My non-prediction for 2025

How I plan to make a living writing about AI and education

A year ago, I wrote about why I stopped using AI image generators. It was not so much a resolution for 2024 as an exploration of an ethical question that led me to change something about AI Log, a non-prediction at a time of year when predictions are a thing you do. Here is my non-prediction for the new year.

Coming soon on AI Log: a review essay about Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine and Josh Eyler’s Failing our Future.

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Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center (SVAWPC) completed in 2022. Image from the website of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, now known as Valley Water.

The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Drinking Silicon Valley water

Money, like water, can defy gravity. Just as water pumped through systems of pipes and tanks exerts pressure that lets you turn on a faucet to fill a glass, dollars flow through the digital economy, pushing information to our screens. The water towers and tanks of Silicon Valley are huge, and the pressure they create explains much of what we read and see about technology. We don’t think much about how any of this works. We just hook up our devices to the systems and consume what comes out.

Just using the term artificial intelligence is drinking water from this system. You cannot create your own vocabulary to describe what’s happening any more than you can dig a well in your own backyard to get water. Influence is one word to describe how language operates through the cultural economy, and influencer is suddenly a new way to describe how one earns a living within that complex system.

What Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson call “persuasion power” is a helpful way to understand the complex dynamics because tracing direct payments, say campaign contributions or payment for services, reveals only part of how influence operates. Silicon Valley’s power is “rooted in status and prestige,” and it affects how we think and talk about technological change.

In my view, persuasion operates on the discourse not so much by manufacturing consent as by grabbing attention. Tech barons, sitting atop revenue projections and funding rounds, crow loudly. Their voices are delivered through information systems that amplify their message. The result is that the questions they ask—How soon will AGI arrive? How quickly will personalized chatbots transform education? How many jobs will be replaced next year?—set the terms of debate.

Those seeking to deflate the hype and ask better questions use the same digital economy as the technology companies. This creates weird pressures in the system, making it difficult to interpret the information as it passes through our devices and to understand the way influence operates on that information.

The dilemma

My interest in how persuasion power works has taken on an urgency since I left my job as an educational bureaucrat to write full-time. Once my severance gets paid out, the only income I can count on will be the amount I receive for teaching one class each term as a part-time adjunct. I have two kids in middle school who show signs of wanting to attend college. Leaving full-time administrative work was a dumb decision financially. Considered from every other angle, it was a brilliant necessity.

The prospect of writing each morning and saying yes to every speaking engagement that comes my way is thrilling. I tell myself that I am free to do good in the world. “Be the change…” as the email signature lines say. How noble to leave my job to fight the good fight! Yet, I would like to receive an income that will support my noble work. And, to be candidly self-aware, I want the status and prestige that comes with being a writer.

To someone teaching or bureaucratizing all day, the life of a writer and public speaker seems gloriously free. LinkedIn and Substack are filled with people like me, chasing status and prestige in hopes they can translate those intangibles into a living wage and freedom from their full-time grind. For tenured academics, this chase is a side hustle with low stakes. Boosting your public profile can actually damage your standing in your department or discipline, but if you play it right, the payoff in status can be worth it.

For independent writers, as I now style myself, the stakes are higher, and the norms have changed. I can look down my nose at influencers and complain about the erosion of trust in a digital economy dominated by brand deals, but that doesn’t help me figure out how to earn a living in this new world. The market in grumpy takes on what the kids are up to with technology is crowded, and demand is high for enthusiastic content about the game-changing power of AI for educators.

The basic outlines of the influencer economy are clear. You attract an audience by creating words and putting them on as many platforms as you can manage. You build a brand. You monetize your brand by saying nice words about other brands who sometimes pay you. This sounds to me, child of the late twentieth century that I am, like selling out. I don’t want to do that for reasons obvious to my generation but obscure to those who have never lived in a world without Instagram and Mr. Beast.

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A seasoned thought leader for the age of AI

In my former life, I negotiated contracts to purchase academic technology for a large, well-resourced research university and tried to convince faculty and academic staff to use this technology. As part of this work, I gave free advice to edtech companies about what my institution and others like it wanted to see in their products. I didn’t worry about my independence because I had none. My institution paid my salary, and I acted with its interest in mind.

While not unique, my perspective as both a bureaucrat and teacher, along with my willingness to speak clearly about educational problems, was useful to my institution and to the companies I worked with. In one case, I helped design academic advising software to address a gap between what my institution needed and what the rest of the market was offering. Advising is not simply about efficiently slotting students into courses they need to graduate. An efficiency mindset and an unquestioned belief that creating a frictionless user experience is the goal for all software is a blindspot for most edtech developers. This truth that friction is a necessary part of education is often beyond understanding to those who build and sell technology for educators.

Now that I am independent, I can sell my skills and knowledge in the market of edtech consulting. Preliminary indications are that the sort of advice I used to give away for free is valuable, especially if I describe myself as “a proven thought leader and seasoned academic technologist with expertise in AIED.” The truth is that I’m just a guy who writes a blog as a way of coping with technology change he barely understands, who got tired and bored of trying to convince academics they needed to learn yet another new tool. That pitch will not land me many $300 per hour Zoom calls. One key to success is telling your clients mostly what they want to hear, including how smart they are for hiring you. Not an area of strength for me.

Of course, edtech is not the only path to a paycheck. There is also talking CIOs, Provosts, and their staff about whatever the hell is going on with AI. Selling my knowledge to educational institutions is constrained by my fundamental belief that colleges and universities need to listen to their own faculty and middle managers more. Expertise within the institution is usually better and cheaper than what you can get on the market. Again, not a pitch that leads to repeat business.

Bragging about my unrealizable market value feels good, but the larger point, again one rooted in a world view where your favorite indie band signing a big record contract felt tragic, is that edtech consulting and taking brand deals will bring me a salary that requires me to not understanding things.¹

I could tell myself I would speak only the truth, shill only for companies I respect, and promote only products I find valuable. But the indie bands I listened to as a kid in the 1980s who signed big contracts did so with similar good intentions. Then, they spent time talking to record company executives about sales targets and earning back their advances. And they bought nice houses and cars. And then sold their hit songs as jingles for TV commercials. Was the music as good? I didn’t think so then, but maybe that was only because the context had changed.

My fear is that I will lose what I am seeking before I start. We need new frameworks to understand and change the systems. That requires taking care to think outside the systems. Money and influence make that difficult. My reluctance to join the influencer economy feels to me like moral rectitude, but it may simply be a failure of imagination.

Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash

Windows onto my practice as a writer and public speaker

I find myself confused when I see a colleague appear in a webinar for an edtech company or write a blog post about how they are using an AI product. Are they sharing information about their practice to help me evaluate the fast-changing world of edtech? Are they promoting a brand for payment as part of the influencer economy? Are they doing both? Does it matter?

Like many questions about life in the twenty-first century, I find myself unsure about the answers. This lack of certainty means I won’t throw rocks at anyone’s glass podcasts or blog posts. We are all figuring out how to live in a technological world we did not ourselves create but want to change for the better. Being transparent about how I plan to get paid this year and how it may influence my writing brings some light to the subject, even if it does not illuminate more than my little corner.

It was helpful to realize that I already know and trust people who work in the world of edtech. These are friends I made along the way who live and work in places like Iowa and Montreal. I talked to them about my plans and fears as I wrote this essay. They influenced me the old-fashioned way, by talking with me over dinner and on the phone, taking my ideas and the work I want to do seriously.²

Here is what I am telling myself. I will work for and with people trying to solve educational problems that matter. I will stay focused on developing the new frameworks I think we need. I will write about and teach these new frameworks. By talking to people who build new tools, including those marketed under the umbrella term artificial intelligence, I will earn more, a lot more than I will through writing and teaching. I will also understand some of the problems better, and maybe exert some small influence to support what Acemoglou recently described as “an anti-AGI, pro-human agenda for AI.” How’s that for a rationalization?

Is this transparency part of my brand strategy? I don’t know. Probably. I find it hilarious that we talk about character and public persona these days using the metaphor of the mark cowboys put on cows. Recall that the purpose of a brand is to identify cows so ranchers can corral the ones they own when it is time for the butcher. Getting poked with a hot iron is an uncomfortable way to think about making a living in the digital economy, but that’s just the sort of historical context and reframing I want to explore in my writing.

Water and water rights are critically important to ranching in the North American West. Cows are ignorant of such things, as they are of the reasons they are subject to disfiguring marks. Not us, though. We can analyze and try to reform our cultural practices. The Silicon Valley water towers can be taken down or broken up, and replaced by smaller, better structures in other locations. Let us use ideas to change the facts about our world. Let us make our modes of living worthy.

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If you have thoughts about the choices I am making about my daily employments or the choices you make in your modes of living, please share them.

𝑨𝑰 𝑳𝒐𝒈 © 2024 by Rob Nelson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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1. Sinclair Lewis: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Disclosures

2. The product I helped build is Courseleaf Path by Leepfrog Technologies headquartered in Coralville, Iowa. I will work for them this year, thinking with their developers about how transformer-based AI models might add useful functions to their products.

I have given talks at conferences and webinars organized by Explorance for over a decade now. I will continue to do so as I begin to charge for sharing my ideas. Nice to work with friends while taking that step. Explorance is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

In November, Grammarly flew me and about a dozen colleagues in higher education to San Fransico and put us up in a hotel across from their headquarters. They showed us new functionality they plan to add next year and took us to a nice dinner.

Once I finish a website advertising my services as a writer and public speaker for hire, I plan to include a disclosures page where I will regularly update the sources of my income and any junkets I accept.