The social lives of AI in higher education

Recent excitement and anxiety about artificial intelligence in education seems to suggest that AI has suddenly appeared in the sector as a set of technical innovations that are inevitably set to transform pedagogic, assessment and management processes. Technology-based transformations are never so simple or linear. As sociological approaches to science and technology insist, all innovations are shaped by the social, historical, political, cultural and economic contexts of their production, and they exert productive effects (and side effects) that are often unanticipated or unintended. In this presentation I unpack some of the “social lives” of AI in higher education, tracing out: (1) the longer, complex genealogies of AI development in the computing and education sectors; (2) the political agendas, policy objectives and governance ambitions to which AI is attached in education; (3) the distinctive economic drivers of AI in education, including venture capital investment and new business models in the education technology industry; and (4) ongoing contests over the regulation of AI, the application of AI ethics frameworks and blueprints, and calls for resisting AI in the HE sector. Focusing on the social lives of AI in HE reveals how AI should be understood not as a transformative technology with inevitable effects, but as a site of social controversy demanding of critical deliberation by constituents across and beyond the higher education sector.