Fig. 1. Photograph of data centre growth from Nicholson, R. (2024) ‘Data centre growth seen in scaled schemes and retrofits’, Construction Journal. Available at: https://ww3.rics.org/uk/en/journals/construction-journal/data-centre-demand-retrofit.html [Accessed 14 Jan. 2025].
A prompt was sent via our PgCert Moodle page about how to prepare for Workshop 1A: if the reading activity was challenging, it suggested that we ‘also try [to] run the text through ChatGPT and ask it to summarise and/or clarify it for you.’ I found this disheartening, as I can imagine a future where people have increasingly short attention spans, and less capacity of critical thinking. Reading, like writing, is a practice, and letting AI replicate those tasks for us seems to diminish the process of learning itself. In my assigned paper, I learnt a new word: ‘metanoia’ (Savage, 2022, p. 1081). As I edit this blog post now, I’ve completely forgotten what it means, but that’s ok. Unfamiliarity, challenges, and difficulty are markers that I am learning.
Some academic writing is confusing, but our ability to communicate in our own unique ways is something to preserve in this world. Feeding texts through ChatGPT allows it to determine what is important, how we should read the text, when it is our engagement with new materials that is part of learning. I think the problem that we are not addressing here is perhaps the difficulty of the materials, or more likely, the fact that none of us seem to have time to engage with these texts properly.
ChatGPT seems to be able to condense and reduce a 23-page text into 2 or 3. It can probably condense hours of reading into 10 minutes. But I worry about what gets lost in this process. I also worry about Elon Musk taking over the world, and the massive problem with sustainability as these machines consume. Because they are out of sight, they very much become out of mind. Yet, I have read reports about the water and land (see fig. 1) that these machines take up (Luccioni, Viguier, Ligozat in Vincent, 2024; Ren, 2023; Li et al., 2023). Already it seems that our jobs are at risk, but now we have machines responding to machines, and I worry that the world we’re continuing to develop makes us ‘useless’ – at least in the perspective of this techno-feudalist society that these tech bros are building.
The reality of neoliberalism is that we have allowed these multinational corporations and capitalism to go unchecked (see Brown, 2003). This system of profiteering privileges the few, while continuing to destroy the environment and dehumanise more and more groups of people. Corporate profiteering certainly shapes UAL as well, on a bad day I feel like a cog in a machine – an act for a consuming student public. We talk about decolonisation, but I wonder how I am cared for; it sometimes seems like an abstraction that has no material foundation.
To be continued in Part 2…