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E-Learning-Inclusivo (Mashup)
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Utopia or dystopia
"Prof Paul Prinsloo, Research Professor: Department of Business Management at the University of South Africa (UNISA), led delegates through a rapid-fire presentation that was as optimistic about the future as it was disturbing. It can be summed up in his opening comments: "I am interested in the duality that has sprung up about robots being smart, how they can speed up repetitive tasks and do away with mundane ones and then the dystopian version of a robotic future".
As an academic, Prof Prinsloo questioned the notion of progress which, he argued, was unthinkingly understood as something 'good'. But he went further to ask questions like "good for who and why". Similarly, the question of growth was also under interrogation because we cannot continue growing, it's unsustainable. "We need to degrow," he quipped. Progress, he argued, especially through technology, could be a curse as much as it could be a blessing; it could be used to alleviate pain at the same time as it was being used to wage war.
He quoted Neil Selwyn, a professor from Monash as stating that educational technology "needs to be understood as a knot of social, political, economic and cultural agendas that is riddled with complications, contradictions and conflicts." For Prof Prinsloo, that was problematic when added to a space like a university. "Technology realigns existing power relations and structures creating a more complex, knotty, inter-generational asymmetry. You add artificial intelligence (AI) to a country that is as unequal as South Africa, what happens?""