The GenAI monster and the limits of reason

There’ll never be a door.

You’re inside

and the keep encompasses the world

and has neither obverse nor reverse

nor circling wall nor secret centre.

“Labyrinth”, Jorge Luis Borges

AI is becoming HE's Monster, in the centre of a Borgesian labyrinth.  It is a perfect fit: this technology immediately colonised our imaginary, our day-to-day, and it actually requires very little digital capability beyond an actualisation of old, critical approaches rehashed from the recent days of Twitter professionally drawn prestige, and a consumer-level, childlike curiosity. 

So “human in the centre” lands as a steampunk metaphor: it recalls how we once imagined driving cars, then astronauts in rocket ships, a metaphor dreamt up by a generation raised on The Jetsons. In higher education, it functions as an ecclesiastic, quasi-geocentric assertion of authority and control. And yet, AI? It moves. 

What we as a sector cannot, do not do systemically — because of our feudal, ecclesiastic, neoliberal roots — is protect labour, despite claiming merit as a social ladder as our greatest social impact; when useful, of course, sometimes it is whatever “knowledge exchange” means. The sector is predicated, intentionally, on precarity, with merit (reward from sacrifice, if you will, as prestige, authority, awards, degrees) as its actual value, capital, parcelled out and traded in the system’s networks of influence; for what, you ask. Good question.

To change, to have true sociocultural, epistemological, axiological impact, the system would have to go against itself with a degree of momentum that would be self-harming. Instead, it stages dissent: a dramatic, third-order simulacrum of critique, where critical voices are raised liturgically, but only within safe ritual bounds of collegiality: symposia; papers; LinkedIn posts, like this one.

In practice, higher education would have to accept material change: in digital learning — for example, asynchronicity and assessment design; and in organisational terms, the protection of labour itself. That is a tall order today. Protecting labour means creating a tangible link between effort and reward, re-situating value. It means job security, salaries, and a different distribution of wealth, prestige, and authority.

In digital learning terms, we circle back to guided independent study, assessment preparation, relational forms of engagement, and formative and summative assessment as the intentional capture of learning artefacts and reflections — axiological experience, skill, and knowledge made visible through embodied, contextualised articulations of value and change.

And we go back to Borges:

(...) Forget the onslaught
of the bull that is a man and whose
strange and plural form haunts the tangle
of unending interwoven stone.
He does not exist. Expect nothing —
not even the beast obscured by the black dusk.

This is a useful image when we inhabit a context shaped as much by imagination and uncertainty as by reason, where friction is more productive than resolution, paradox than dichotomy, and the sort of Zen balance that human-in-the-centre imagery tries to promise. Meaning — and real change — may emerge not from projecting ourselves towards imagined technical horizons (the automobile, the spaceship), but from attending to how those inventions were actually lived: traffic jams, suburbanisation, the space race, the Cold War. A service-based, hyperreal society with weakened trade unions emerged from Reagan and Thatcher’s world, and the USSR collapsed. We are still living inside that settlement.

Protect labour. Reward the imperfect, negotiated, expensive value of co-design, guided independent study, assessment as a living, valuable portfolio, socioculturally rewarded axiological co-creation, digitally capable, critical students. Reward it. Or at least let go of lyrical, narrative monsters vs. the technological wet dreams of efficiency; they're tiring.