Chad Nilep. 2024. AI and new forms of knowledge work: How writing education can help equip students for an uncertain future. PDF
One way in which disruptive technologies have historically resulted in social and economic change is by creating new jobs while displacing or reducing the value of existing jobs. While it is easy to predict that current developments under the label of “artificial intelligence” will transform work, it is exceedingly difficult to predict just what skills will best serve in the future. Perhaps the best tools that educators can provide today come from classical liberal arts, especially logic, rhetoric, and critical thinking. Questions of how to improve job skills, in addition to being difficult to answer, may be counter-productive to ask. As Ekbia and Nardi (2017) note, 21st century innovations from social media to self-service grocery checkout so far have served not to reduce human labor but to transfer its value to the corporations that control the technology. Thus, important questions arise regarding how best to govern and to organize society in ways that allow for continued gains without sacrificing equity. Obviously, writing education will not answer these questions on its own, but our students will need to grapple with them. The changes wrought by earlier disruptive communication technologies took more than a decade to resolve and are in many ways still being worked out. Therefore, the most beneficial contributions of writing education at present are to develop skills in critical inquiry, rhetorical reading and writing, and logical argumentation with which today’s learners can face tomorrow’s crises.
Keywords
academic writing, AI, rhetoric, logic, trivium
AWCT 2024