American

• That is, it ought to cultivate the ability to intelligently decide how we want to shape our lives.
• The aim of education should be to foster human autonomy.
• Yet there’s little evidence that their views have played any significant role in shaping the global contemporary education sector, including the tertiary sector.

What the big thinkers have had to say

• Merely lending a hand is expressive of a limited understanding of the norms guiding professional work, and hence distorts autonomy.
• Dewey thought that education should promote “intelligent growth”, the sort that defines an autonomous agent.
• In Dewey’s own words:
  Impulses and desires that are not ordered by intelligence are under the control of accidental circumstances.
• A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom.

The reality

• It is this approach that the American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky describes in an interview when speaking about the contrast between indoctrination and genuine education.
• This sort of narrowly circumscribed thinking lacks the expansiveness of the critical mind – a mind able to stand back, consider and influence autonomous action.

Intellectual subordination

• Professionals are deliberately produced to be intellectually and politically subordinate.
• He illustrates this idea with the anecdote of two young nuclear weapons designers working in a nuclear weapons design laboratory.

Education as freedom

• There are ways in which this approach to education can be challenged.
• It aims to complement the current university offering to foster the educational ideals propounded by the scholars I’ve discussed here.
• The idea that education is the practice of freedom cannot be separated from the idea that education should aim to equip students to critically and creatively engage with reality to transform it for the better.

• The last time I saw Gabrielle Carey, who died this week, aged 64, was a couple of weeks ago in Sydney.
• She is still best known as the coauthor, with Kathy Lette, of Puberty Blues (1979), a book she wrote as a teenager.
• But for many of those who knew Gabrielle later in life, she was, among many other things, a “Joycean”, and more particularly, a “Wakean”.
• If you’re finding it hard to make a decision, you can say you’re in “twinsome twominds” and your fellow Wakeans will understand.
• She was in regular correspondence with the leading scholars; she was the author of numerous acclaimed essays on Joyce.

Authors were ‘living beings’ for her

• The first of these was Moving among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my Family, a book which won the Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2013.
• When she pressed him for more, he fell silent, and within a year, he had died.
• It’s also a study of an enigmatic writer who was once internationally acclaimed, but who has now almost disappeared from Australian literary history.
• Falling out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018), as the title suggests, is a similar combination of literary biography and memoir.
• The third of these, Only Happiness Here: in Search of Elizabeth von Arnim (2020), was completed during Gabrielle’s fellowship in Canberra.

‘She works for James Joyce’

• Gabrielle’s final book, James Joyce: A Life, is currently in press.
• As she quipped, it was her “fourth biography and the first about a writer who is still famous”.
• Two of Gabrielle’s acclaimed essays, Waking up with James Joyce and Breaking up with James Joyce, give an indication of the conflicted relationship she maintained with this writer who inspired and infuriated her throughout her life.

Reading groups ‘like jam sessions’

• They would gather over food and wine and take the Wake a page and a line and a word at a time.
• If they got really stuck, they’d turn to Fweet, an online guide to the Wake with more than 90,000 explanatory annotations.
• If somebody came up with a new insight, she’d painstaking note it in even tinier pencil between the existing marginalia.
• Her reading groups were more like jam sessions than scholarly seminars.

The art of living well

• Gabrielle was a teacher of the art of living well.
• Every evening, no matter where you were, Gabrielle would always step outside for a few minutes to watch the sun set.
• A keen gardener, she made tiny pots of fabulously precious jam, that she playfully labelled “Jams Joyce”, from rose-petals harvested from her garden.
• Instead of going to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as I’d planned, I went to the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay.
• In her last year, Gabrielle had been taking classes in the art of bookbinding, a creative outlet to add to gardening and rose-petal jam, not to mention writing.

• A “royal snub,” screamed headlines, while commentators grumbled about “Irish Joe” and his “hatred” of the Brits.
• The truth is, no U.S. president has ever attended a British coronation ceremony.
• Biden did attend Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022, but that was very much the exception, not the rule.
• What’s more, she will be joined by an American coronation delegation.
• But if history is a guide, who is sent across the Atlantic will telegraph particular American ideas and aspirations.

Signaling intent

• That party was headed by General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, and included James Gerard, former U.S.
• Ambassador to Germany, and Admiral Hugh Rodman, a former commander-in-chief in the U.S. Navy.
• Gerard had reviewed Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for The New York Times in 1933, in which he expressed his “fear for the world’s future.” In dispatching both to the coronation, Roosevelt was signaling where he stood on Nazi Germany.

Elevating women

• In this postwar moment – marked by escalating tensions with the Soviet Union and the accompanying Red Scare at home – Eisenhower chose his four representatives carefully.
• Marshall, who headed the delegation, had been U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II.
• More recently, as secretary of state, he had helped implement the Marshall Plan, which provided crucial funding to postwar Europe.
• Bradley, likewise, had played a decisive role in the war, and now served as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• In choosing Cowles, Eisenhower played into this female narrative, while also signaling his own, sometimes contradictory, aspirations for the modern American woman.

Pinned down on US positions

• Once the delegation arrived in London, its role as a diplomatic corps became only more evident.
• More informally, the delegation fielded frequent questions from the press about controversial issues and did its best to remain in lockstep with the president.
• The choices, whenever they’re announced, will tell us much about how President Biden wants to position himself ahead of his 2024 presidential bid.

• The first was the invention of gunpowder by people in ancient China.
• And now, war has – like so many other aspects of life – entered the age of automation.
• And all of this raises the question: why has the government’s recent defence strategic review failed to seriously consider the implications of AI-enabled warfare?

AI has crept into Australia’s military

• On the sea, the defence force has been testing a new type of uncrewed surveillance vessel called the Bluebottle, developed by local company Ocius.
• The government’s just announced A$3.4 billion defence innovation “accelerator” will aim to get cutting-edge military technologies, including hypersonic missiles, directed energy weapons and autonomous vehicles, into service sooner.
• You’d expect AI and autonomy would be a significant concern – especially since the review recommends spending a not insignificant A$19 billion over the next four years.

Countries are preparing for the third revolution

• Around the world, major powers have made it clear they consider AI a central component of the planet’s military future.
• The House of Lords in the United Kingdom is holding a public inquiry into the use of AI in weapons systems.
• Unless we give more focus to AI in our military strategy, we risk being left fighting wars with outdated technologies.

Future regulation

• I was invited as an expert witness to an intergovernmental meeting in Costa Rica earlier this year, where 30 Latin and Central American nations called for regulation – many for the first time.
• Regulation will hopefully ensure meaningful human control is maintained over autonomous weapon systems (although we’re yet to agree on what “meaningful control” will look like).
• We can still expect to see AI, and some levels of autonomy, as vital components in our defence in the near future.

We need to prepare

• A review that ignores all of this leaves us woefully unprepared for the future.
• We also need to engage more constructively in ongoing diplomatic discussions about the use of AI in warfare.