An Unsettling Artificial Intelligence

 Algorithms, Curriculum, and Futurities

Abstract

In this theoretical article and in the context of emerging possibilites and limitations of artificial intelligence in curriculum, we discuss how a particular algorithm informs the curricula of our theorizing, teaching, and wider lives–namely, unsettling accounts of the algorithms of settler colonialism. We trace the development of this artificial intelligence from the beginnings of the nation state we call Canada, illuminating its physical and psychical inscription on the land and settler colonial thinking. We further move through how such thinking has seeped into how we understand ourselves as human–biologically and through practices of education–particularly through histories and lasting influences of eugenics. Returning to the material technology of AI and its futurities, we consider the implications of its future development and deployment amidst this enduring context of “rule.” We conclude with a reading of an Indigenous Futurist novel, The Marrow Thieves, as a counter-algorithmic and counter-genetic curriculum, hopefully inspiring future curricular thinking beyond logics of settler colonial futurities.