The Race Around AI: Ensuring a Future Powered by Humans, Not Robots
Do we want a future powered by people, or dictated by Big Tech billionaires and run by chatbots? There’s no question that artificial intelligence has caused—and will continue to cause—seismic shifts across our society. What’s less clear is whether AI will be harnessed by people and communities to promote the common good, or humanity will take a back seat to what chatbots and algorithms decide for us.
We are in the middle of a giant race to secure federal guardrails and guarantees so AI supports workers and their families, and to ensure humans, not robots or chatbots, are in the driver’s seat. Who will cross the finish line first—working people or Big Tech—is far from certain.
From the first introduction of ChatGPT, we said we needed to learn it, embrace the positives and combat the negatives.
Well, we are learning, as are our members, which is the point of our National Academy for AI Instruction. But neither Big Tech nor this administration is doing its part to mitigate the harms of this earthshaking change.
That’s why I joined Sen. Bernie Sanders, workers and other labor leaders at the U.S. Capitol recently to demand Congress act now to create the checks and balances we need on AI and Big Tech to protect kids, workers and communities. We need to make sure there is sanity, common sense and dignity in the transition to AI. We need Congress to put people first and ensure that human beings are in charge of society, not robots or chatbots; that teachers are in front of classrooms, not robots; and that AI and technology are a boon to humanity, not a threat to its future. That is what the American people want: 79 percent of voters are concerned that the government doesn’t have a plan to protect workers from AI.
As Sanders said at the event, “We are looking at the most consequential and significant technological revolution in the history of humanity. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that maybe human beings and workers should benefit from this transition rather than a handful of multibillionaires.”
And where is the Trump administration on all of this? The president is more preoccupied with posting AI-generated images of himself as Jesus than in protecting the American people from the dangers of AI. First lady Melania Trump recently trotted out a robot she thinks could replace human teachers. The Trump administration has given Big Tech carte blanche to do whatever it wants, while attempting to restrict how states can put their own protections and safeguards on AI.
This isn’t about being a Luddite or anti-tech. Teachers use technology in their classrooms all the time to support their teaching. As I wrote in my New York Times column last week:
I’m not calling for a ban on AI or a bonfire of the Chromebooks. But the lack of guardrails and federal regulations for AI causes deep apprehension for more and more of us. We need to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. That’s why the AFT created the National Academy for AI Instruction last year. It’s a training hub designed by educators, grounded in safety and people-first technology. I am wary of the actual and potential dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and regulations—and I have an obligation to my members to help educators become coaches in the game, not spectators on the sidelines.
Indeed, teachers—along with parents—are leading the way on the appropriate use of tech, toward what I call “devices down, eyes up, hands on” learning. The AFT is supporting active learning—from project-based instruction to career and technical education. Last year, our New York state affiliate won a ban on cellphones during the school day [and more than 37 states have similar policies]. Kids are noticeably more engaged, and hallways and lunchrooms bustle with chatter and laughter again now that students aren’t glued to their phones.
Teachers and parents on their own can’t confront the seismic changes coming at our kids and families. We saw what happened when Congress failed to establish adequate guardrails for Big Tech around smartphones and social media. Professor Jonathan Haidt and others have written extensively about the corrosive effects smartphones and social media have had on us, particularly on our children. We know these devices and apps are designed to be addictive and that they are making our kids sedentary, solitary, anxious and depressed. And neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has researched tech’s impact on students’ cognition, attention and achievement.
Jessica Winter writes in The New Yorker about her own experiences as a parent confronting how AI was seeping into the classrooms of her kids. Despite her cautioning her kids about the harmful impacts of AI and having solid guardrails at home, she recounts how her son, who is in third grade, recently came home with a certificate of completion for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence” and how her daughter, who is in sixth grade, received a new Chromebook with built-in AI prompts that pop up when she is writing an essay or designing a slideshow presentation.
In her piece, “What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?”, Winter describes the growing role of AI and Big Tech in education and the dangers that poses for children. She writes:
The main arguments against the use of generative A.I. in children’s education are threefold. The first is that L.L.M.s [large language models] encourage cognitive offloading before kids have done much cognitive onloading—that is, if these tools cause atrophy of thought in adults, then we can scarcely overestimate the potential effects on a brain that has not developed those cognitive muscles in the first place.
The second is that chatbots, which mimic emotional intimacy and tend toward sycophancy, warp how children forge their selfhood and relationships. …
… The third complaint against the use of A.I. in schools is that it confuses ends and means, privileging the most efficient route to the correct answer, the crispest thesis statement, or the neatest drawing over the messier and less quantifiable process of building a thinking, feeling person. “We are potentially undermining complex thinking, changing the development of sociality, and mistaking the learning goal,” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at University of Southern California, told me. “We are cutting off learning at the knees.”
Winter also writes about writes about the AFT’s efforts to ensure educators, not Big Tech, are at the center of how this technology is used in the classroom.
A new educator training program called the National Academy for AI Instruction may offer teachers a chance to stress-test some of the many promises that the A.I. industry has made to their profession. The academy, which is headquartered at the United Federation of Teachers’ office in Manhattan, is a joint project of the U.F.T. and the American Federation of Teachers, and is funded via a twenty-three-million-dollar partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The in-person and online classes offered by the academy are intended to help educators “not accept the inevitable but navigate it.”
This is what I have observed in schooling over the last year: The more people rely on AI, the more people are not thinking. We need more paper and pencil, more hands-on learning and fewer screens. And we will not accept as inevitable that humans will lose this race to machines.
For economic reasons, for moral reasons, for brain science reasons and for commonsense reasons, we need Congress to act and help us win this race we’re in against a future where humans are no longer in control. We’ve even compiled some “Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools” that Congress can build from.
Making sure human beings are in charge of society also means making sure people have a living wage and affordable healthcare and can retire with dignity. It means making sure the 70 percent of Americans who want unions have the freedom to form them and can secure a first contract. Because even without the changes being driven by technology and AI, too many Americans are finding it harder and harder to afford the basics, inequality has continued to grow, and millions of hardworking Americans are in economic crisis through no fault of their own.
That’s why I also joined Bernie Sanders in my hometown of New York City, along with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and union members and leaders, to launch a new organization called Union Now to power union organizing and build the power that workers need to secure a better future for themselves, their families and those they serve. We, the labor community, must ensure that people who want to organize know we have their backs, and that’s what this new group does. And I was joined by two United Federation of Teachers members—special education teacher Fran Gachett and paraprofessional TreVaughn Taylor—who talked about the fights we’re taking on in New York to secure a living wage for paraprofessionals and a decent retirement for teachers after a career in the classroom.
As I said at that rally, it’s not radical to want a living wage, affordable healthcare, access to childcare, great public schools and a dignified retirement.
And it’s also not radical to believe that we should have commonsense guardrails on AI and technology—guardrails that put people first.
These are the fights we will continue to take on, for our members, for our students, and to ensure a future built on the hopes and aspirations of people and not the algorithms built in machines.