Our new book – On the Problem of Foundation Skills and the Futures of Work – has just been published by Brill.
The book provides an analysis of how global capitalism, digital disruption, and new worlds of work have reshaped ideas about language, literacy and numeracy (LLN), or foundation skills in a neoliberal foundation skills apparatus in Australia since the 1980s.
The book uses Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to produce critical ‘histories of our present’. From this perspective it examines how these disruptions have transformed what was once a voluntary, not-for-profit community ‘movement’ of education for migrants and marginalised people into a sophisticated government, community, and for-profit training and skills sector which imagines foundation skills learners as choice making consumers.
The PhD project on which the book is based emerged from Garry’s experience as a foundation skills practitioner for over 20 years. As he writes in the book, I have witnessed the transformation of funding in the sector from guaranteed allocations and continuous improvement models to ongoing processes of competitive tendering, open competitive markets and contractual audits.
Monitoring the quality and efficiency of services to maintain ‘trust’ in the investment of public money has emerged as an unsettling by-product of winning training contracts. Increased layers of bureaucracy have been implemented into programs, and a new vocabulary of accountability, compliance, tenders, reporting and audit – normally reserved for boards of management and executive officers – has become a reality for all staff.
In short, a competitive market, with a significant focus on quality and efficiency, has reimagined a training provider as a ‘business’. Any remnants of the commitment to providing education and training as a service to the community with the aim of ‘covering costs’ have been unequivocally dissolved. Training operations are planned to reduce overheads and manage as many students in the classroom as possible to maximise income return. Student-centred teaching and learning strategies have been disturbed by ‘teaching to the assessment’, frameworks, training packages, curriculum standards, and benchmarking. Teaching practices from educators and trainers are now influenced by Chief Financial Officers, Compliance Coordinators and Business Managers to meet budgets and compliance audits.
In doing this sort of work the book speculates on the ways in which the emergence of large language model, generative machine and artificial intelligences (such as ChatGPT) are radically transforming what it is that we understand as LLN skills. This speculation raises questions about the value proposition that humans who struggle to develop LLN skills can bring to futures of work that are being re-imagined and transformed by these machine intelligences.
In exploring what a ‘political economy’ of AI might be concerned with we reference Naomi Klein’s (2023) – AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are – engagement with the ‘techno-optimism‘ of Silicon Valley’s ‘tech-bros’ such as Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI.
Klein suggests that these benignly optimistic accounts about AI and futures of work reference a long history of imagining a post-work order of leisure and more creative pursuits by humans freed from the obligation to earn a living. We are told by these techno-optimists not to be concerned:
Don’t worry, the AI enthusiasts hallucinate – it will be wonderful. Who likes work anyway? Generative AI won’t be the end of employment, we are told, only “boring work” – with chatbots helpfully doing all the soul-destroying, repetitive tasks and humans merely supervising them. Altman, for his part, sees a future where work “can be a broader concept, not something you have to do to be able to eat, but something you do as a creative expression and a way to find fulfillment and happiness”. (Klein 2023).
As Klein (2023) indicates:
That’s an exciting vision of a more beautiful, leisurely life, one many leftists share…But we leftists also know that if earning money is to no longer be life’s driving imperative, then there must be other ways to meet our creaturely needs for shelter and sustenance. A world without crappy jobs means that rent has to be free, and healthcare has to be free, and every person has to have inalienable economic rights. And then suddenly we aren’t talking about AI at all – we’re talking about socialism. (Klein 2023)
In this sense, any speculative projection about the history of the future of foundation skills needs to recognise, and account for, the reality that the primary reason for the current rush to develop, evolve, and deploy machine and artificial intelligences
never was to solve climate change or make our governments more responsible or our daily lives more leisurely. It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots. (Klein 2023)
As Klein (2023) observes, ‘we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating’. Rather, in the material reality of 21st century, neoliberal, globalising forms of capitalism,
the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss. (Klein 2023)
An abyss in which these people will continue to be imagined, for the foreseeable future, as choice making, rational consumers of those foundation skills products and services that agencies, governments, and businesses promise will equip them with the skills deemed necessary for securing participation in these futures of work.