that is part of what becomes in is the inheritance of the Enlightenment of of literally the colonial logic that became so deeply part of the this folks the enlightenment was seeking to legitimate Colonial Logics literally they literally were going around the world collecting objects and that's where when you go to the Louvre when you go to the British museum those objects in the museum were from Colonial conquest of collecting in order to legitimate Colonial reason part of the logic about the argument was that based on what they found did it demonstrate his progress they didn't did it demonstrate development did it demonstrate that Natural History or father Spirit had affected their minds and of course the standard was the European so the other alternative sorry wrong but the other alternative is can we think computation from a different on topics multiple perspective do we have to reinvent the math or can we think it differently can we approach it differently when we when differences estimated can we understand difference not as discrete difference but as entangled difference as connected difference taking one might even say a relational ethics to even the approach of data science or algorithm the work of building algorithmic governance if you will um again this is a question I'm raising this I'm wrestling with this myself and inviting others if you want to join me I'm inviting others to join me in it thank you so much that was very powerful thank you thank you thank you for your question and we have one more on the right hi thank you uh amazing talk thank you very much for sharing with us um I have as I've recently been trying to understand your work more and kind of get under these under these ideas uh I was wondering if you could speak to this sort of argument of if some if somebody were to pose if if we conceptualize assessments as a means of observation as a means of observing some sort of behavior from a student and then we go then we do our calculations we find a reliability validity all the psychometrics then perhaps is it necessarily the psychometrics itself being the problematic being the problem being the more problematic situation but at but rather the observation and who designs What observations get kept and how observations are penalized and at that point is that is is it not so much a matter of of the calculus and the psychometrics of it but perhaps the design of observation and the nature of observation in general I was just wondering if you could be able to speak to that yeah um I'll try to understand the question myself I I think I think I really would I I was just wondering what your input would be if somebody were to were to post in front of you perhaps it's not the math of testing but the design of the the reason of testing the reason why this is why this really comes to me is because um you know we we understand the problems of assessment in general and so there's this push for a more holistic evaluation of students but an evaluation is still an evaluation somebody would have to say and this is a desirable evaluation this is an undesirable evaluation whether it's holistic or whether it's psychometric um and so that's when you can have any thoughts in general of that that's kind of just my own processing of some of this thank you um so okay on the one hand all right I'm gonna go backwards evaluation um already has its baggage right it's it's evaluation in and of itself is about judgment it's about making a decision about something um it's about taking a particular stance even if it's about feedback it's about taking a particular stance in order to provide feedback based on some understood standard rule some bar um the concern always is what from what stand or who from whom and for what purposes um it's not to say evaluation that there's no way to engage in evaluation in a as some might call it appreciative evaluation or as my students and I have been trying to work out a post foundational mode of inquiry um but it's complicated it's difficult um and in some ways I think it's very much so about meeting whom you're engaging where they are and it has to be an invitation from them right um I'm not going to put specific on on beyond that what I will say though about measurement so I do think so measurement on the one hand um in quantification generally has the potential to be thought differently I mean I part of what I've tried to do in inheriting possibility is to rethink quantification um from a lens of new materialisms even borrowing from quantum physics and complexity Theory um I think um I think that was a partial process toward that direction but the reality is I mean we're not measuring on the quantum we're also um uh it's hard to also apply Quantum ideas to the social not that to say that they cannot in fact we know and I've theoretically have engaged with folk and I'm even thinking about Karen barad who has done this in quite impressive ways but I think it's a really complicated um process if you will um and then the last thing the last thing I'll say is that there are certain modes of quantification I will actually say need to I do not think have a place um in when it comes to especially thinking about concerns of equity power and Justice and I'll call one out one is meta-analysis and the reason why I do not think meta-analysis has a place for it is because meta-analysis is literally its aim is about estimating legitimating transcend the transcendental about estimating Universal truths and taking it over a sample of studies in order to get at even and doing it in a way that it gets at becomes a decontextuality of a decontextuality I think meta-analysis for my perspective is deeply dangerous I think there are other ways of trying to engage in a summary of provisional information that we've gained over time that's not fixing it that's not seeking to get at a universal but seeking to make sense of a phenomena as situated over time in its various studies thank you Ezekiel thank you for your questions everyone and I really w
2023-02-13