What ever you think about Artificial Intelligence, it cannot be denied that it has generated - and continues to generate - a lot of hype. And in the AI and education field it feels as if the hype is advancing, perhaps because education is seen as massive market for shiny new (and expensive) toys. So I liked this recent post on LinkedIn by Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves about Critical Hype Studies.
A panel at the EASST/4S conference aimed, he says, “at outlining what the field of critical hype studies could be. Although we're still in the early stages, here are some tentative insights from four days of intense, varied, and lengthy discussions about hype, technology, futures, fiction, narratives, rhetorics, and finances in Amsterdam.”
The Politics of Hype is defined as follows:
a. Hype is an interface between experts and non-experts, leaving non-experts vulnerable to oversimplified, overpromising expert statements.
b. The capacity to produce and disseminate hype is unevenly distributed and generally benefits the already privileged—wealthy, educated, male, Western (i.e., economically powerful countries like the USA or Germany take greater advantage of AI hype).
The post goes on to summarise the conversations and presentations of the two panels reflecting on critical hype studies and hype in the promissory economy.
