Antón is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. He is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent, The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making–his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes–was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.
Project: I’ll be investigating the data-intensive algorithmic tools being deployed within education in the United States. I want to understand how dependencies on corporate owned AI systems are changing the political economy and philosophy of education, and what impact this is having on the pedagogical principles of American educational institutions. Edtech infrastructure is increasingly inextricable from the practice of education at all levels. Its presence is routinely justified on the grounds that it helps prepare students for a changing workforce and maintain American competitiveness. While these are substantial concerns, the identification of AI with education also poses tacit, novel kinds of threats. Beyond the threat of corporate capture, edtech is entrenching a conception of education that amounts to the consumption and production of informational content. It implies and reinforces the view that students should learn how to be users operating within the terms of particular software services, rather than how to distinguish between technological capacities and higher human ends. It thereby degrades the cultivation of democratic practices and norms. In addition to criticizing the irreflexive adoption of edtech, I’ll be working to sketch some of the principles that might guide the formulation of alternative curricula for a post-digital, genuinely democratic education.