Most of my work focuses on floods, disasters, and climate justice, where questions of power, equity, and resilience are always at the center. Increasingly, I find the same questions resurfacing in new terrains, including AI and education. AI in education is never just about technology. It’s about power, embedded both in definitions of knowledge and in the material conditions of production. How we choose to confront or ignore inequitable realities will shape what kind of "education" AI makes possible, and whose futures are enabled to thrive or rendered foreclosed. Grateful to join the roundtable on Grassroots Perspectives on AI, particularly the focused discussion on education. Organized by CirroLytix with support from Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung The conversations felt intuitively anthropological, asking: What is the nature of education? What does it mean to be educated with AI? How do our definitions of education shape whose knowledge is counted, whose risks (including climate risks) are minimized, and whose futures are allowed to thrive in an AI-driven world? If education on AI stops at technical literacy and coding, we risk entrenching inequities that leave students, educators, and the workforce vulnerable. Rehumanizing AI means rejecting armchair, one-size-fits-all assumptions and grounding policy in the fine-grained contours of the everyday. For it is the messy spaces of the everyday that uncloak matters of distributive, procedural, and epistemic justice: how benefits and burdens of technologies are shared, who has voice in decision-making, and whose knowledge is recognized or erased. Only when education in and with AI embodies justice can it build futures worth living.
A huge thank you to all the industry experts who joined us in last week's AI policy roundtable discussion, Grassroots Perspectives on AI: Shaping Policy in Education, Ethics, Engineering, and Enforcement. Your insights have proven invaluable to the central goal of making AI policy human-centric for everyone’s benefit. Here’s to a future co-created by humans and technology!
