Tech Bros Scurry to Humanize Their Dehumanizing AI Product Lines

When academic philosophy’s rock stars like David Chalmers start advising their grad students toward careers with tech corporations, you can bet, with pretty good odds, that philosophy is about to have a moment. Probably the biggest since the 1960s, when new advances in life-saving technology like dialysis and organ transplants gave rise to the new philosophical sub-discipline, medical ethics, which was charged with sorting out questions like, “if you have 50 people requiring dialysis to live, and you have capacity to serve only six, what do you do?”. 

Of course, ethics with a capital “E” has been considering this type of human problem since before the pre-Socratics, as was pointed out repeatedly by one of my old crusty philosophy profs at UT, who growled regularly about what he considered the ridiculousness of creating a whole new sub-discipline to use the same time-honored philosophical tools that have been around for thousands of years to examine the same type of human problem, except in a contemporary context.

But I suppose that philosophy majors, too, deserve jobs when they graduate, even if they are working for tech bro billionaires willing to pay a few millions to some of them to come up with a code for the coders that might protect, 1) their product lines from being switched off to prevent, let’s say, some bot-inspired human catastrophe, or 2) the tech bros, themselves, from legal liability for the actions of their own digital Frankensteins.

Of course, a much needed case should be made for tech bros hiring axiological stuntmen (ethicists) to develop conceptual frameworks that might protect humanity from the dangers associated with developing autonomous digital things (ADTs) whose actions and evolutions remain entirely beyond the understanding of their creators.

But, no, quite the opposite is happening.  The Musks and the Zucks are hiring philosophers to delineate consciousness in such a way as to allow their self-organizing (autonomous) machines the “conscious” designation and the protections that go with it. So the argument: if conscious beings deserve ethical consideration, as they surely do, and if AI bots are conscious, then AI bots deserve ethical consideration just as humans do. This, you might say, is the biggest “if” of the century.

So the bottom line for the tech bros: if bots are conscious, they (their product lines) must be protected.  If they (their products lines) are autonomous, no human can be blamed for their actions. Therefore, hire more philosophers.

I urge all those capable of thought, both lay thinkers and professional thinkers (philosophers), to consider the, uh, ethical implications of this situation. 

Recommended reading: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/ethical-know-how

Graham Platner, GO HOME!

Federal Appeals Court Eviscerates DeSantis’s Stop Woke Act

Big, big win for Florida students and faculty! 👏 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 2:53 PM

Take 17 Minutes to Learn About School Vouchers

And if you are already educated about vouchers, there’s still more here that will surprise you about the biggest educational scam in American educational history. Pass it on. 

Recalling the Bad Ole Days of No Child Left Behind

 

I wrote this in 2007, when it was clear that NCLB had failed children, parents, teachers, and schools. As the standardized testing cabal is now trying to get the band back together for another round of psychometric madness, let’s pause and remember what it was like: www.schoolsmatter.info/2007/11/what...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 1:17 PM

Felon-in-Chief and Freedom 250 Wire Fraud

 

The definition of wire fraud: " . . . fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 8:42 AM

Texas Taliban Mandates Bible and Bill Bennett in Schools

Texas has a long history of repeated attempts to turn the public school curriculum into an indoctrination tool in support of Christofascist values promoted by the John Birch Society of the late 1950s—which had such profound influence on Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the MAGAts that are now seeking to replace our constitutional republic with a fascist theocracy. 

The recent approval of a mandated book list for all K-12 Texas public school children is the latest, most brazen, and stupidest version of those many attempts to mold the next generation toward acceptance of the intellectual, ethical, religious, and social values of the late Jim Crow Era.

The religious indoctrination effort is underpinned by an unprecedented requirement for specified Protestant bible readings and/or bible lessons through elementary and high school.

The ethical training component comes in the form of required reading of neocon hypocrite, racist, and admitted habitual gambler, Bill Bennett, whose Book of Virtues and Children’s Book of Virtues serve as texts. (For some background on Bennett, see "The Bookie of Virtue" by Joshua Green writing for the Washington Monthly.)

Almost ten percent of all U.S. public school children attend Texas public schools.  Therefore, textbook companies are quick to yield to the monetary incentive to offer texts nationally that will sell in Texas as well. So if you think the retro pablum in the Texas required list of books will be limited to Texas, think again. 

By the way, the only significant differences between the new Texas requirements and what I was expected to read in school (1955-1967): we did not have a right-wing gambling addict teaching us ethical know-how, we didn’t have to read the bible (Protestant or otherwise), and we DID get to read Romeo and Juliet in 11th grade.  

Worldwide Movement Underway to Protect Schoolchildren from AI

A strong article here at The Guardian. 

Some of the science noted in the piece:

. . . neuroscience and education experts argue that rather than help students learn, AI can cause “cognitive off-loading”, meaning using an external aid to avoid mental effort.

A study published in 2025 in the journal Societies found that people ages 17 to 25 “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants”.

Stanford University reported in March that there was little evidence on how AI impacts K-12 education and that it’s unclear whether AI is “helping students complete tasks or helping them develop durable learning and skills”.

AI “was never designed to be a learning tool”, said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who has linked the recent nationwide decrease in test scores to increased screen time. “The tool an expert uses to make his or her life easier is not the tool a novice could use to learn how to become an expert. When they use the same tool, they don’t learn anything.” . . . .

Margaret Spellings Rides Again!

That’s right—the cowgirl is back, with a whole new look but with the same old discredited education policy that she started hawking 30 years ago with her Texas sidekick, then-Governor, George W. Bush.

Spellings has become the point person for the political and corporate dinosaurs who have never relented from a mission to profiteer and privatize schools and, now it seems, are renewing their efforts to finish off public education with even more of the same high-stakes standardized tests that continue to be used even today in almost every state.

So as a reminder of the wreckage that Spellings oversaw beginning the late 1990s, here is a post from just before the 2008 presidential election:

Special Comment: Margaret Spellings

October 27, 2008

Margaret Lamontagne Spellings has come a long way from her humble beginnings as a legislative activist paid to hector public education supporters in the Texas Legislature. With a bachelor's degree in poli-sci and a teaching resume that is limited to a single stint as tutor on education issues to a distinctively non-curious George the Governor of Texas, she has risen to represent the neocon ruling model that insists upon political fealty above competence, ruthlessness over morality, ideology above truth, private aggrandizement over the public good.

With her fellow NCLB designer Sandy Kress working under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, who previously hired her to tutor the Governor, these core miseducators put together the infrastructure for an education bill aimed to achieve the conservative goals of education privatization, even without the school vouchers that unsuspecting Democrats strutted about getting stripped from the NCLB Act.

As Elizabeth Debray has documented, Spellings and the inner circle knew that the impossible 100 percent proficiency targets would accomplish over time what conservatives would have preferred to get done with the imposition of vouchers on the front end of the Bush reign. Rather than immediate conservative gratification, the Spellings testing requirements offered the kind of torturous schooling, a pedagogical variety of slow-motion waterboarding, that would eventually break down the will of teachers and public school supporters, thus opening up the market for the tutoring corporations, the charter profiteers, and the non-profit corporate brainwashing outfits like KIPP.

Now at the end of the Spellings reign of terror and half-way to the 2014 Judgment Day, 4 out of 10 public schools in America are on her NCLB failure list. Special ed children and English language learners who can't read the test questions are tested right along with the rest, including millions of children disabled by poverty. The poorest neighborhoods, in fact, are commanded to perform at the same level as the schools in the leafy suburbs. No excuses. And no extra resources, either.

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Recently when fielding a question concerning the burgeoning number of schools not making the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progres) cut, Mrs. Spellings limply responded with "pretty much every organization needs improvement." Yes, you are correct, Mrs. Spellings, and "pretty much every organization" accepts this fact, except yours, it seems. Pretty much every other organization does not face closure or reconstitution or some other form of demolition if the organization does not reach a level of improvement that is impossible to attain.

As a result of your manipulation, Mrs. Spellings, it is now the public school organization that has lost its most ethical and imaginative professionals on the road to "improvement." It is now only the public school organization that, in seeking the impossible, has had its purposes hijacked so that relevance, caring, and humane values have been extinguished along the way to the unreachable. It is now only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, that has so focused on unattainable improvements that children have become alienated prisoners in an institution that blames them for the failure that you, Mrs. Spellings, have created. It is only the public school organization whose resources have been reduced while your scheduled impossible demands have been racheted up (even though there is no level of funding that would make the 100% proficiency goal achievable). It is only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, whose most vulnerable and needy member units have been cynically sacrificed on the ideological altar of privatization, even as the empty rhetoric of rescue has been unceasing from your lips.

So yes, Margaret, if I may call you Margaret, we are in agreement: "pretty much every organization needs improvement," including, I will add in caps, YOUR OWN. I would argue, in fact, that your organization "pretty much" needs an entire makeover. The good news is that your imminent departure, along with your reluctant former pupil, will make that improvement possible. Perhaps, then, we can get on the road to the real work of public school improvement, rather than the ceaseless undercutting of "pretty much" the entire system. I am sure that the competent and hard working civil servants at the Department of Education will be glad to see you off.

The Forests, Humanity’s Close Cousins

 I watched a segment of NOVA on PBS this week, and I have been thinking a lot about this research finding shared in this clip from the transcript:

NARRATOR: In the soil around their roots, trees and plants cultivate microbes to break down the minerals they need and to fight off harmful bacteria. Just as we rely on microbes in our guts to digest our food, plants also need a healthy microbiome, the rhizosphere that surrounds their roots.

GEORGE MONBIOT: The rhizosphere might lie outside the plant, but it’s the plant’s external gut. And to make this comparison even spookier, of the thousand or so phyla of bacteria, the major groups, there are four that dominate in the rhizosphere, and there are four that dominate in the human gut. And they’re the same four.

It’s probably spookiest to those who consider humans far removed from what goes on inside the forest community.