Joshua Foust 🪖🎮: 100% Plus it’s yet one more point of human contact being denied to students, another way we tell them people are inferior to gadgets.

One of the reasons TA work is sometimes (AND OFTEN NOT) repetitive lower-skilled tasks is bc these are training tasks for early career scholars. If we automate them and eliminate the positions associated with them, we are explicitly gutting the future of these fields.

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

100% Plus it’s yet one more point of human contact being denied to students, another way we tell them people are inferior to gadgets.

Remember MOOCs... the idea was going to be that it was ok that your professor was a video (or dead) because the professor would be the Best Professor, preferably from Harvard, +

and then there would be these really active TAs who needless to say could provide all the human contact needed but could never themselves become the professor (because there could be only one, Best, professor).

At that point it had already been decided that there need be no such thing as social reproduction

Yeah it was bleak and had predictable outcomes

ESPECIALLY for any institution that serves many first generation minority students who are less familiar with institutional norms like (*checks notes) AN HBCU

Yep. It’s just replicating the same structural marginalization that exists in every other context.

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